Mike Leavitt, EPA’s new administrator, made his first public statement since he took the job yesterday. It was a bland speech, somewhat rambling, peppered with dull anecdotes as strained vehicles for palliative sound bites intended to appeal to both sides of the environmental debate. But one thing Leavitt said interested me. He spoke of the importance of “collaboration” in addressing environmental issues. But, he assured his audience “[c]ollaboration is not code for compromise. It is the pursuit of what’s possible checked only by the realities of what is workable.”
Well, that’s a nice sound bite, no question. But is it true? The proof, as they say, is in the policy, and this EPA’s new proposal on mercury control is a clear example of compromise.
Perhaps it is unfair to blame the new administrator, barely a month into his job, for policies that may have been in the works since before he has been at the job. Then again, he hardly distanced himself from those policies. To the contrary, he took a classically Bush-ian approach: he touted what is essentially a fundamental step backward in environmental regulation as progress. Leavitt announced that his EPA would “move forward with the first-ever regulations addressing mercury emissions from power plants”. What he didn’t say was that the Bush administration has radically re-written regulations that would otherwise have gone into effect in two weeks, and in a way that smacks of “collaboration” with the power plants.
Leavitt mentioned technology several times in his speech. “More. Better. Faster. Newer. That’s the tune you will hear from me,” he crowed. That may be the tune, but the dance is “Not too much. Not too Fast. Better for the Industry.” The existing plan called for mercury reduction using “maximum achievable technology”. The new plan calls instead for a more flexible, cap-and-trade system, under which power plants would be assigned “points”, which they could buy and sell, allowing them to pollute more or less depending on the number of points they had. The cap-and-trade system is a viable method of environmental regulation—it has been successful in combatting acid rain, for example. However, even environmentalists who have supported cap-and-trade for other pollutants say that it is a dangerous approach for mercury, because of its extreme toxicity.
Coal-fired power plants are the nation’s largest source of unregulated airborne mercury pollution, sending an estimated 48 tons into the atmosphere annually. The airborne mercury quickly falls into our lakes, streams and rivers, thus entering the food chain and threatening public health, especially for children and pregnant women who eat tainted fish. The EPA itself has acknowledged that “mercury has been identified as the toxic of greatest concern among all the air toxics emitted from power plants,” causing neurological and developmental defects, particularly in pregnant women and children.
Leavitt and others in the Bush administration will no doubt tell us that the new proposal is a grand step forward. Proponents of the plan will point out that it will reduce annual output of mercury pollution from power plants by nearly 30% by 2010. They probably won’t mention that this would still leave 34 tons a year in emissions, eight tons more than the limit promised by the Bush administration as part of its “Clear Skies” initiative. Or that the plan set to go into effect on December 15 of this year, the plan Leavitt’s EPA is about to replace, would have required pollution controls by 2007, not 2010.
The CDC recently found that 8 percent of women of childbearing age have mercury in their blood exceeding levels deemed safe by the EPA. Do you know more than 12 women who might become pregnant between 2007 and 2010? If so, you might ask if any of them is pleased with the “cooperation” between the EPA and the energy industry that has resulted in a giant step back from the rules that would have gone into effect two weeks from now. That new spirit of “cooperation” makes it far more likely that at least one of them will have a baby damaged by mercury poisoning.
Read Less...
EPA's spirit of "collaboration" means at least three extra years of poisoned babies
