The EPA's Mercurial Madness

Someone might think that ,really, the environment has nothing to do with these regulations.
It’s about power, money and power.

Willis:
If you get a second, you should mention that compact fluorescent lights (CFL’s) contain about 4 milligrams (mg) of mercury. If we assume one broken bulb per household at 114,235,996 households in the US, that is 0.46 tonnes of mercury per year or 0.71% of the US total. If the EPA is successful in cutting emissions by 25 tonnes, this percentage increases to 1.2%. Hence CFL’s will then contribute as much of the US mercury as the US contributes to overall mercury. We should ban them.
Note that vaccines are something the UN wants to ban.
These guys:
http://www.unep.org/hazardoussubstances/Mercury/Negotiations/INC3/tabid/3469/Default.aspx
(hope that cut and paste of the link worked!)
References:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=cfls.pr_cfls_mercury
Cheers
JE

Mercury is a genuine and serious pollutant. If EPA would confine itself to controlling genuine and serious pollutants like this, I wouldn’t have any problem with them.
It’s the other nonsense about carbon and biodiversity that makes them dangerous and requires the agency to be abolished. (After a bureaucracy tastes blood, there’s no way to take it back to sanity.)

Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Willis Eschenbach on Mercury poisoned EPA regs.

If the moderators will allow it, I’ll recycle most of a comment I made last December when I also found out how shockingly low the US power plant emissions were.
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Now compare that to this April 07, 2011 newspaper account of a growing Hg contamination issue:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/07/business/la-fi-lightbulb-mercury-20110407

…
Demand for CFL bulbs is growing as government mandates for energy-efficient lighting take effect, yet only about 2% of residential consumers and one-third of businesses recycle the new bulbs, according to the Assn. of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers.
As a result, U.S. landfills are releasing more than 4 tons of mercury annually into the atmosphere and storm water runoff, according to a study in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Assn.
A San Francisco hardware store owner is all too familiar with the bulb issue.
“They’re promoting them and giving them away, but there’s nowhere to drop them off,” said Tom Tognetti, co-owner of Fredricksen’s Hardware.
…

I continually find this issue obfuscated by claims that the energy savings lead to reduced demand on coal-fired electric plants yielding less Hg emissions at those plants. To wit:

…
CFL bulbs actually have fewer mercury concerns than incandescent lights, according to the California Energy Commission. Although the older bulbs contain no mercury, they’re often powered by coal-fired electricity plants, which release mercury as a pollutant. The result is about 40% less mercury emissions per bulb with CFLs, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures.
…

Some claims are even more extreme:
http://www.helplightnj.com/about/do-your-part-recycle-spent-cfl-bulbs/

Generating power is the number one contributor of mercury in the environment. CFLs save up to 70% of lighting energy, which means that power plants can produce 70% less power, which means 70% less mercury in the atmosphere.

Strangely enough, this claim does not factor in the Hg emissions from any coal-fired energy sources for the energy used in manufacturing and recycling CFL’s, let alone the Hg emissions from obtaining the Hg and manufacturing process releases. The 70% can be figured by a Nov 2010 EPA document (fine print says it’s a “living document” subject to change):
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf
Which makes an amazing claim:

Most mercury vapor inside fluorescent light bulbs becomes bound to the inside of the light bulb as it is used. EPA estimates that the rest of the mercury within a CFL – about 11 percent – is released into air or water when it is sent to a landfill, assuming the light bulb is broken.

This allows them to significantly downgrade their estimate of Hg released. And they are also not mentioning the Hg emissions related to manufacturing, and recycling including recovering the Hg from the toxic glass, if possible. Since the EPA thinks 89% of the Hg will stay forever bound to the glass in a landfill, it must take a lot of energy to liberate the Hg when recycling. Looks like there may be even more Hg released by recycling than just chucking them into a landfill.
So the EPA wants to regulate out of existence the coal-fired power plants that release only a relatively tiny bit of worldwide Hg emissions. But they want us to use CFL’s while being less than precise about the Hg emissions involved. And if you’re really worried about those coal-fired power plant emissions, ask yourself this: Which gives you a more severe exposure to Hg, those plant emissions spread out across the map, or a single CFL broken in your house? With EPA recommendations of ventilating a room for several hours with outdoor air after breaking a CFL, the answer should be obvious.

Some person in a previous thread remarked that a plastic shopping bag full of old CFLs inadvertantly “dropped” in your local legislative building contains enough mercury to trigger an evacuation of the building and a full HAZMAT response. Democracy at work.
Our newish Conservative government, here in Canada, has shelved the phase out of incandescants even though they have all been pulled from our local stores (????). Ive got a closet stuffed with em and as the old softee Charlton Heston remarked they’ll have to – gently and slowly – pry my incandescents from my cold dead hands. If you check out Charltons’ quote he aims it at Mr. Gore – wow that guy is into everything – but was referring to another environmental hazard.

Actually, I think mercury is a serious problem with modern civilization. Whether or not the measures intended to control it are or are not likely to be effective, mercury is a very bad molecule to be carrying around in your body. However, the problem isn’t elemental mercury — you could drink a cup full of liquid mercury and suffer very little in the way of side effects (and people used to do just this back when they were searching for medicines, read Stephenson’s “Quicksilver” in the Baroque Cycle) — it is mercury compounds, in particular (IIRC) methyl mercury and mercuric cyanide. Mercury vapor isn’t good for you, but it is unusual to build up a vapor concentration that is dangerous — it needs spilled mercury in a closed warm room sitting a long time with little circulation to get an equilibrium vapor pressure with potential toxicity — even releasing the mercury vapor in a fluorescent bulb only makes the air around it moderately toxic for a few minutes.
Methyl mercury is a very bad actor — produced by bacteria, toxic enough to kill you if a single drop gets on your skin, and the cyanic variants are just as bad. Mercury has a rather long half life in the body, concentrating in fatty tissue in things like the liver. It acts among other ways as an oxidant, damaging cellular DNA. The body doesn’t like heavy metals, and mercury probably beats out lead as being a heavy metal it doesn’t like. You can read about mercury objectively here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning
One of the problems with mercury is that it does not remain uniformly diluted at harmless concentrations. Once aerosolized from e.g. the burning of coal, it falls as rain into waterways, is transformed by bacteria into methyl mercury and related organic forms, is eaten by the things that eat the bacteria and starts making its way up the food chain, concentrating as it goes. In particular, it concentrates in top of the food chain fish. As a fisherman, I totally appreciate that because nearly any large fish I fish for has measurable concentration of mercury in its flesh.
This too isn’t uniform. In Eastern NC they used to make paper. Paper mills used liquid mercury to electrolyze salt into chlorine to bleach the paper. One mill in particular went out of business — they just went bankrupt and the owners walked away, leaving the whole thing to moulder including the mercury pits. Forty years passed, and the mercury vats corroded through, and tons of mercury literally poured out onto the swampy ground. When this was finally discovered — we’re talking rural and stuck out on a back road where nobody ever went but occasional deer hunters — the ground near the plant was so saturated that mercury would ooze up out of the mud when investigators walked towards the buildings.
Mercury in contact with ground = active source of methyl mercury operating over years, with the methyl mercury leaching into groundwater and down into the nearby (IIRC) Neuse River and thence down to the NC sounds and the sea. Predators like catfish and bass taken near the plant were horribly toxic and probably did kill a lot of people (decades later) with cancer and various linked diseases and disorders — it doesn’t act quickly but it acts; elevated levels of mercury were evident in fish sampled all the way down to and out in the ocean. It took years and lots of state money to clean it up (because the original owners were all dead and the heirs didn’t even know they had a problem and had no money anyway).
Another place where the problem is evident is the Great Lakes. Visit Michigan’s DNR website and look over it’s recommendations on eating fish taken from the Great Lakes — no more than one meal of fish a month (and none for pregnant women) because the fish are so damn toxic with cumulated mercury and PCBs. Certain fish (e.g. catfish) they suggest not eating at all. Certain places (e.g. Saginaw Bay) those of us who sometimes fished there knew better than to keep fish — Saginaw is surrounded by industries and has a far higher concentration of mercury and PCBs than the average, even for the Great Lakes. They are trying to clean them up, but it takes decades of regulation and elimination of new sources to drop the concentrations to where things get better, and it will probably be 2100 before fish taken there are anything close to safe to eat in quantity.
Mercury will, given enough time, flush out even of the oceans — methyl mercury from the mercury we are ADDING to the ocean every year will enter the food chain and eventually make its way to the bottom to build up in the rain of silt that is eventually subducted and a few hundred million years from now reforged into rock. There are doubtless natural sources — leaching out of mercury ores (cinnabar) in rivers and the like — but we (humans) are by far the biggest source of mercury, and we do not distribute that mercury at all evenly and the biosphere concentrates that which we do produce. The mercury vapor given off by the ocean is probably harmless. The biologically active mercury in the oceans is definitely not harmless. The mercury we produce eventually becomes biologically active and increases the concentration of non-harmless mercury to actively dangerous levels, generally in specific spatial locations but also in particular species that appear particularly susceptible (e.g. swordfish) in the ocean.
Mercury, in addition to be a teratogen (causing birth defects), toxin (poisonous enough to kill you directly), carcinogen (as a DNA-damaging oxidative agent readily taken up and stored in tissue), has a pronounced CNS effect — it crosses the blood brain barrier and causes damage to nervous tissue. It is mad as a hatter to oppose reasonable efforts to reduce the levels of mercury in the environment, or try to claim that the mercury that is there is harmless and that we didn’t put a lot of it there right where it is most dangerous. Dissenters are invited to take their pregnant wives and visit sunny Michigan for a Saginaw Fish Fry.
Well, no, I suppose I’m kidding — it really isn’t funny, and I wouldn’t wish birth defects on anyone for the sin of disagreeing or being wrong about something, but there really is a rather large amount of science and experience behind this and sometimes even the overdemonized EPA gets things right. Indeed, overall I rather think it is a good thing, because we made a bloody mess out of our waterways and air quality before it came along, and a lot of what it does anyone with common sense would want done. Don’t throw the many babies it provides out with the bathwater of misdirected efforts treating CO_2 as a “pollutant”.
Mercury is many things, but one thing it isn’t is equivalent to CO_2 in toxicity or long term capacity to cause harm.
rgb

Nick in Vancouver says:
March 31, 2012 at 7:07 am
Clearly the EPA needs to ban China, oh wait we’ve “outsourced” all our manufacturing there what will we do?
No worries, Nick. I agree a top EPA priority should be a total ban of China. As to our outsourced manufacturing there, I say it goes the same way as the 40% of our electrical generation President Zero is on the way to bankrupting. When the sh*t really hits the fan, we can all riot our fannies off — that’s if disease and starvation hasn’t already taken us out.

@ur momisugly Bob W in NC :& kadaka (KD Knoebel)
I may be too cynical, but the circumstances are just too coincidental for me to ignore.
We essentially outlawed incandescent bulbs. We did this to save energy. Ok, I was against that but I understand the thought…. sort of. But, we also essentially established the CFL’s as the default bulb to replace them with. But, we did this knowing full well LEDs were right on the heels of CFL’s as being marketable with even better energy savings. We rushed the legislation to kill U.S. production and to endorse CFLs. The CFLs are simply an issue the lunatics can put in their back pocket.
Without a doubt, in a few years, there’s going to be an upwelling, a crying and gnashing of teeth because ground levels of mercury will be seen as increasing. And it will be an emergency and we’ll be prodded to do something extreme, and it will harm a successful industry in the U.S.
If WUWT is still around, we’ll show them these wonderful charts and graphs and data provided by Willis and others. And, they’ll ignore this and continue to show the rise in ground level mercury. And then we’ll lose another industry and likely a liberty or two. Next, they’ll come up with some other great idea using lead or some such for a product we don’t need but will adopt. Rinse and repeat as necessary until all forms of capitalism and liberties(yes, that’s redundant) are extinguished from this great land.
Prolly the next great scare…. after water scarcity, will be the radioactive particles of the REE found in our e-waste or some such madness.

The WSJ has an article by Liam Denning that says this rule applies to “new” plants. Further, he writes “Except the market got there first. Regardless of the EPA proposal, it makes no sense to build a new coal-fired plant anyway.”
Then there are numbers ($ & %). The last two paragraphs are interesting. Lots of gas. Price goes down. Price of coal goes down. Gas price already low – can it go lower? All this makes the “futures” prices hard to settle on and thus, planning for new construction of electrical generation difficult.