Minneapolis Star Tribune
Published February 12, 2004
In pursuing what so often seems a faith-based approach to making policy, the Bush administration is consistently blithe about connecting the dots of research, regulation and result. When it comes to electoral politics, the president's team apparently assumes that voters won't connect them, either.
Take mercury. At the end of January, the Environmental Protection Agency laid out its proposed new rules for reducing power-plant emissions of this heavy metal, which quickly becomes a potent neurotoxin and especially afflicts unborn children. Like so many of this administration's policies on the environment and public health, the new limits represent a clear retreat from the direction set in Bill Clinton's administration.
Clinton's EPA had moved to require that power producers use the "maximum achievable control technology" to cut mercury output, estimating that this could reduce emissions from the present 48 tons per year to 5 tons by 2007. Those may seem like small numbers, as pollution statistics go, but power plants account for perhaps 40 percent of all U.S. mercury emissions.
Now that maximum-reduction approach is being replaced with a system of pollution credits that utilities can buy and sell among themselves, with a goal of lowering emissions to 34 tons annually by 2018. This goal, which retreats even from George W. Bush's original "Clear Skies" initiative, is described as a more effective approach to the problem. It achieves its flexibility by recategorizing mercury as a more benign pollutant, lumping it with the chemicals that cause smog and acid rain.
Taking this change as the first dot, try connecting it with these others and see what kind of picture emerges:
• Late last month, EPA reported that nearly one in six newborn Americans may be exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb. That's twice as many as in previous estimates, and reflects a disturbing new finding: Mercury concentrations in a woman's umbilical-cord blood are 1.7 times higher, on average, than her overall blood level. This led EPA to lower the "safe" maximum for mercury in the blood from 5.8 parts per billion to 3.5 -- a concentration now exceeded by 630,000 women giving birth each year.
• Last December, analysis of EPA data by Environmental Defense concluded that 10 states -- Indiana, Michigan, Maryland, Florida, Illinois, South Carolina, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Tennessee -- had "hot spots" of especially high mercury contamination in soil and water. Though emissions trading systems can be useful in achieving overall reductions, they allow such localized excesses to continue.
• Also in December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued new guidelines on fish consumption for pregnant women, fish being the main conduit through which mercury moves from smokestack to bloodstream. These did not mention albacore, or white tuna, widely considered an especially problematic source of dietary mercury, especially among lower-income women.
• Early this week, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health made news with findings that mercury exposure in the womb can cause lasting heart damage in children, along with the well-known brain-related impairments of mobility, vision, memory and learning. The study, which tested children in Denmark's seafood-dependent Faroe Islands, was unable to establish a threshold of exposure below which no harm occurred.
• Two weeks ago, the Washington Post laid EPA's mercury policy alongside two memos prepared by utility lobbyists and found at least a dozen paragraphs of supporting analysis that had made their way, nearly verbatim, from the lobbyists' mouths into the government's. The Post report was not widely republished, perhaps because editors reasoned that no one would really be surprised.
