EPA mercury rules for electricity generating units are based on false science and economics
Guest post by Craig Rucker
The Environmental Protection Agency claims its “final proposed” Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) rules will eliminate toxic pollution from electrical generating units, bring up to $140 billion in annual health benefits, and prevent thousands of premature deaths yearly – all for “only” $11 billion a year in compliance costs.
This may be true in the virtual reality of EPA computer models, linear extrapolations, cherry-picked health studies and statistics, government press releases and agency-generated public comments. However, in the real world inhabited by families, employers and other energy users, the new rules will bring few benefits, but will impose extensive costs that the agency chose to minimize or ignore in its analysis.
Emissions of mercury and other air toxics from power plants have been declining steadily for decades, as older generating units have been replaced with more efficient, less polluting systems or retrofitted with better pollution control technologies. While a few older plants still violate EPA’s draconian proposed rules – the new rules are not based on credible scientific and epidemiological studies.
As independent natural scientist Dr. Willie Soon and CFACT policy advisor Paul Driessen pointed out in their WallStreetJournal and Investor’sBusinessDaily articles, and in Dr. Soon’s 85-page critique of EPA’s draft rules, US power plants account for only 0.5% of the mercury in US air. Thus, even if EPA’s new rules eventually do eliminate 90% of mercury from power plant emission streams, that’s still only 90% of 0.5% – ie, almost zero benefit. The rest of the mercury in US air comes from natural and foreign sources, such as forest fires, Chinese power plants and the cremation of human remains (from tooth fillings that contain mercury and silver).
EPA fails to recognize that mercury is abundant in the earth’s crust. It is absorbed by trees through their roots – and released into the atmosphere when the trees are burned in forest fires, fireplaces and wood-burning stoves. In fact, US forest fires annually emit as much mercury as all US coal-burning electrical power plants. Mercury and other “pollutants” are also released by geysers, volcanoes and subsea vents, which tap directly into subsurface rock formations containing these substances.
The agency compounds these errors by claiming fish contain dangerous levels of mercury that threatens the health and mental acuity of babies and children. In making this claim, the agency commits four more grievous errors. First, it ignores the fact that selenium in fish tissue is strongly attracted to mercury molecules and thus protects people against buildups of methylmercury, mercury’s more toxic form.
Second, EPA based its toxicity claims on a study of Faroe Islanders, who eat few fruits and vegetables, but feast on pilot whale meat and blubber that is high in mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) – but very low in selenium. Third, it ignored a 17-year Seychelles Islands evaluation, which found “no measurable cognitive or behavioral effects” in children who eat five to twelve servings of fish per week.
Fourth, it used computer models to generate linear extrapolations from known or assumed toxic levels down to much lower levels. Not only is this method contrary to sound science and epidemiology; it resulted in politicized “safety” levels that are twice as restrictive as Canadian and World Health Organization mercury standards, three times more restrictive than US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and four times tougher than US Food and Drug Administration recommendations. No wonder the Centers for Disease Control says blood mercury levels in US women and children are already well below excessively “safe” levels set by EPA.
Simply put, EPA grossly exaggerated the health benefits of its proposed mercury rules – and then claimed additional mercury benefits based on double counting of reductions in particulate matter. It also ignored the adverse effects that its rules will inflict. Not only is EPA’s anti-mercury campaign scaring mothers and children into not eating nutritious fish that is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids. It is also raising electricity heating, air conditioning and food costs, impairing electrical reliability, costing jobs, and thereby harming the health and welfare of countless Americans.
Energy analyst Roger Bezdek has calculated that utilities will have to spend $130 billion to retrofit older plants – and another $30 billion a year to operate, maintain and power the energy-intensive pollution control equipment they will be forced to install. Moreover, under its MACT rules, EPA intends to micromanage every aspect of power plant operations. It will now cite companies for violations even if emissions fully comply with air quality standards, if operators merely deviate from new agency “work practice standards” and “operational guidelines,” even under unusual weather conditions or equipment malfunctions that are beyond the operators’ control.
While it is true that older power plants are more significant sources of toxic air emissions, those plants are mostly in key manufacturing states that burn coal to generate 48-98% of their electricity. Many utility companies cannot justify those huge costs – and thus plan to close dozens of units, representing tens of thousands of megawatts – enough to electrify tens of millions of homes and small businesses. Illinois alone will lose nearly 3,500 MW of reliable, affordable, baseload electricity – with little to replace it.
Electricity consumers could pay at least 20% more in many states within a few years. According to the Chicago Tribune, Illinois families and businesses will pay 40-60% more. That will severely affect business investment, production and hiring – and family plans to repair cars and homes, save for college and retirement, take vacations, or have health physicals or surgery.
Chicago public schools will have to pay an additional $2.7 million annually for electricity by 2014, says the Tribune. Hospitals, factories and other major electricity users will also be hard hit. Many poor and minority families will find it increasingly hard to afford proper heating and air conditioning. Further job losses and economic stress will lead to further reductions in living standards and nutrition, more foreclosures and homelessness, and additional drug, alcohol, spousal and child abuse.
The very reliability of America’s electricity grid could be at risk, if multiple power plants shut down. Brownouts, blackouts and power interruptions will affect factory production lines, hospital, school, farm and office operations, employment, and the quality of food, products and services.
The impact on people’s health and welfare is patently obvious. But EPA considered none of this.
EPA insists there was strong public support for its rules. However, its rules were clearly based on false, biased or even fraudulent information. Furthermore, EPA itself generated much of that public support.
The agency recruited, guided and financed activist groups that promoted its rulemaking. Over the past decade, it gave nearly $4 billion to the American Lung Association and other advocacy organizations and various “environmental justice” groups, according to a Heritage Foundation study. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and members of her staff also visited historically black and other colleges – giving speeches about “toxic emissions,” providing templates for scare-mongering posters and postcards, and making it easy for students to send pro-rulemaking comments via click-and-submit buttons on websites.
This EPA action does nothing to improve environmental quality or human health. In fact, by advancing President Obama’s goal of shutting down power plants and raising electricity costs, it impairs job creation, economic recovery, and public health and welfare. It is intrusive government at its worst.
It is a massive power grab that threatens to give EPA nearly unfettered power over the electrical power we need to support our livelihoods and living standards.
Congress, states, utility companies, affected industries, school districts and hospitals, and families and citizen groups should immediately take action to postpone the MACT rules’ implementation. Otherwise, their harmful impacts will be felt long and hard in states that depend on coal for their electricity.
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Craig Rucker is CEO of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.
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The problem is the Economic Punishment Agency has morphed from something worthwhile into a self-serving bureaucracy whose only intention is its own preservation and expansion.
Like ‘climate science’, its existence depends on the continued manufacturing of unfounded scare stories.
For those wanting to know more about mercury, this might help:
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=mercury%20poisoning%20deaths%20statistics&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CFYQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercuryfacts.org%2FmercuryMyths.cfm&ei=bsb5TubmE4Lb8QPYqPikAQ&usg=AFQjCNFnvqde8aeB57XjABhPrEJcQQDRQQ&cad=rja
The obsession about reducing minute non-dangerous levels of mercury has had a severe negative impact on the health of individuals living in the western world. Almost all environmental and climate science has now become a case of taking a non-story and turning it into a scary story. It is all to do with job perpetuation and comfortable lifestyles and almost nothing to do with science.
As always: The solution to pollution is dilution.
As I recall, the bolded part (mine) is/was a stated goal of the Obama administration, maybe not in as many words.
Mark
So how could you stop the EPA?
Said governments are not simply accepting such recommendations, they are actually pushing the science behind the flawed papers that result in such recommendations. Governments are populated by the very same people generating the flawed papers. Indeed, this is what they want, nay, need: control. The consequences are not of consequence.
Mark
Democracy has gone too far, driven by the maddening idea of “not discriminating minorities” as to allow those totally unfitted to reach positions of decision and power. Thus the most complete menagerie of fools, idiots and sick people are dictating the laws and measures for the rest of the society. This is absolutely insane.
An old spanish proverb reads: “Lo que Natura non da, Salamanca non presta”: “What Nature does not give, Salamanca (the academia) does not lend”
Then, those sadly ungifted, who bravely struggle to attain a position in society ( we must recognize that), in this case getting and keeping a job in government, academia, official agencies,etc. affirm themselves by believing in what the foolest among themselves have concocted, and to avoid any doubts on their proficiency and expertise, establish them as “consensual truths” reinforced by mutual caressing and indulging.
It is funny to observe that their epistemology does not include intuition (their stomachs are too busy digesting trash food or going after the next girl who crosses their field of sight, that it is impossible for them to perceive anything of a higher energetic order) thus their whole intellectual activity is limited to counting and naming, being their favorite method that of statistics, commonly performed by politically convenient “programmed artificial brains”-“super computers”- (their biology did not included such an apparatuses working in the upper part of their bodies).
So the time has arrived to put things on place before it is too late.
What the EPA is doing is part of the long term plan by some whose front-man is Maurice Strong, now living in China.
“Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” -Maurice Strong quoted in the September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine.
http://soldierforliberty.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/maurice-strong-man-behind-agenda-21-part-2/
More can be found on Strong’s background and connections and background to the ideology which is driving this, some links here: http://smashabanana.blogspot.com/2011/12/united-nations-official-maurice-strong.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2507419/posts
What really has to be taken on board here, is these people are serious and in powerful positions and have control of main stream media. To change anything here re the EPA isn’t going to be a walkover..
Until enough people in populations around the world have information about this, the complicity of world governments in this agenda isn’t going to be appreciated. Take OZ for example, people think they can vote in an alternative view and overturn the billions of dollars hand out from OZ to China, but governments have been taken over by those promoting the agenda, it doesn’t make any difference who is voted in, they will be nobbled, indoctrinated.
There’s a video somewhere of Gordon Brown giving a speech in OZ, he mentions ‘new world order’ and derivatives a dozen times in as many minutes – not a phrase he had ever used before his sudden elevation to PM, no record of any such words or ideas in Hansard.
We’re all effectively without governments representing us the ordinary people..
@ur momisugly William says:
December 27, 2011 at 2:48 am
Enough is enough. We live in democracy. Let’s solve this EPA problem.
====================================================
I agree. We should ‘set them free’ of the terrible burden of caring for our welfare.
davidgmills says:
“Things that make economic sense don’t always make health sense.”
—————————————–
It seems like Obama’s one time Health ‘Czar’ disagrees with you.
“You could have protected the wealthy and the well, instead of recognizing that sick people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker, and that any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must – must – redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistribution. Britain, you chose well. … “
Ed_B says:
December 26, 2011 at 7:20 pm
“We are such sissies today..
Didn’t every boomer have a small container of mercury that they would rub on pennies to try to pass them off as dimes?”
First, yes I rubbed mercury on pennies. Wonderful shine.
Second, yes we are a nation of sissies. I’ve often said that if this generation landed at Plymouth Rock, we never would have made it past the seashore. Can you imagine trying to move west in covered wagons? All of the children would have had to wear helmets, knee and elbow pads and gloves to protect them from when they fell out of the wagon – of course they shouldn’t fall out because they would have had to have strapped in to their children’s protective seats. And the filth and germs produced by our mode of transportation, not to mention the methane. The green weanies would have had us all back on boats to the Mother Country, all to live in exquisitely equal squalor and misery, except of course, for our betters like AlGore and government bureaucrats.
The EPA doesn’t do Cost Benefit Analysis.
The EPA does Rigged Justification Analysis.
“Mark T says:
December 27, 2011 at 5:40 am
There is only one motive that EPA has for continuing to ratchet up the already high, impossible bar in connection with industrial activity: to close coal-fired power plants altogether and destroy our economy on some crackpot theory that we have to get rid of coal and that it is somehow better for all of us to freeze or to have our power out.
As I recall, the bolded part (mine) is/was a stated goal of the Obama administration, maybe not in as many words.”
Mark T, your memory is correct, but it was in the context of cap-and-trade/CO2 reduction –
“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” January 2008 Obama quote from interview with SF Chronicle.
Let’s see, shut ’em down because of cap-and-trade/carbon emissions, or shut em down because of mercury emissions. You say toma[y]to, I say toma[h]to. Just as long as we shut ’em down.
Just an aside:
have you noticed hw more and more rules, directives, regulations and laws are being introduced by governments and national entities because ‘this will save xxx lives/premature deaths’?
Never mind that these directives/rules etc are curtailing economic activities,costing huge amounts of money, and in the worst cases affect civil liberties …
Despotism: abuse of power: cruel and arbitrary use of power. There are many other definitions but this will do.
This has got me boiling, so I’ll save the mod’s time & self-snip most of my post.
The EPA demonstrates a compulsive/obsessive disorder — hair-splitting to finer and finer levels, ad infinitum, regardless of the cost/benefit ratio. They don’t know when to stop.
They are out of control, to the point of absurdity.
Found an interesting graph on wikipedia : mercury deposition in a Wyoming glacier ice core.
Notice the spikes caused by larger volcanic eruptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mercury_fremont_ice_core.png
Found in this context:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)#Releases_in_the_environment
I am reminded of this quote from P.J. O’Rourke:
“The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop”
Been waiting for a thread to post t his to.
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff500/fv00459.htm
I was interested by: “The agency recruited, guided and financed activist groups that promoted its rulemaking. Over the past decade, it gave nearly $4 billion to the American Lung Association and other advocacy organizations and various “environmental justice” groups, according to a Heritage Foundation study.” This helps explain to me why the New Brunswick Lung Association is so active in AGW and related matters.
IanM
The agency recruited, guided and financed activist groups that promoted its rulemaking. Over the past decade, it gave nearly $4 billion to the American Lung Association and other advocacy organizations and various “environmental justice” groups, according to a Heritage Foundation study. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and members of her staff also visited historically black and other colleges – giving speeches about “toxic emissions,” providing templates for scare-mongering posters and postcards, and making it easy for students to send pro-rulemaking comments via click-and-submit buttons on websites.
Frankly, I’d be a litle happier if the author had provided a reference or link to that Heritage Foundation study. I’m also not sure what the reference to the historically black and other colleges is intended to convey.
Here is the quote, in context, from the study and illustrates how the EPA is buying support from the ALA:
“As we search for means to cut Washington’s waste, grants like the one to LVEJO should move to the front of the line, where it should have lots of company. According to the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, there are 2,141 federal grant programs with some 109 coming out of the EPA. By the EPA’s own grant database, over the last ten years, the agency has bellied up to the bar and bought drinks for many of its friends at the taxpayers’ expense. Within the past decade, the EPA awarded or continues to have open more than 7,500 grants, totaling $3,847,160,250 to non-profit groups alone.
While some EPA grant recipients like the American Lung Association may seem more palatable than LVEJO, many have shown themselves to be reliable reactionaries for the EPA. The American Lung Association recently came to the agency’s defense, stating:
Polluters and some members of Congress want to interfere with EPA’s ability to protect public health. Most Americans believe that the Clean Air Act needs protecting. We are fighting hard to prevent anyone from weakening or undermining the law or the protective standards the law provides. We are fighting to ensure EPA has the legal authority and necessary funding to continue to protect public health.”
Exactly what kind of nefarious plans by “[p]olluters and some members of Congress” to damage public health is the American Lung Association seeking to thwart? One of their efforts is targeted at defeating a bill that seeks to stop the EPA from doing an end run around Congress and regulating greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide – under the Clean Air Act. Money can’t buy passion like that, but if it could, the 164 EPA grants to various American Lung Association groups totaling over $20,000,000 within the past decade might help.”
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/05/19/epa-dollars-doled-out-to-environmentalist-activist-groups/
RiH008,
“CO2 in concentrations of 5000 ppm in submarines is plausible to have an impact;”
Should I be worried? How long does it take for effects to show up? As a former submariner, I want to know.
Actually it doesn’t matter. One has to be a bit off to volunteer for subs in the first place.
“So how could you stop the EPA?”
Thermo-nuclear devices sounds tempting.
I’ve read somewhere, that due to all of the pollution control devices, for cars driving in the LA basin, their exhaust is cleaner than the air entering at the filtered end.
I wonder how long it will be until the EPA requires power plants to reach this stage of cleanliness?
RiHo08 says:
December 26, 2011 at 2:55 pm
La Miya Casa & A Physicist.
“CO2 does not cause any of what you state as relevant to yourselves and others. Regulating the effluent from coal powered power plants can be argued favorably that it should be done. When CO2 and water vapor, two of the most effective green house gases, although they may play only a small role in climate change, are to be regulated, that is the nonsense. The use of the endangerment finding for regulating greenhouse gases is only a political issue. I repeat, CO2 and water vapor do not cause cancer, bad behavior of your teenager, asthma, whatever…. ”
____________________________________________________________________________
RiHo08,
Merry Christmas and Happy New year.
1. I’m “NULL” not anti/pro CO2 individual, so please first of all put your gun down;
2. I’ve lost 2 of my best friends because of lung cancer, let’s leave it was because of inheritance factor, although they had no relations, so come down please;
3.In power plants and factories, usually there are rules and regulations that are controlling the gas from smoke stacks, nothing to worry about;
4. As I said, in underground railways, locomotives are electrically powered, that is exactly because of CO2 and other harmful smells and elements mixed with the fossil fuels, this cannot be denied. It doesn’t mean CO2 is good/bad;
5. I don’t like politics, I like to talk to find better solutions for where we need, we get medical solutions from snakes poisons;
6. In undergrounds/metros, you can imagine how many people are traveling around the world. We have the same problem in SOME of the greater cities on the streets, we should solve this problem because the leverages and controls on power plants and factories according to law cannot be implemented on individuals and their cars;
7. local climate conditions, like winds, humidity, traffic compression, and geographical situation of the greater cities and the upside down air pollution phenomena, are making troubles for the residents and you know what are the aftermaths, the way that the view is reduced and everything’s colour becomes dark grey. We cannot claim that the so called environment is nothing, then what should we say when the air is clean and sun is visible. This cannot be denied;
8. Did you see anything political or something pro CO2 or anything anti CO2? You are here to discuss about theses things;
9. I cannot believe there are people thinking on CO2 as their own property. The result would be that they do just like foreigners behavior to the earth. CO2 should be discussed, talking about CO2 is not heresy.
MarkW says:
December 27, 2011 at 9:58 am
“I’ve read somewhere, that due to all of the pollution control devices, for cars driving in the LA basin, their exhaust is cleaner than the air entering at the filtered end. I wonder how long it will be until the EPA requires power plants to reach this stage of cleanliness?”
I have already been down this road with EPA on 2 wastewater treatment plants. You see the regulations said anti-degradation which was interpreted as no change in condition- in the one case the water produced by the plant was of higher quality than the river above the discharge and as such that the biological indicators below the plant showed a better condition. The improvement in the river became a violation. The other was an ocean outfall that as can be expected given all the structure associated with it attracted a lot of sea life. A few hundred yards away there was nothing but near lifeless sand habitat. Therefore the ocean outfall had changed the condition and was seen as a violation. I can’t even begin to tell you how much time and aggravation it took to undo this mess.