For more than 20 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been acutely aware of the damage that mercury pollution wreaks on public health and the environment, and has been busily limiting emissions of the substance since 1990. What has been missing, though, is a national standard for how much mercury can be emitted by power plants a gap that has at long last been filled.
Through a series of court orders and appeals, the EPA has been working since the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments were passed to establish a national rule for power plant air toxics emissions, and the final rule governing these substances was announced at long last earlier this month. The standards will require power plants to install pollution-reduction devices that will bring down the levels of harmful substances as mercury, chromium, arsenic and acid gases that are the byproduct of burning coal and other fuels for electricity generation. Doing so, the agency estimates, will have dramatic implications on public health, with 11,000 premature deaths prevented each year, as well as 130,000 cases of childhood asthma and 4,700 heart attacks. It will also reduce the incidence of developmental and neurological problems associated with high levels of mercury. The total value of preventing these conditions is immeasurable, but in health care costs alone, the savings is significant. In quality of life as well as environmental justice, it is a long overdue but welcome move particularly in regions such as Southwest Colorado, where two notoriously polluting coal-fired power plants upwind chug a laundry list of toxins into the airshed and waterways that surround them.
While the standard was embraced by environmentalists and many who live in communities affected by power plant pollution, it was hardly universally heralded. Despite findings by the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy that the new rules will not threaten the reliability of the nations power grid, some Republican lawmakers and many in the energy lobby are employing scare tactics to rally against the clean-up requirements. The rhetoric is neither unexpected nor imaginative: sweeping layoffs and rolling power outages are the certain result of the EPAs rules, claim industry groups. The EPAs analysis finds neither to be the case, and in fact anticipates that the retrofitting the rules require can be a job creator, as can the construction of new power facilities that replace those older, dirtier facilities that owners may choose to close rather than investing in the outdated plants. There is much opportunity in each of these scenarios.
More importantly, though, the rules address a situation that has been demanding attention for far too long. In this region alone, where the San Juan Generating Station and Four Corners Power Plant have been online for 40 years or more, there are warnings about eating fish caught in many local lakes and streams because of high mercury content, treasured landscapes are threatened by poor air quality, and asthma rates are higher than average. None of these is a cost justifiable by the power the plants generate, and ensuring that such a trade off is not required is the right move for the EPA and the utilities that own the facilities. The math is clear, despite the politics that have muddied the process for the past two decades.
