Pick Your Poison - New Republic article on mercury

March 22, 2005

Pick Your Poison
by Gregg Easterbrook
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w050321&s=easterbrook032205

Mercury emitted by United States power plants is so incredibly dangerousit causes "hundreds of thousands" of birth defects per year, accordingto a very well-respected publication, The New Republic. The Bush administration's proposal to reduce mercury emissions from power plants,released last week, is "illegal" and "irresponsible" and "blatantly disregards the threat mercury poses to our children," according to the National Resources Defense Council. According to Senator John Kerry, the proposal is "one of the weakest pollution control regulations everwritten for a major industry." Sure sounds bad.

Yesterday I noted how a high school in Washington, D.C., was closed formore than a week simply because a few drops of mercury were found in ahallway. Mercury mania has also gone national, mainly over fears ofmercury in the exhaust of coal-fired power plants. Mercury is a poison and also a neurotoxin, so having it in the air can't be good--although there would be some mercury in the air regardless of industry, since about a third of airborne mercury occurs naturally. But what about the scare?

A National Academy of Sciences study has shown that mercury could cause learning disabilities and seizures in young children. How often this actually happens is, however, not known. About six percent of American women have blood mercury levels high enough to cause risk to infants, a Centers for Disease Control study has found. News reports commonly say that large numbers of American women are "at risk" to give birth to babies with birth defects owing to mercury, but actual incidence of mercury-linked health harm has not been established. Because mercury tends to accumulate in Great Lakes fish, the Food and Drug Administration has warned women of childbearing age not to eat more than six ounces of freshwater fish per week. Most studies show overall incidence of birth defects in the United States declining, so there's no epidemic; especially, childhood deaths from birth defects are in decline. And the "hundreds of thousands" of birth defects caused by mercury that The New Republic warned about? Umm, sorry, mistake. This figure exceeds the total annual number of babies born with developmental defects in the United States, which according to the National Academy of Sciences is about 120,000, about three percent of whom have defects caused by prenatal exposure to toxic chemicals. That's about 3,600 babies per year with defects engendered by toxics, which is plenty bad enough. What fraction of the 3,600 links to mercury is unknown but is probably small, as lead and drugs (both legal and illegal) are believed to be the primary chemical-exposure cause. Though mercury levels inwomen's blood are the concern of the moment, lead levels in women's blood have declined significantly, and lead is much more clearlyassociated with birth defects than mercury.

Why the increase in mercury levels in women's blood? Mercury"deposition" in the biosphere is rising owing to a century of globalcombustion of coal, which contains traces of the element. Mercury fromcoal-fired power plants has never been regulated, either in the United States or any nation. And now we return to the politics.

In 2002, George W. Bush proposed the world's first regulation ofpower-plant mercury--small reductions right away and a roughly 70 percent reduction over 15 years, via the president's "Clear Skies"pollution-reduction legislation. Editorialists and environmental lobbyists denounced Clear Skies, calling its mercury provisions insufficient. Since 2002, enviros, editorialists, and Democrats in the Senate have been fighting doggedly against the Clear Skies bill, which was just blocked again in the Senate two weeks ago. Yet if mercury from power plants really is an urgent threat, blocking Clear Skies had the effect of insuring there would be no reform. Had Clear Skies been enacted in 2002, some of the mercury reduction that the bill mandated would already have occurred.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled regulations that would reduce power-plant mercury regardless of the fate of the Clear Skies proposal. The mandates are a 21 percent reduction by 2010 and a 70 percent cut by 2018. Immediately the rules were assailed as inadequate; Kerry was among many to declare opposition to Bush's plan,saying mercury emissions "must be controlled better and faster." Yet the same situation obtains now as in 2002: If environmental groups or members of Congress manage to block the new rule, then instead of a mercury reduction, nothing will happen. It's hard not to suspect that what some enviros and Democrats (not all, of course) want is to prevent action against mercury, to give them a grievance for the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Opponents complain that the administration's two plans for reducing mercury emissions--first Clear Skies and now last week's action, which was taken under existing authority of the Clean Air Act--allow trading of emissions credits among power plants. This, it is said, might create local "hot spots" of mercury around generating stations that meet the regulation by buying credits from other power plants that reduce their emissions more than required. This might happen; it cannot be ruled out, but seems unlikely.

In 1990 Congress enacted a credits-trading system for acid rain. Since then power-plant emissions of the primary pollutant that causes acid rain have fallen by 32 percent, without "hot spot" problems. Credit-trading in acid rain has caused emissions to decline more rapidly in some places than others; surely credit-trading in mercury emissions would cause emissions to decline more rapidly in some places than inothers. But having a slower rate of decline than other places still leaves an area better off than now. Because mercury is heavy compared to the air, it may precipitate to the ground closer to power plants than does acid rain. This causes some to fear that mercury from generating stations can cause "hot spots" in a way that acid rain, which tends to spread regionally, does not. This, too, cannot be ruled out, but again the worst-case outcome of a credits-trading approach is likely to bethat mercury declines more slowly in some areas than in others.

Now let's turn to the parts left out of coverage of the issue--that U.S. mercury emissions are already declining anyway, and that almost all mercury to which Americans are exposed does not come from power plants in the first place.

Currently, United States power plants emit about 48 tons of mercuryannually. Mercury emission in the United States fell by nearly twice asmuch, a 97-ton reduction, during the 1990s, as the EPA imposed strictrules on municipal waste incinerators. Municipal waste incinerators werechosen as the first target because they emitted far more mercury thanpower plants; now that this category of emission is controlled, theregulatory focus turns to power plants. Because of the incineratorsrule, overall emissions of mercury in the United States were nearly cutin half during the 1990s.

So if U.S. emissions are already falling fast, how can there be aproblem in the first place? The reason is that most mercury emissions donot come from the United States. Global mercury emissions are at least 5,000 tons per year, with more than half originating in Asia. Combustion of coal for power is rising rapidly in Asia, especially in China, and often without anything like the emissions controls of the United States; Chinese coal, in turn, contains more mercury than most American coal. Mercury from China and elsewhere drifts on the winds to the United States in larger amounts than the mercury emitted here; increasingly, research shows that smog, acid rain, dust pollution, and toxic air pollution are global, often transiting the oceans. These are not reasons not to regulate mercury from U.S. power plants--regulation is needed. But suppose the Bush rule proposed last week, and denounced by the usual suspects, goes into effect. By its deadline year of 2018, U.S. will be emitting just 15 tons of mercury annually, far less than one percent of the current global total. Speeding up the cut back in mercury emitted by U.S. power plants would have almost no effect on theamount of mercury to which Americans are exposed, since the bulk of the problem comes from nature or from Asia to begin with.

No coverage of the mercury issue that I have seen has placed into context how small U.S. power-plant emissions are in the global scheme, or that current claims of a mercury-exposure crisis follow a dramaticreduction in U.S. mercury emissions. Reporters and editorialists seem determined to present mercury from U.S. power plants as a super-ultra danger, simply by leaving out the larger equation.

Lamenting the state of green politics, Nicholas Krist of recently wrote in The New York Times that environmental alarms are becoming like car alarms: so often blaring when false they are now ignored when real. The flap over power-plant mercury is a car alarm: Harm from power plant mercury is real but relatively small, and the regulation the White House proposes will nearly eliminate the part of the problem that's within U.S. power to fix. Not engaging in silly faux hysteria over the White House plan--John Kerry said last week, "When fathers can't feed their families the fish they catch and children can't learn in school, is the Bush administration really willing to allow an extra ten years of higher mercury pollution?"--would make green sentiment more credible where the alarm should be sounding, such as on global warming.

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor at TNR and a visiting fellow atthe Brookings Institution.*

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