Column: EPA mercury rules put risk to people, not utilities
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
By Tom Goldtooth and Diana McKeown
Imagine that your next-door neighbor burns tires in his backyard as a way to generate electricity for his home. Unfortunately, the tire burning creates toxic air pollutants, which fall on the vegetable garden in your backyard. Your vegetables, which you usually use to supplement the food you buy from the store, become inedible because of the toxins created by the burning tires.
When you explain to your neighbor that your vegetables are now toxic, he tells you that it is your responsibility to eat fewer of them, to avoid getting sick. Your neighbor is trying to shift the burden of addressing the tire pollution from himself, the source of the pollution, to you, the person dependent upon the vegetables that are now polluted by the tire burning.
Your neighbor is betting on risk avoidance over risk reduction, and your health is the big loser in this wager.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency is attempting to do the very same thing, by proposing an inadequate rule to reduce mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants, the major source of air emissions of mercury.
The EPA’s rule, called the Clean Air Mercury Rule or CAMR, has come under considerable criticism, including that of this paper (“Senate fails in bid to end mercury rule,” Sept. 14). Much of the criticism is focused on the fact that CAMR includes a cap-and-trade system for coal plants to reduce mercury emissions.
The coal plant industry claims that cap-and-trade allows for flexibility and keeps compliance costs down, which means “cheaper” electricity for all of us. But what cap-and-trade really means is that, for people living near plants that choose to buy polluting rights rather than clean up, mercury pollution will not be addressed.
Even if the polluting plant is not right next door, some people will be disproportionately affected, because they are pregnant or nursing, or eat a lot of fish. Fish consumption is the main way people are exposed to mercury pollution.
Like the tire-burner in our example, the power plants are trying to shift the burden of pollution control from themselves to the public. At the end of the day, this would mean it is our neighbors and our families of Minnesota that will be burdened with dealing with mercury pollution.
This disproportionate effect is one reason organizations like Indigenous Environmental Network and Clean Water Action Alliance have opposed CAMR and have supported efforts by state agencies and legislatures to implement stronger standards for coal plants.
Unfortunately, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s current proposal to reduce mercury pollution (called a Total Maximum Daily Load plan, or TMDL) does not protect the populations in the state most affected by mercury either.
But this abdication of responsibility by the state and federal governments does not mean they’re off the hook. The people of Minnesota, Minnesota tribes, and the rest of the country, will continue to remind the policymakers that fish consumption advisories are a stop-gap measure to protect our health.
The real solution to mercury pollution is to reduce the sources, not to tell people who rely on fish for food to “just eat less fish.”
Tom Goldtooth is executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network in Bemidji and Diana McKeown is program director for Clean Water Action Alliance of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
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Mercury poisoning can affect Indigenous peoples, all other
races, all ages, cultures, geographical areas, however, developing
fetuses are especially vulnerable. Methyl-mercury is one form
of mercury that targets and damages the developing brain and
nervous system. In some areas, Indigenous Peoples may experience
higher exposures to mercury poisoning from higher consumption
of fish and wildlife contaminated from mercury...
The Mercury Policy Project (MPP)