News Coverage
Mercury's taint
Published April 4, 2004
FOR DECADES, as coal power has grown in its share of the nation's electricity supply, the country has allowed coal's mercury emissions to poison fish, a crucial source of protein. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 630,000 children are born each year with levels of mercury that put them at risk for learning disabilities and neurological disorders.
Last month the Food and Drug Administration warned childbearing women and young children against eating more than small quantities of certain fish with high levels of mercury, including swordfish and albacore tuna. Light tuna and many other varieties of fish have lower levels of the heavy metal, which moves up the food chain from bacteria to the largest finned predators. Officials are loath to red-line fish because of the benefits of its protein and heart-healthy fatty acids.
The warning immediately ignited a debate over whether it is stringent enough to protect children and fetuses. But the more important question is why the Bush administration is dragging its feet on cutting back mercury emissions from the country's 1,100 coal plants in the first place.
The Clinton administration rightly ruled that mercury is a high-level toxin, like lead or asbestos, that should be controlled by maximum achievable technology. It wanted to require utilities to use such technology, which has worked well in municipal waste incinerators and pilot coal plants, to reduce annual emissions from the current 48 tons to 8 tons by 2008.
But the utilities began lobbying for a cheaper method. The industry got its wish from the Bush administration, which proposed a rule that borrows wording from an industry memo and calls for reducing mercury just to 15 tons by 2018. Utilities with better antipollution controls would be able to sell emissions credits to dirtier plants. That, critics say, would subject residents living near the dirty plants to mercury "hot spots." Last week attorneys general from 10 states, including Massachusetts, and 45 US senators asked the EPA to propose stronger requirements. The agency is taking comments until April 30.
The EPA's own scientist-advisers said in January that the agency's plan is deficient. The proposed action, said the EPA's Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, "does not go as far as is feasible to reduce mercury emissions from power plants and therefore does not sufficiently protect our nation's children."
Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat, and Olympia Snowe of Maine, a Republican, recently called on the EPA chief, Michael Leavitt, to rewrite the draft mercury rule. Vermont's other senator, James Jeffords, an independent, asked Leavitt to have the EPA's inspector general investigate possible industry influence in the rule-making process. The EPA should heed its advisory panel and give children a higher priority than utility profits.