Re: Proposed National Emission Standards for Hazardous Pollutants; and, in the Alternative, Proposed Standards of Performance for New and Existing Stationary Sources: Electric Utility Steam Generating Units; Docket ID No.OAR-2002-0056
Thank you for allowing me to testify. My name is Nathan Willcox and I am the energy and clean air advocate with PennEnvironment. PennEnvironment is a statewide environmental advocacy group with more than 13,000 members across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
This year, the Agency has before it a decision that will have an enormous impact on public health, especially for women and children. Your agency is under a settlement agreement to issue final rules to significantly curb mercury emissions from power plants. Unfortunately, you have put forward several proposed options that would allow our children to be exposed to far more mercury, for a decade longer than what is achievable and required by the federal Clean Air Act. As I will outline, your proposed options are inadequate to protect public health, and illegal. They fail to implement either the letter or the intent of the Clean Air Act's requirements for safeguarding human health against toxic air pollution. I urge EPA to reverse this course and reduce power plant mercury air emissions by 90%, requiring reductions at each and every power plant by 2008 using levels reflected by maximum achievable control technologies.
Mercury is a highly toxic chemical whose effects on the central nervous system are comparable to those of lead. Exposure to mercury, especially exposure of the developing fetus in the womb, can cause severe neurological and developmental problems that include poor attention span and delayed language development, impaired memory and vision, problems processing information, and impaired fine motor coordination.
The principal way that people are exposed to mercury is by eating fish, a staple of the American diet. When pregnant women eat mercury-contaminated fish, the mercury can pass through the placenta. Infants can ingest mercury from breast milk. Also at risk are those who consume large amounts of fish, such as recreational and subsistence anglers.
Mercury exposure is widespread. Across the country 43 states have issued fish consumption advisories covering more than 12 million acres of lakes and 400,000 miles of rivers. These warnings advising people to avoid or limit fish consumption due to mercury. Here in Pennsylvania, a statewide advisory has been issued covering all water bodies, advising limited consumption of fish due to mercury pollution. This pollution carries with it not only public health implications, but also potential economic implications, as recreational fishing is one of Pennsylvania's largest revenue sources. Despite these fish consumption advisories in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, a recent study by Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1 in 12 women of childbearing years in the U.S. have unsafe levels of mercury in their blood. If this were the only relevant measure, one could conclude that more than 300,000 children are born each year with a heightened risk for neurological and developmental problems related to mercury exposure. However, the situation is even more alarming than this. Because mercury tends to become concentrated in the umbilical cord, the exposure of children to unsafe mercury levels is even higher. Your agency recently released data estimating that as many as 630,000 children may be born each year with unhealthy levels of mercury in their blood.
The largest industrial source of the mercury that contaminates our food supply is air emissions from the electricity generating industry. In its Report To Congress, your agency estimated that 60% of mercury deposited in the U.S. is emitted by U.S. anthropogenic air emission sources. Power plants account for nearly one quarter of all U.S. emissions. Mercury is emitted from power plant smoke stacks, and falls in rain and snow onto the land and into water bodies around the power plants. Amazingly, power plants are the only major mercury polluters yet to be regulated under federal clean air standards. Thus, in large part, our nation's mercury problem is due to the fact that while other sources must meet strict emission limits, power plants continue to spew unlimited quantities of mercury into our air, where the rain and snow wash it into our rivers, lakes and oceans, and, ultimately, into our food chain.
Protecting public health demands that we reduce women and children's mercury exposure by reducing mercury from its largest source: coal burning power plants. It is a credit to Congress that they foresaw the need for these safeguards in writing the Clean Air Act, which is designed to provide these reductions. Under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act, toxic substances such as mercury must be controlled to emission levels achievable by "maximum achievable control technologies" (MACT). Two years ago, EPA estimated that under a MACT standard, 90% mercury reductions were achievable from the electricity generating industry using existing, commercially available technologies, bringing mercury emissions down to roughly 5 tons per year by 2008.
Unfortunately, your three proposed options mark a dramatic departure from the protections afforded by the Clean Air Act. One of EPA's proposed options rescinds the Agency's prior determination that power plants are to be regulated according to MACT levels. Instead EPA treats mercury pollution as if it were conventional air pollution, like smog and soot, under Section 111.
This is plainly outside the authority granted to EPA by the Clean Air Act. Mercury has been a regulated air toxic for almost 35 years - well before 1990; in fact, it was one of only eight air toxic pollutants for which EPA had developed pollutant-based rules prior to the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. The Clean Air Act requires EPA to continue to recognize that mercury is a hazardous air pollutant and to regulate it as such.
Your proposed regulation of power plant mercury emissions under section 111 of the Clean Air Act will be devastating to public health. Under EPA's proposed section 111 NSPS standard, existing power plants will be allowed to emit six to seven times more mercury into our environment for over a decade longer compared to a MACT approach that requires implementation of available control technologies by 2008. This means that mothers and children will be exposed to far more mercury for far longer than the law allows.
Both of EPA's proposed cap-and-trade options also violate the Clean Air Act because they would not require each and every power plant to make emissions reductions. Instead, some plants would be able to avoid making reductions by buying or trading credits from other plants. There is no authority provided in the Clean Air Act's language or legislative history for allowing some facilities in a listed industrial category to avoid making significant emissions reductions of hazardous air pollutants.
And there is a good reason for this. Mercury trading significantly increases the likelihood and severity of "hotspots," or communities where mercury deposition is more prevalent. There is substantial evidence that local mercury emissions create local mercury problems. A report done by Environmental Defense analyzing EPA modeling data found that local emissions of mercury are largely responsible for mercury deposition. At hot spots across the United States, local sources often account for 50% to 80% of the mercury deposition. This is particularly troubling due to mercury's persistent, bio-accumulative properties. If we create and exacerbate hotpots, we will also increase the likelihood that communities will be left toxic for decades.
Requiring plant-specific controls, on the other hand, can go a long way towards solving local mercury problems. The state of Florida, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Geological Survey issued a study of southern Florida and the Everglades that concluded that the levels of mercury contaminant found in largemouth bass and other wildlife of the Everglades declined by 60 to 75 percent since state and federal agencies began waging an aggressive campaign in the early 1990s to clean up municipal and medical-waste incinerators.
Finally, even your proposed options that do not allow emissions trading are indefensible under the Clean Air Act for they fail to require power plants to reduce as much mercury as is achievable in the near term. In 2001, your agency estimated that coal-fired power plants could achieve an average of 90 percent mercury reductions by 2008 under a MACT standard, regardless of the type of power plant or the type of coal burned. Not only are these emissions reductions achievable, studies indicate that the costs would be comparable to costs for controls for other pollutants. EPA's current proposal, on the other hand, disregards these studies as well as emerging state-of-the-art mercury control technologies. In the end, your proposal allows more than six to seven times more mercury for a decade longer than what your own staff deemed was achievable.
In sum, the proposal regarding mercury emissions from power plants is unacceptable and does not fulfill your obligation under the Clean Air Act. We urge you to go back to the drawing board and draft a new proposal that will require every plant to install state of the art mercury controls to achieve a nationwide reduction of 90% by 2008. We urge you to do this with adequate opportunity for public comment and while meeting the terms of the 1998 settlement agreement's December 15, 2004 deadline.
