http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/muck021204.asp?source=muck
Hot Spot and Bothered
With feds slow to tackle mercury pollution, state
leaders step up
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by Amanda Griscom
12 Feb 2004
The Mercury Mutiny is gaining force on the state
level, galvanizing some unlikely rebels. Eastern
states including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New
Jersey, and New York were the first to jump into the
fray, launching local efforts to reduce mercury
pollution in response to the Bush administration's
widely criticized plan for dealing with mercury. Then
last week, a new regional effort was announced by a
coalition of state legislators from six Midwestern
states -- Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio,
and Wisconsin -- many of which have economies reliant
on King Coal, a major culprit in mercury emissions.
Coal it like you see it.
Photo: Los Alamos National Lab.
"You might expect this kind of action from
Northeastern states, but now even Midwestern states
are mobilizing," said Jane Krentz, a former state
senator from Minnesota and the Midwest coordinator of
the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, the
group that organized this regional initiative. "We
can't ignore the science any longer. The federal
government's rollback on mercury is very disturbing --
it will set us back decades -- so we've got no choice
but to take things into our own hands." The state
senators and representatives plan to introduce bills
in their legislatures that would curb mercury
emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Adam Schafer, program director for NCEL, admitted that
it will be difficult to get the legislation passed
considering the power of the coal industry in the
Midwest, "but we hope that working together as a
coalition, we'll have more leverage to fight that
battle," he said. "More importantly, we're sending a
message to Washington, letting the EPA know that we
can see the writing on the wall: Mercury threatens the
brains of babies. If Washington isn't going to act to
protect our constituencies, we won't sit back and let
that risk escalate."
Indeed, the writing on the wall got even bolder a
couple of weeks ago when the EPA's top mercury
scientist, Kathryn Mahaffey, released new findings
indicating that 630,000 babies born in the U.S. each
year, one in six, are at risk of mercury-related
developmental problems contracted in the womb -- a
number nearly twice as high as the EPA's current
official estimate. Mahaffey's new calculations are
based on the finding that mercury concentrates at
higher levels in the umbilical cords of pregnant women
than in their bloodstreams, indicating that fetuses
could be getting higher doses of mercury than
previously thought.
Mahaffey's findings are unlikely to sway the
administration from its current controversial
cap-and-trade program for mercury pollution, which has
been derided as too weak by environmentalists and
public-health advocates. And hers is not the only
mercury-related science that the Bush administration
doesn't seem to want to consider.
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published.
In late January, Inside EPA reporter Liz Heron
obtained EPA documents through the Freedom of
Information Act revealing that the agency failed to
comply with two executive orders requiring it to study
how the administration's mercury plan would affect
children, minorities, and low-income populations.
"What they said to me was that they were trying to
protect the entire population, so it wasn't necessary
to look at the effects on specific population
subsets," said Heron. "Their logic is that if their
end goal will benefit everybody, it will help
susceptible populations as well."
But environmentalists argue that such studies of
potential effects on vulnerable populations are
particularly important in the case of mercury
pollution, which, as Mahaffey made clear, has
disproportionate impacts on children, and is widely
thought to create toxic "hot spots" in the mostly
low-income communities immediately surrounding power
plants. Bush's cap-and-trade program -- which would
let utilities buy and sell the right to emit mercury
-- could exacerbate the hot-spot problem in
particular. "The larger point here," said Heron, "is
that the Bush administration is shifting away from the
emphasis on environmental justice that was prevalent
in the '90s."
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