Finally! After decades of effort stretching back through four administrations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued new federal standards last week to limit the amount of mercury, arsenic and other harmful poisons emitted from power plants.
The new rules require mostly coal, but also oil-burning, power generators to install modern technology that will eliminate 90 percent of the mercury and other toxins they emit. Most of the affected plants are in the Midwest and Southeast, but the pollution they spew travels well beyond those regions. Anyone who eats fish – particularly fish near the top of the food chain, such as tuna – is potentially at risk from mercury.
A potent neurotoxin, mercury can damage the nervous system of fetuses and young children. It can cause blindness and deafness, lower IQs and developmental disabilities. Other toxins targeted by the new rules cause cancer, stroke and heart attack. They damage kidneys, irritate the eyes and aggravate asthma and other respiratory ailments.
The federal EPA estimates the new rule will prevent 11,000 premature deaths a year and thousand of asthma attacks and emergency room visits.
Predictably, opponents are forecasting catastrophe. They say tightened standards will jack up electricity costs, increase the threat of power outages and kill jobs. Really? The pollution control technologies mandated by the new standards have been commercially available for more than 20 years. Hundreds of power plant operators in the 17 states that issued similarly stringent standards years ago have already complied with the new rules. No lights went out or even dimmed as a result.
The coal-burning plants that will likely have to shut down because of the new standards account for less than one-half of one percent of the power generation for the nation.
New jobs will be created to build and install the pollution equipment needed to comply with the new standards. And utilities have been given maximum flexibility. They will have until 2015 to retrofit their plants, a year longer if the fix would in any way interrupt power supply.
Republicans in Congress, working with well-financed lobbyists for polluters, have promised to block the new rules. That will be interesting to watch in an election year. As President Obama has noted, it's a false choice to claim we can't have clean air and a strong economy. We can have both, and this rule will help accomplish it.
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