All Hands On Deck: Mercury

EPA Ordered Back to the Drawing Board to Control Power Plant Mercury Emissions

The time to reclaim our government and wrest control of the EPA from self-interested and improper industry influence is fast approaching. We must rid EPA of the industry officials who now skulk through the halls and sit at the very desks of an agency that was created to protect the environment and public health. We must put the wretched lack of environmental leadership of the past seven and a half years behind us and demand that EPA re-establish its stated mission “to protect human health and the environment” instead of safeguarding the profits of corporate polluters. And nowhere is there a better opportunity for the agency to start to regain its lost integrity and once more earn the trust of the American people than with the rewriting of the power plant mercury rules.

On Feb. 8, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia handed down a scathing opinion against the Environmental Protection Agency, vacating an anemic, industry-scripted Clean Air Act mercury non-control scheme. EPA’s failed plan would have granted the coal-fired energy companies free rein to continue to poison our waterways and communities with harmful amounts of mercury for decades to come.

The court’s decision was the latest in a long string of courtroom defeats for Bush’s rabidly anti-environmental policies. Sadly, as more and more of EPA’s improper regulatory practices come to light, it has become abundantly clear that it’s not EPA’s desires that are being fulfilled by its several illegal rulemakings, but those of the polluting industries.

U.S. coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of airborne mercury in the country, spewing nearly 50 tons of this deadly poison into the air and our local watersheds each year. Several studies have shown that as much as 70 percent of these toxic emissions are ending up in local waterways and fish. The pre-Bush EPA concluded that there was a link between coal-fired power plant mercury emissions and mercury found in freshwater fish. Yet this EPA steadfastly refuses to properly control these emissions.

Today, communities across the country are paying the price of EPA’s and industry’s irresponsible actions. Mercury fish advisories blanket significant portions of our streams, rivers and lakes with 48 states warning large segments of the population to avoid eating many species of fish because of high mercury levels. For 19 of these states, the warning is statewide.
EPA was under a legal mandate to force this industry to control these dangerous emissions with the best technology available. Proven, affordable mercury control systems like sorbent injection have consistently shown 90% reductions in emissions, yet EPA has jumped through elaborate and illegal hoops to avoid regulating the industry. With the Court’s February ruling, EPA is forced to go back to the drawing board and write a mercury control rule that truly complies with the law and protects the American people from mercury poisoning.

You can help make sure this happens by:
• Writing the EPA and demanding that they get it right this time; and
• Calling your elected representatives and asking them to carefully monitor EPA’s rewriting of the mercury rule.

It’s your government, your EPA. It’s time to take it back. w