EPA rules to cut mercury pollution fall short
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday ordered power plants to cut mercury pollution from smokestacks by nearly half within 15 years but left an out for the worst polluters.
The EPA said the cuts would help protect pregnant women, women of childbearing age and young children from a toxic metal that causes nerve damage. Critics said the arrangement fell far short of what was needed, and they promised to fight it.
“The United States is the first nation to take a leadership role in addressing the problem of mercury from power plants,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, EPA’s top air pollution official.
The nation’s 600 coal-burning power plants release 48 tons of mercury pollution a year. That is expected to decrease to 31.3 tons in 2010, 27.9 tons in 2015 and 24.3 tons in 2020.
Forty percent of mercury emissions come from power plants, but those emissions have never been regulated as a pollutant. EPA regulates mercury in water and from municipal waste and medical waste incinerators.
EPA faced immediate political and legal opposition. Senators, environmentalists and public health advocates said EPA failed to do all the Clean Air Act requires.
They said EPA favored industry by setting a nationwide cap on allowable pollution and then allocating a specific amount to each state - and, in a few cases, Indian tribes that own power plants. The states then set limits on specific plants. Those that exceed the limit could buy pollution “credits” from plants emitting less pollution than they’re allowed.
The cap-and-trade approach kicks in at 2010. Until then, utilities don’t have to do anything specifically to control mercury. Instead, they must follow another regulation to reduce two other pollutants - which EPA says will also help control mercury.
The regulations were issued because of a court agreement with the Natural Resources Defense Council [an Earth Share of Washington organization].
NRDC and other administration critics said EPA should have used the Clean Air Act to require individual power plants to buy the most effective technology on the market for reducing mercury from their stacks. They said that would avoid “hot spots” where there could be local concentrations of mercury pollution.
“We don’t think there will be any hot spots, we’re quite confident of that,” Holmstead said. “A cap-and-trade approach can always get a bigger reduction at a lower cost.”
Some states, primarily in the West, would be allocated pollution limits much greater than their actual emissions, environmentalists said, explaining that utilities in those states could sell pollution rights to eastern plants in states most likely to exceed their caps soon.
Continue reading this story from the Seattle P-I:
EPA issues rules to cut mercury pollution