E.P.A. Weakens Controls on Mercury

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/climate/epa-mercury-coal.html

By Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport
April 16, 2020


The Trump administration on Thursday weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic.

The new Environmental Protection Agency rule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental lawyers said would fundamentally undermine the legal underpinnings of controls on mercury and many other pollutants.

By reducing the positive health effects of regulations on paper and raising their economic costs, the new method could be used to justify loosening restrictions on any pollutant that the fossil fuel industry has deemed too costly to control.

“That is the big unstated goal,” said David Konisky, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. “This is less about mercury than about potentially constraining or handcuffing future efforts by the E.P.A. to regulate air pollution.”

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Patrick Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law School, noted that in virtually every environmental rollback, Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. has acknowledged in the fine print that enormous increases in health problems and deaths will occur because of increased pollution.

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Driving down mercury emissions alone, the studies at the time found, would yield a $6 million annual benefit, a fraction of the cost of the controls. But by adding in co-benefits like projected gains in avoided heart disease, asthma attacks and other health problems, the total benefits reached $80 billion over five years. Overall, the Obama administration estimated that the rule would prevent 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks and 11,000 premature deaths each year.

Under the Trump administration’s new rule, such co-benefits will no longer be calculated with cost, only direct benefits.

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Matthew Davis, a former E.P.A. scientist who worked with the agency’s office of children’s health protection to develop the original rule, said weakening the rule still represented a threat to children’s health.

“The reason we did this rule is because children and developing fetuses are harmed by mercury,” said Mr. Davis, who now works at the League of Conservation Voters.

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In Congress, the Obama-era mercury rule has bipartisan support. Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works committee, and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the chairman of an energy and water appropriations subcommittee, wrote an opinion piece in USA Today in November urging the Trump administration to leave the regulation unchanged.

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