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Defenders View: Mercury: Corporate Polluters Get Their Way with the White House
Apparently they just can’t help themselves. The president and his appointees, that is. The evidence is incontrovertible that mercury is a poison inflicting serious harm on our wildlife and, most importantly, us. Yet the Bush administration is siding with its friends in industry and proposing to allow the main villains, large coal-fired power plants, to release five times as much mercury into the air as current law allows.
It is one of the most “unreal” decisions yet by an obviously reality-impaired White House. Just this past March, the Environmental Protection Agency issued new warnings about the extreme danger to children and pregnant women from eating mercury-contaminated fish. Yet at the same time, the White House was pushing to weaken current regulations that require power plants to reduce the amount of toxic mercury they pump into the atmosphere.
The science of mercury contamination is clear. After being released into the atmosphere, mercury is absorbed by clouds and falls back to earth in rain that then pollutes our wetlands, creeks, rivers and oceans. From there it is a short step into the food chain where it works its way through various aquatic species and ends up in humans and other mammals. Because the pollutant magnifies at each link in the food chain, predatory fish such as bass or walleye can have mercury levels tens of thousands of times higher than the water in which they live. Small aquatic mammals such as river otters, as well as birds including bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, mallard ducks and common loons, all show the impacts of high mercury levels. The toxic metal is even showing up as one culprit in the decline of the endangered Florida panther.
The biggest danger is to pregnant women, fetuses and young children. Mercury exposure can be devastating to the development of mammals’ central nervous systems, especially putting their offspring in danger. In 2003, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 1 in 12 U.S. women of childbearing age have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies.
How bad is it? Forty-four states and territories have issued health advisories about eating fish caught in local waters, and new research is raising red flags about mercury in canned tuna, a staple of kids’ lunchboxes across the country.
Faced with this overwhelming evidence, you would think that our president would do everything in his power to decrease the danger of mercury to pregnant women, our children and our wildlife heritage.
You would be wrong.
Instead of strengthening—or even enforcing—the existing Clean Air Act regulations that require major reductions of mercury pollution from coal-burning power plants, the Bush administration is pushing to weaken the law, allowing much more mercury to be released than would otherwise be possible.
There is a better way. Recent research indicates that it is technologically and economically feasible to cut mercury emissions from power plants by 90 percent, keeping tons of this dangerous pollutant out of our air and water, and out of our wildlife’s and women’s and children’s bodies. But it isn’t going to happen without a White House that is willing to put kids, pregnant moms and our natural bounty ahead of corporate polluters.
