This disgusts me. I was born and raised in Michigan which had and still has coal fired plants. As a child we heated our home with coal. I have fond memories of going fishing in the many beautiful lakes in Michigan and having a family fish fry. Today all of the water ways in Michigan are contaminated with mercury. The fish are largely unsafe to eat so a wonderful natural resource has been destroyed. Coal is not beautiful president trump. Mercury is not beautiful. Fish and people are beautiful. Clean water and air are beautiful.
We should be tightening our environmental laws and investing in the renewable energy technologies. You are flogging a dead horse.
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Check this off Putin's bucket list: Make Americans dumber.
26
So let me get this straight.
The same administration that wants to overturn Roe v Wade because it “kills unborn babes in the womb”, a common descriptor used by anti-choicers...not me...
Is ok with polluting our environment and damaging the health of living children and adults.
Somehow they view the termination of a non sentient fetus as morally wrong but not children poisoned by playing in polluted lakes and streams.
Talk about being completely disconnected to reality.
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The problem with Times readers is that too often they don't think like industrialists.
What is the big deal?
Regulations interfere with generating wealth.
So people die. They'll die eventually, anyway.
And people are renewable.
23
Trump and the kleptocratic Republican party are experts at using unjustifiable fear to mobilize voters. Although the environment has not traditionally ranked high as a motivating factor for voters, the EPA and other agencies responsible for health and the environment are altering rules like the one for mercury that are truly scary. In the coming elections, Democrats would be wise to: 1) highlight how toxic the Republican-endorsed mercury increases are for each and every one of us, and 2) refuse to frame such actions as "rolling back regulation" and reframe them as "losses of protection" for our health and environment.
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EPA is a lost hope.. Let us do our part and continue to consume less electricity generated from coal; and ones who can afford and where available choose solar co-op even if it might cost a cent or two more per unit.
10
There is always a need to reinvent the cost-benefit analysis when we spend on the enhancement of HSE (Health,Safety & Environment)standards .
My suggestion to EPA is to make a policy for review and redraft of every regulation in a 'Fixed Frequency Frame"
irrespective of the person who is in the white house. When
EPA is ready to offer me an opportunity, I could aid with added elements to strengthen the justification on spending to contain all emissions including mercury. Carbon foot print is
visible to the estimation but to add 'sole print',we need----.
1
The economic theory of "Pareto Optimality" describes the theoretical sweet spot between spending more on pollution abatement and reducing the cost of economic output by imposing the burdens of pollution on society. Models based on the theory clearly show that the sweet spot is heavily influenced by the distribution of wealth and rights before market exchanges determine the presumably economically optimum solution.
If those who would be harmed by pollution are relatively wealthy and are given the option to pay not to be poisoned, they will tend to pay a lot to arrive at a low pollution outcome. Similarly, if the public has a right not to be poisoned by industry, they will tend to demand high compensation for low to moderate levels of pollution, leading industry to choose levels of output and pollution abatement investments that result in low to moderate levels of pollution. However, when the public that is to be impacted by pollution is poor and bestowed with few rights not to be poisoned, industry tends to reduce pollution abatement investments and increase output to the point that the public suffers significant adverse health consequences.
That last condition seems to be the basis for the regulatory changes the Trump administration is pursuing. It is the basis of charges of economic racism that burdens poor, minority neighborhoods with the greatest pollution burdens. In this case, they taking away rights to expand the boundaries of the disenfranchised.
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The reconsideration of these rules is appropriate and timely. For many potential toxins, including mercury (Hg) there is no data that the trace amounts absorbed by humans due to power plant emissions are toxic. This, of course, is at least partly due to any effects of low Hg levels being so small. There is also good reason to think that trace amounts of Hg and other heavy metals will be inconsequential since we contain a protein, metallothionein, that specifically binds and sequesters heavy metals. Furthermore, if the effects of Hg were significant, we should be seeing significant improvements in human health due to the reductions that have been going on for so many years. As far as I am aware, no such effects have been detected suggesting that there have been no significant improvements in human health due to this rule.
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@Rob-Chemist
Mink also contain metallothionein, yet when fed fish with as little as 0.22 part per million of methylmercury, they have fewer kits (Halbrook et al. 1997. Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 33:312-316). That study was done using fish from the creek in my hometown. I can't consider that effect "inconsequential" especially if humans are affected in a similar manner.
It may be difficult to tease out the effects of low-level Hg (not limited to reproductive effects) from all the other factors affecting human health, especially if the adverse affect shows only upon reproduction or is otherwise hard to observe. But that difficulty is no excuse to assume that there is no effect. When you say "no such effects have been detected," how many studies are you referring to? Where can I find them?
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@Sara
With the mink study, and other studies, a confounding issue is that they are fed a diet consisting of almost exclusively the contaminated food. This is very different than the human diet where food containing low levels of Hg are almost always a very small portion of the total diet. Regarding your question as to studies showing effects not having been detected, the answer is actually your question. If effects had been discovered by epidemiologists, they would have been published and publicized due to their importance. Studies saying "We have been unable to ascertain any health benefits due to a change in regulation" are generally unpublishable since they are negative data.
There are scores of data regarding harmful effects of heavy metals on human health regardless of source. Relying on metallothionein to protect from heavy metals is ill-advised. Had the same protective mechanisms be cited 40 years ago, wed still have leaded paints and auto fuels not to mention generations of poisoned children and adults.
22
What can we do? I want to be proactive, not just sit here fretting and dispairing about how much more polluted this country and our waters will be for my new baby if this administration gets its way!
Are there resources for those who want to take action to prevent the loosening of environmental regulations?
14
@Elli - the following link gets you to the EPA dockets where there are proposed rules open for the public to comment on:
https://www.epa.gov/dockets/view-dockets-open-public-comment-program-office
This one includes some tips on effective commenting:
https://www.epa.gov/dockets
Members of Congress really are affected by their phone ringing - it's not a sure-fire way to turn around EPA since that's the Executive branch, but you can pick up a phone and call your Representative, Senators and even call the White House switchboard.
Donations to charities that oppose the kind of bad-health rules might help, too, but I'm not going to try recommending any particular ones.
15
This Administration can make this entire issue much less difficult by providing balloons full of every noxious toxin to each household to use as it sees fit.
This way the Administration, the EPA, energy companies need not worry about emissions - the poisoning will already be done for them.
5
Mercury in making felt hats was why hatters went mad, hence Lewis Carroll's clichéd "Mad Hatter." We are all going to end up mad as hatters if this rule goes into effect. Hg (mercury) is a known neurotoxin. What idiot lets Hg into the air, rainfall and soil? Since this is purely about coal company profits, maybe the Bible's right about the love of money being the root of all evil.
26
Thank you for connecting that phrase, "mad as a hatter," with mercury that was used in making felt hats. Startling. How many people want their children or themselves to be like the "Mad Hatter" in "Alice in Wonderland"?
6
This is just an extension of the Reagan-era dishonesty in cost-benefits analysis: Declare, with false piety, that “you can’t place a value on a human life”, then insert a zero into your calculations on the line for the cost in human life of not regulating polluters. Poof! Regulations’ costs outweigh the value of lives saved! Typical right-wing deception.
32
The most mercurial person ever to work in the Oval Office now has a department that wants us to believe more exposure to mercury is safe.
22
So do we thank the "steady state" for this, too? What a nightmare.
7
The science distortions and denials are expanding with this administration.
Trump has the nerve to call the Attorney General a “ stupid”Southerner because he protects Mueller and tea.
But Trump will go down in history as the most stupid, corrupt, dishonest prez in our history, always protecting those who feed his financial contribution coffers.
21
EPA is shorthand for "Environmental Protection Agency." The Agency was designed and dedicated to the protection of human, land and waterway health among other things. It was not supposed to be the "IPA" (Ideology Protection Agency).
Mercury is one of the most toxic of environmental pollutants (along with lead), and it is known as a potent neurotoxin since antiquity.
No sensible human could defend putting more mercury (Hg) into the lungs of humans and edible mammals. Those who defend this are rather antediluvian sleazeballs.
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@Svirchev, nor into the water supply and hence into our fish.
7
Why is this happening, and how much is the coal industry paying Trump and his buds to ruin all of us........because of money?
24
I'm 73 and have lived through Love Canal, Houston Ship Canal. You name it and business wants to spend the least amount of money possible. Here in Reading, PA we have superfund sites from lead battery makers, beryllium contamination from a local industry, coal dust in rivers. You name it, industry does it the least expensive way possible. They make their money and move on....
67
Hey, I have a joke I'd like to tell.
.
.
.
"Clean Coal"
.
.
Thank you, thank you! I'll be here all week! Don't forget to tip your waiter.
41
I hope that this story makes liberals rethink their devotion to the doctrine of judicial deference to the decisions of administrative agencies. That doctrine pretty much insulates the Government’s recalculation of the cost/benefits of environmental regulations from judicial review. Yet I see that one of the prime objections to Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination is precisely that he is skeptical of this doctrine of deference. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
2
@Douglas - Cognitive dissonance indeed, when administrative agencies of the government of the people are co-opted by political appointees who have no concern for facts or science. Judicial deference to these agencies had always been based on the assumption that they were competent, but the current administration is incompetent; blinded by greed and ignorance. Brett’s skepticism of judicial deference simply marches in lockstep with them.
32
"For example, in the case of the mercury rule, the Obama administration found between $4 million to $6 million in health benefits directly from curbing mercury. But it further justified the regulation by citing an additional $80 billion in health benefits a year by, among other things, preventing as many as 11,000 premature deaths. " 4 to 6 $million per what?
Cost/Benefit analysis requires the application of probability estimates to costs. And, on the benefit side, there has to be a valuation made to human life.
This article is incomplete.
5
@gordon bjork Agreed. The health benefits from just mercury reductions were so low that they were basically uncalculatable. Instead EPA relied on all the so-called “co-benefits” to justify the rules big price tag. Something like 99% of the mercury rule’s benefits were from co-benefits, and not from mercury reduction. In my opinion, EPA should regulate the co-benefit pollutants (particulate matter) under existing rules that exist specifically for these pollutants.
2
Why is the EPA more concerned about "underestimat[ing] the costs of its regulations" instead of 'underestimating the cost of not having the regulations,' especially when the latter "costs" are in human health and human lives? These bureaucrats and profiteers should first inhale a fine mist of mercury before making decisions about poisoning the rest of us for profit. It's not enough for the winners to have the losers lose financially, they also want them to lose their health and even their lives too. What kind of choice and business and regulation is that?
I find it perverse that the value of human life is not necessarily based on financial cost but rather financial profit. How little profit is necessary to be allowed to kill your neighbor or destroy their health, or destroy the world if the profit is high enough.
Where are all the so called pro-life profiteers who would rather injure the fetal health and that of the mother for profit?
I am sure that the electric power companies will lower rates once they have recovered their investment in anti-pollution devices, ... NOT! Will rates go down once they're able to ignore previous regulations? I think not!
These criminal profiteers are no better than the Russian assassins who poison their own. And it is the public that pays the EPA's salaries while industry avoids paying taxes. Go figure that one out too.
24
Republicans care about money and power; period. People? Not at all. Vote out Republicans if you hope to have a long life. Ray Sipe
27
In a country that provides healthcare to its citizens it is in the interest of the government to minimize impacts from environmental pollution. But the direction of the US appears to be going in the opposite direction -- where corporate profits are more important than public health, then Love Canal, for example, or Flint, is an entirely acceptable cost of doing business. The public just has to watch out for themselves -- maybe move to a nicer area. And have the servants check the labels on food, etc. Short-sighted to be sure. But its been a while since long term benefits played a role in decision-making.
36
Mercury is a neurotoxin that not only will be in our soil, but the runoff will enter our waterways, become converted into methyl mercury, consumed by fish and ingested in all of our seafood. The impact goes beyond any direct exposure. It is an element that does not degrade and become harmless. It will be in our air, soil, and food for the rest of our lives, our children's lives, and their children's lives. It will permanently cause learning disabilities for an entire generation.
Put the price of that into your EPA equations and tell me about how you can justify its benefit?
79
By weakening rules the EPA is giving into the companies and organizations that are in favor of destroying our planet and our country in order to keep more money in their pockets. This is not about our health and safety at all. It's about greed.
51
I just can't believe there are no comments here yet! The disgusting evil clown circus of the trump administration machinations are all anyone is talking about. You have to look a little farther than Kavanaugh to see this article on mercury regulations that NO ONE opposes, being rolled back by the trump EPA because...... why? When even the coal industry doesn't want it, why? They don't value you, your kids, or anyone. They value corporate power OVER YOU and that's all. I'm betting FOX news will not be reporting this, and will instead be giving Alex Jones his poor, victim TV time.
34
Republicans do not put any value on "life." After all, a "life" cannot be put in a bank account, and bank accounts are the only way that Republicans know how to keep score and know if they are "winning" or not. Republicans have amply proven over the decades that someone losing their health or life is really not a concern for them. Never has been, never will be.
44
pro lifers indeed
21
@Joe Rockbottom, the only way to stop them is to vote them put of office.
9