WASHINGTON – A clean-air alliance of Northeast states that includes Maryland asked the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday to replace proposed cap-and-trade rules for mercury emissions with a “bubble” policy that prohibits mercury trading between power plants.
The Ozone Transport Commission said the cap-and-trade policy for mercury emissions would create highly toxic “hotspots” near those power plants that would be allowed to buy extra pollution credits from facilities that have fallen below their emission quota.
People living near those plants are at greater risk for mercury poisoning, which damages human-motor functions and child development, environmentalists say.
“It (the EPA proposal) has everything to do with trying to placate industry and little to do with protecting the environment,” said Bill Becker, director of the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators and the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials.
But industry officials like the EPA guidelines, which were published Friday. Dan Riedinger of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility advocacy group, said then that the proposal preserves the environment and business at the same time.
But while it opposes the mercury rules, the Northeast coalition said it will support a cap-and-trade policy for other, less-toxic, pollutants, on the condition that the EPA lowers the overall emissions cap for those pollutants by 2015. The coalition wants the EPA to cap annual sulfur dioxide emissions at 3 million tons and to cap nitrogen oxide to 1.4 million tons a year.
“The cap is going to have to be lower, probably even lower than what OTC is proposing. And that’s just addressing point sources and power-plants in particular,” said Jeff Stehr a scientist for the University of Maryland meteorology department.
Maryland and other Northeastern states are currently in violation of federal-ozone standards and, according to the Clean Air Act, are supposed to come up with a plan to fix the problem. But Stehr said Maryland has already implemented nearly every policy possible to lower ozone on its own.
“The only way we would attain at this point is if everyone in Maryland got up and left,” he said.
The coalition said pollution blowing in to Northeastern states from Midwestern states is the main reason mercury levels here are so high and why it wants stricter federal regulations.
Maryland and other Northeastern states would be better able to attain ozone standards under the coalition proposal than the proposed EPA rules, Stehr said. Becker agreed, saying the coalition proposal works faster than the EPA rules and is just as economically feasible.
“If adopted, it (the coalition plan) could provide a huge health and welfare benefit to the entire region including the Chesapeake Bay,” Becker said.
“We do think that we can save between 10,000 and 20,000 lives a year by OTC’s proposal and indeed that we can do it with fractions of cents cost per kilowatt hour,” said Christopher Recchia, executive director of the coalition.
He said the OTC will submit its proposal to the EPA in the next 60 days, the official public-comment period for the EPA rules.
EPA officials did not return phone calls Tuesday seeking comment on the coalition proposal.
-30- CNS 02-03-04