Mercury Emissions To Be Traded
EPA Criticized On Pollution Rule
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 15, 2005; Page A01


The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a rule today to reduce mercury emissions from power plants through a cap-and-trade system that allows some power plants to make deep pollution cuts while others make none.

The rule sets broad national limits on mercury emissions that enable power companies to decide which plants will receive pollution controls -- meaning that even as many states reduce their emissions, some could see increases in emissions of mercury, a potent neurotoxin.

The rule is certain to be contested in court by environmental groups, which charge that it places the financial interests of power companies over public health and violates existing law on how the government must deal with dangerous substances.

Mercury is the third major pollutant produced by coal-fired power plants and other industries that the government has sought to limit because of accumulating evidence of their devastating effects on health. The EPA issued a rule last week to control the smog and soot produced by sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.

The agency plans to offer a full justification for its approach today but defended it in broad terms yesterday. Industry groups back the cap-and-trade approach as more practical and cost-effective than the alternative that environmentalists prefer -- limiting emissions at every plant.

The EPA's actions in developing the mercury rule prompted intense criticism by the agency's inspector general and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, which said the agency ignored scientific evidence. Agency staff have charged that the Bush administration's political operatives decided the framework of the new rule in advance and deliberately made it less ambitious in order not to be tougher than President Bush's proposed revisions of the Clean Air Act, the nation's fundamental air pollution law. Bush's proposal, which has been stalled in Congress, is also based on a cap-and-trade system. Agency officials and industry advocates have defended the rulemaking process as open, credible and efficient.

"It is unconscionable EPA is allowing power companies to trade in a powerful neurotoxin -- it is unprecedented and illegal," said S. William Becker, executive director of two bipartisan state environmental groups, the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators and the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials. He predicted that states and cities will be forced to institute a "patchwork quilt" of more stringent local emissions controls.

To justify the new approach, the administration needed to reverse a decision by the Clinton administration to list mercury as a "hazardous air pollutant." That allowed for greater flexibility in designing emission controls and made possible a trading system to mesh with the EPA rule issued last week to control emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, said Scott Segal, a spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which represents a number of coal-fired utilities.

"There is similarity in how these emissions are produced, and there should be similarities in how they are controlled," Segal said yesterday. The industry spokesman did not dispute that mercury is dangerous but said the trading system is the best way to achieve dramatic cuts at reasonable cost -- with minimal litigation delays.

"This rule is about public health, and this rule is protective given what we know about mercury and how and why we get exposed to it," EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said yesterday. She said she was constrained in speaking about the specifics of the rule because it was to be finalized only today.

The mercury rule is so closely linked to last week's Clean Air Interstate Rule that the initial phase of emissions cuts will be a byproduct of that rule. Bergman said those initial cuts target a particularly hazardous form of mercury, which justified removing it from the list of hazardous air pollutants. Today's rule will call for a cap of mercury emissions at 38 tons per year from power plants by 2010 -- down from 48 tons at present -- and an additional reduction of 15 tons per year by 2018.

Although the broad outlines of the mercury rule have been known for months, environmental groups have waited to see whether the agency would perform the additional analyses demanded by the EPA's inspector general and the GAO. While Bergman had previously said criticisms about the lack of analyses were premature, she confirmed yesterday that some of the analyses demanded had not been performed.

Bergman said that the competing approach -- to reduce mercury at every plant -- could indeed produce dramatic results, but she said it depends on the flawed assumption that the technology is available to make sharp cuts at every plant. She said such technology will not be ready for several years.

At a news briefing yesterday by several environmental groups, John Walke, clean air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, contested Bergman's claim about the lack of available technology and said the real purpose of the rule is to invite litigation and "years and years and years of delay" in instituting mercury controls. "This is the most dishonest, dangerous and illegal rule I have ever seen come out of the EPA," he said.

Susan West Marmagas, environment and health program director at the group Physicians for Social Responsibility, said 630,000 babies each year in the United States are at risk of mercury toxicity and 1 in 12 American women who could become pregnant have heightened risk of mercury toxicity.

Bergman and Segal said that, contrary to the impression conveyed by environmentalists, global mercury emissions are responsible for the bulk of mercury toxicity in the United States -- meaning that pregnant women and children should limit their intake of certain types of fish, irrespective of what happens with mercury emission controls.

Felice Stadler, a policy specialist at the National Wildlife Foundation's Clean the Rain campaign, said that controlling fish consumption is indeed the right short-term approach but that strong mercury emissions controls could help protect millions of Americans who catch and eat fish every year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2005Mar14.html

EPA Issuing New Mercury Pollution Rules

Updated 11:44 AM ET March 15, 2005

http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pr...88rh1uo2&src=ap

By JOHN HEILPRIN

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration says its new power plant regulations will cut mercury pollution from electric utilities nearly in half by 2020, raising electricity prices but helping protect fetuses and young children from a toxic metal known to cause nerve damage.

Yet critics say the Environmental Protection Agency's rules, which use an industry-favored market trading approach rather than required cuts at each specific coal-burning power plant, fail to do all that the Clean Air Act requires.

"Unless every coal-fired power plant is required to reduce its emissions, dangerously high concentrations of mercury in Maine and other parts of the country will persist," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

The EPA on Tuesday was issuing the regulations _ the first mercury controls on coal-burning power plants _ to meet a court-ordered deadline in a settlement with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that sued EPA 13 years ago to regulate hazardous air pollutants from power plants. Since the late 1990s, the EPA has regulated mercury dumped in water and air from municipal waste and medical waste incinerators.

Environmental and public health groups, including the Defense Council, criticized EPA's approach for not requiring all power plants to use the best available pollution-control technology.

"It's the do-nothing approach to mercury," said John Walke, NRDC's director of clean air programs. "They get a holiday basically ... that requires them to reduce mercury no more than would incidentally be achieved from their smog and soot cuts."

The new EPA rules anticipate that the nation's 450-plus coal-burning power plants that now produce a total of 48 tons of mercury each year will cut that amount to 31.3 tons in 2010, 27.9 tons in 2015 and 24.3 tons in 2020......

While this rule is protective of public health, most of the mercury that creates health risks for Americans comes from fish contaminated from sources that we can't control," Bergman said Monday. "This is a global problem."

In the meantime, she said, pregnant women and women of childbearing age should heed government warnings to limit fish intake, since most Americans consume fish from abroad.

Mercury concentrations accumulate in fish and work up the food chain, which has prompted most states to issue fish consumption advisories. Forty percent of mercury emissions come from power plants, but those emissions have never been regulated as a pollutant.

Pa., others oppose new mercury rules
State DEP cites 'dangerous approach'
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05075/472089.stm

Just hours after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released its new mercury control rule yesterday afternoon, the state Department of Environmental Protection and at least one environmental group announced they will seek to have it overturned......

But DEP said it will appeal the federal rule in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, because it violates the Clean Air Act, fails to adequately protect public health and will hurt the state's coal industry.

Calling the EPA action a "dangerous approach," DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty said, "If EPA won't act willingly, then Pennsylvania and others will move ahead to make sure the agency puts in place a plan that is more protective of citizens."....

Kurt Knaus, a DEP spokesman, said the new federal rule rescinds a December 2000 EPA finding that mercury emissions are a hazardous pollutant that must be controlled using maximum available controls, not a cap and trade program that could create local "hot spots" of contamination.

He said the new rule, which allows utilities to make economics-based decisions about where controls will be applied, will do little to curb pollution blowing into Pennsylvania from upwind states in the Midwest. The rule could also hurt the state's coal industry because coal-burning utilities could comply with it by switching to low mercury coal mined in western states.

Scott Edwards, legal director for the Waterkeeper Alliance, an national environmental group that announced it will also file a federal appeal of the rule, said it will allow some of the dirtiest power plants to avoid any mercury emissions reductions.

"This isn't a rule: it's a kickback -- the illegal end product of huge campaign contributions, scurrilous industry influence and a fraudulent rulemaking process. This rule is a poster child for why courts exist."

The Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a coalition of utility industry companies, said the cap and trade program "creates substantial economic incentives for superior mercury control" and should result in reductions by the biggest mercury emitters.

The council said there is no existing technology that can achieve the level of reduction contained in the new rule, or the 90 percent reductions advocated by environmentalists, and state and local air quality officials.

But in meetings with the utility industry in 2001, the EPA estimated that an 80 to 90 percent reduction in mercury emissions was achievable and affordable with existing control technology, like that already used by medical and municipal incinerators.

Recent reports by the EPA Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office were critical of the agency for politicizing the rulemaking process by directing agency scientists to tailor the mercury rule caps to those that will be achieved under other emissions controls.

As a result, according to the EPA's calculations, a first phase cap of 38 tons a year will be achieved "by taking advantage of co-benefit reductions to control soot and smog. Controls aimed specifically at reducing mercury emissions won't be required for a dozen years.

Knaus said Pennsylvania will consult with 10 other northeast states that are on record as opposing the rule to determine if they will join in the federal appeal.

"I suspect this rule will see a number of challenges," Knaus said, "and we intend to stay out in front in opposing what the EPA announced today."

After the new rule is printed in the Federal Register -- which should happen within the next couple weeks -- petitions for review can be filed in federal court during a 60-day appeal period.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18786