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Mercury and money
The EPA wasn't telling the whole truth about the benefits of strict pollution curbs
March 28, 2005

Times Union wrote:

It now turns out that when the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its proposed new rules on mercury pollution earlier this month, it did more than disappoint environmentalists and some public officials who were hoping for more stringent measures. It also ignored the advice, and the findings, of its own agency. And it kept the information from the public.

Two steps need to be taken immediately: Congress should investigate the apparent cover-up, and it must impose its own stricter mercury standards if the EPA refuses to do so. Inaction will only put public health at risk.

The EPA's secrecy was detailed in a Washington Post story last week that revealed agency officials were aware that a Harvard study had directly contradicted the agency's findings on mercury pollution standards. In fact, EPA had paid for the Harvard analysis, an EPA scientist had co-authored it, and other EPA scientists had peer-reviewed it.

The Harvard study had found that the health and economic benefits of tough new mercury pollution controls would far exceed the costs that utilities would face when installing them, and by extension, the cost to consumers in the form of higher electric bills. But when EPA announced its new rules, it said just the opposite -- that the cost of strict new controls would exceed any health benefits to the public.

As a result, the agency's rules were designed to reduce mercury pollution by 69 percent below 1999 levels in the next 13 years, a relatively lenient standard. Environmental groups had argued that today's anti-pollution technology could reduce those levels by 90 percent.

Expressed in hard cash terms, the EPA estimated that tough new standards would produce only $50 million in health benefits a year -- mainly in the form of lower medical costs to treat mercury-related illnesses -- while the cost to industry to install the scrubbing technology necessary to curb emissions would be more than $750 million. But the Harvard study found the benefits to be nearly $5 billion a year, mainly in reduced costs for medical care for neurological and cardiac disorders.

Mercury is one of the smokestack pollutants emitted by utilities. Some of this pollution drifts over the Northeast and contributes to acid rain, which kills lakes and forests in the Adirondacks. But mercury tends to accumulate haphazardly on the ground -- heavy concentrations in one area, barely traces in another -- and washes into waterways, where it is ingested by fish and works it way into the human food chain.

Now the EPA is stammering to explain why it kept the Harvard findings under wrap. One claim is that the study had been submitted after the Jan. 3 deadline and could not be considered when formulating the new standards. But the Post cites documents showing that EPA officials had been briefed on the study as far back as last August.

Another claim -- namely, that the Harvard study places too great an emphasis on mercury in the oceans -- is even less plausible. Granted, U.S. power plants contribute only about 1 percent of the mercury contamination in the oceans. But most Americans are exposed to mercury by eating ocean fish. And the EPA's pollution standards should reflect that.

Yes, the coal burning plants have mercury injectors for the sole reasons of causing health problems because they are paid off by the large pharmacutical companies pushing cancer treatments.

Also, coal burning power plants pump more radioactivity into the environment per kilowatt of electricity than the oldest and dirtiest nuclear reactors. And because it's exhaust it can't be sequestered like nuclear waste can. But it's not a "nuclear power plant" so John Q. Dumbass doesn't have a problem with it.

And the point, my dear Marzy, is that they're not taking steps to limit mercury output. Why should they? It would eat into their profits.

1) Eliminate corporate money in Washington
2) Kyoto-style pollution recommendations: "We will tolerate this much mercury entering the environment, which decreases. Who generates it is up to you. Here are the credits. If you abuse this system, you pay hefty fines which are placed into a trust fund for people affected by your pollution."

Last edited by The New Guy (2005-04-07 10:30 am)

Conservation, decentralizing some energy production, upgrading the 1950s era electrical grid and mandating better energy efficiency standards will solve most of those problems. Here's a story about a township that gets it.

We have the technology right now to lower mercury levels. The problem is that it also raises costs, which eats into the profits of an already heavily subsidized industry. They can produce the same amount of electricity, they just have to put scrubbers on the smokestacks, which costs money.

And let's not forget what really caused the blackouts and brownouts in California: Enron selling the state's electricity back to them at exhorbitant prices after deregulation.

Wind and solar aren't reliable enough, but on windy or sunny days they can provide a much needed suppliment to the grid during high load times. Especially if you have them decentralized on individual homes. When your home isn't using all of the electricity it's generating, it dumps it back to the grid. I'm not talking about totally eliminating all power plants immediately, and that straw-man has been torn down long ago. I'm talking about recognizing the total costs of burning coal and factoring them into the price of the electricity.

And it's not just mercury that's a problem. During the 2003 blackout an environmental team flew above my home town collecting air samples. Turns out ozone, particulate and sulfur dioxide levels dropped 50%, 70% and 90% respectively when power plants in the mid west were shut down. Source

We're paying for these companies to pollute right now. We're paying in higher medical insurance costs because of the diseases they're causing (like asthma attacks and chronic respiratory problems). And we're also paying in the destruction of the environment and our quality of life. I say we make the power companies pay for these things. Yeah, they'll have to charge us more for coal-generated electricity, but that will make renewable energy (which has very few problems compared with fossil fuels) even more economical since they won't have to pay the costs associated with it.

gradient wrote:

The New Guy wrote:

1) Eliminate corporate money in Washington
2) Kyoto-style pollution recommendations: "We will tolerate this much mercury entering the environment, which decreases. Who generates it is up to you. Here are the credits. If you abuse this system, you pay hefty fines which are placed into a trust fund for people affected by your pollution."

Then we have an energy crisis.

How do you plan on reducing the mercury? Going to wind? The bird lovers won't like that. Solar? It's not reliable enough, like wind. Nuclear? No one wants a reactor in their town and the liberals will throw themselves on train tracks before they let the spent fuel pass through.

It's fun to pass cute little bills, but it is another to actually use your brain and find a way of dealing it yourself.

If you want to have black/brown-outs, then I suggest you push for them in your own state.

You are right about is that wind NRG is still a joke right now and there are actually some greenies against wind energy cause there are in face changed meso -climate of winds and birds strikes at night.

And yes solar only produces something like 12 watts per meter sq or smt like that. But legislation demands industry to invest in the next best solution, advancing it, which could be wind, wave or solar NRG.
After all solar panels in the past 15 years have advanced exponentially and their costs have gone down dramatically. Why it used to cost smt like $12,000 if you wanted a solar water heater then and now it coasts like $3000.  Solar has also been advancing this much with actually a trickle of $ if you compare how much industries could actually spare to advance it.

Didn't anyone catch the EPA giveaway to the polluters.... their reversal of a Clinton improvement? It's in the first article. This, despite the heading, isn't just about mercury. It's about lead, arsenic, hexavalent chromium, and other very harmful substances.

If you notice the chart on the first page, utilities are at the top of the pollution list. Compare that with the new de-listing of utilities, coupled with the statements below from the EPA:

At the heart of the debate over the new mercury rule is the rule's reversal of a 2000 EPA decision. Under the Clinton administration, the agency added electric utilities to a critical list of industries considered to be major sources of hazardous air pollutants such as lead and arsenic. The new mercury rule "de-lists" utilities. But in the eyes of many, that original listing still constitutes a legal requirement for power plants to eventually control these toxic emissions.

"What we concluded in the final mercury rule is that for the utility industry ... it was mercury that was the hazardous air pollutant with the greatest concern for public health," says spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman. In the preamble to the new mercury-rule proposal, the EPA concluded that nonmercury toxic emissions "posed no hazards to public health."

Either you use a conventional hot water heater or take cold showers all the time. Trying anything else is obviously retarded because you haven't thought it through, you stupid hippie.

</sarcasm>

What about the EPA saying to Minnesota that its higher mercury limits were overruled by the EPA's lower limits?

Last edited by The New Guy (2005-04-09 2:18 pm)

Ra wrote:

Hmmm...there are several places, not too far from where I live, where all i have to do is to jump into a hot spring, right in the middle of the winter.

Why doesn't everyone just live there then? It's so simple.

Ra wrote:

In warmer places where the temperatures don't drop too much, one can use heat pumps to extract heat from the ground under the house or backyard. There are 12 VDC heat pumps, so one can use solar panels to run those. All it takes is a series of copper coils for the water, a tank or reservoir inside the home, and a circulating pump. But you 55-gallon drum idea would work very well at my campsite. I only spend a couple of weeks there, to mid September.

Did you miss the part about it being a preheater? It's not supposed to replace, just suppliment.

An example of the birth defects caused by mercury poisoning