WASHINGTON – Maryland environmental groups criticized final clean-air rules published Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency, saying its proposed new mercury standards would do too little, too late to protect the state.
The rules, posted Friday in the Federal Register, include a call for a 70 percent reduction in the amount of mercury released from power plants by 2018.
But critics say that even a tiny amount of mercury, which is particularly dangerous to development of fetuses and children, is too much and that technology exists to lower emissions as much as 90 percent.
“This proposal should be called the ‘Leave Our Children Behind Mercury Rule’,” said Zach Corrigan, an official with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “The inevitable consequence will be more developmental problems for our children due to the accumulation of mercury.”
But industry officials said the EPA’s new guidelines are the most realistic approach to reducing mercury levels.
“Our concern is not whether or not we should do it (lower mercury emissions), the question for us is what is the most cost-effective way to achieve it,” said Dan Riedinger of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility advocacy group.
The new regulations replace the strict standards of the Clean Air Act with a looser “cap-and-trade” approach that sets a limit on the tons of mercury that each plant can emit. That approach treats emissions as a commodity: Plants that put out too much mercury would be able to buy credits from those plants whose emissions fell below the level set by the EPA.
But critics say that practice amounts to “buying and selling the right to pollute.”
The Clean Air Act stipulated that the federal government must require the most-effective technologies to combat air pollution, regardless of cost. The new proposal contradicts that language with its barter system, said Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former director of the EPA Office of Regulatory Enforcement.
The mercury standards are particularly important to Maryland, which had the highest concentration of mercury in its rainfall of any of the states recently evaluated by the National Wildlife Federation.
Maryland power plants emitted nearly 2,500 pounds of mercury in 2000, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Far less can contaminate a lake to the point that fish are unsafe to eat, the foundation noted.
It did not measure mercury from other states that drift to Maryland on the wind. Maryland suffers high mercury levels because smog from unregulated Midwestern plants blows east along the jet stream and falls onto land and into the water.
Maryland and 11 other Northeastern states sued the federal government last year after they learned of the EPA’s “new-source review” plan, to release coal-burning power plants from their obligation to upgrade pollution controls when they renovate.
National organizations predict that Friday’s proposal will face the same legal challenge as new-source review.
“The new (mercury) proposal falls short of what Maryland and other downwind Northeastern states have considered in the Ozone Transport Commission,” an alliance of states working for reductions in air pollution, said Richard McIntyre, a spokesman for Maryland Department of the Environment.
Schaeffer said that the 70 percent emission-reduction level is just a goal and will not likely be met. EPA statistics predict no better than a 46 percent decline by 2018, given present conditions, he said.
Schaeffer also noted that the proposal makes no promises for mercury reduction before 2015, a fact that he said poses a grave health risk. That is why he and other environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club and U.S. PIRG, have asked for a 90-day comment period.
Friday marked the beginning of a 60-day comment period on the new regulations. Public hearings have been scheduled next month in Illinois, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
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