News Coverage
Editorial: Connect the dots/What's shaping mercury rules?
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: