The EPA's Mercurial Madness

Great job Willis. The last two posts on mercury really need to be published. The results are enough to stop EPA cold, if it were possible.
But, alas, I agree with Louis. The EPA objective is not pollution control or saving lives. The EPA objective is to regulate American industry and energy enough to drive us bankrupt and into the tyranny of socialism and/or communism. EPA is all about the leftist agenda of gaining power and tax money on the road to socialism.

There is still a bigger point. The emissions of natural mercury are mostly harmless. The common forms found in nature (soil, trees, coal) are easily processed by humans.
Power plant emissions include the natural forms, not the toxic of methyl mercury form.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/26/shutting-down-power-plants-imaginary-benefits-extensive-harm/

Larry in Texas said @ur momisugly March 31, 2012 at 10:33 pm

The Pompous Git says:
March 31, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Um, Pompous, before you jump to conclusions about Bonaparte and being “poisoned by his physician,” read these articles:
http://www.nature.com/nrgastro/journal/v4/n1/full/ncpgasthep0684.html#B5
http://www.livescience.com/2292-napoleon-death-arsenic-poisoning-ruled.html

Not much jumping; Boney’s death has always been controversial. Here’s the analysis from Napoleon’s Death: New Findings From His Autopsy Ribon Ari , MD and Former Assoc. Professor and Chief of Allergy-Immunology at NY Medical College.

“The stomach was perforated through and through in the center…the aperture closed by the adhesion of the liver. The stomach was filled with a considerable quantity of substances of a color resembling the sediment of coffee which exhaled an infectious odor.” (This is processed blood from a severe irritation with hemorrhage caused by an enormous dose of Calomel, a laxative used at that time.) It did not require medical knowledge, just common sense, not to give a sick patient, who had vomited repeatedly and had loose bowel movements, an increase in the accepted dose of one grain of Calomel, to a dose ten times that amount. Napoleon’s valet, Louis Marchand, knew better when he refused to give the Calomel to him but Dr. Arnott won and a moribund Napoleon got his last dose of gross medical error. Every historian writes that this enormous dose of Calomel was given by the British Dr. Arnott unintentionally. Or was it?

I suspect we will never know what was truly the final cause of Napoleon’s death, but claomel almost certainly played a role.

Heystoopidone says:
March 31, 2012 at 6:34 pm
Now let me check, according to peer reviewed science papers :
“Estimates show that 20% of global mercury emissions are from natural emissions, 40% from global re-cycling of previous anthropogenic activity, and 40% from current anthropogenic25 emissions 26. As shown in Table 4, North America contributed approximately 11% of the total global anthropogenic mercury emissions in 1995.”
——————————————————
I am reluctant to place too much credence on a paper that claims that “estimates show” something. Estimates don’t “show” anything. This raises the same junk science red flag as papers that describe model outputs as “experiments”.

To DocMartyn:
Doc, there are several sinks for mercury, mainly at the bottom of water bodies. But mercury is nevertheless still in steady state in the oceans. No matter what we do, the combination of natural emissions above and below the sea, combined with the huge amounts circulating in the oceans, will ensure that the oceans will always have about the same amounts of mercury as they currently have.
Fish with the largest amounts of mercury are the large ocean going fish which bioaccumulate mercury. Blue fin tuna, for example, can have roughly 100 times the mercury content of salmon or flounder per ounce of meat. These levels are higher than in freshwater fish. These levels will barely change when emissions of humans are reduced.
Of course, at a high enough level, we all know that mercury is a neurotoxin, but that isn’t the issue. To agree with your point — if people eat too much top of the line pelagic predators, they can get neurotoxic effects, like confusion and hair loss — but reducing manmade emissions won’t affect methyl mercury levels in bluefin tuna, or marlin, or large swordfish. Only eating less of these top of the line predatory fish will reduce that risk.
The issue is whether mercury causes neurotoxic effects at current levels in the atmosphere, and whether the reduction of 30 to 35 tons from US coal fired power plants (in a pool of about 7,000 tons per year total emissions) has any appreciable beneficial effect on people.
EPA has concluded that this reduction has only one beneficial effect that they can identify and measure, supposing that their understanding of mercury’s effects are correct. That effect is on the IQ of children still in the womb when their mothers eat fish. EPA concluded that the reduction in mercury that they are requiring will cause the IQ of 240,000 children to increase by an aggregate of 511 IQ points across the country, or 2/1000 of an IQ point per child. Assuming that this is a statistically significant result, it is so tiny to be unnoticeable. EPA calculates that this benefit is worth between $500 K and $6 million, based upon improved lifetime earning from the total nationwide increase of 511 IQ points.
In my first post, at 7:47 AM on March 31, I gave a link to the EPA document that says this, and pointed out the pages and tables to look at. Please read that, so you will know that I haven’t stretched anything or ignored anything — I’m reporting to you what EPA itself says.
To summarize: as with CO2, the issue isn’t whether at some substantially higher level mercury wouldn’t poison people and animals. We already know that, as we know that CO2 levels of, say, 3,000 ppm would have substantial temperature and other effects on the earth that would be far more minor at, say, the 600 ppm we will surely reach.
It is the same with mercury. Because mercury (as an element, that cannot be destroyed) is omnipresent in the environment, and because anyone who eats fish or scallops or shrimp or clams, etc., is exposed to mercury, humans over the eons have gotten used to having small amounts of mercury in our bodies, with no harm. The amount contributed to the global pool of mercury from US power plants is miniscule, and EPA has rightly concluded in their Regulatory Impact Analysis that they can find only one tiny benefit from the reduction. We can’t mandate the elimination of mercury from the environment, and there is no appreciable benefit from reducing the tiny amounts that the US puts into the atmosphere. But there are large costs which will decrease incomes and increase unemployment.

DocMartyn says:
March 31, 2012 at 1:30 pm
(Many things well worth listening to…)
Exactly.
Also:
The addition of 40 tons of mercury in twisty lightbulb is still peanuts compared with industrial processes still apparently run by the Homer Simpsons of American industry who are richly deserving of attention from the EPA.
Also true. Homer Simpsons past, present, and probably future. For example, there is the mercury dumped into the waterways of California during the gold rush. Rather enormous amounts of elemental mercury were used to pull gold out of gold-bearing rock. In addition to damaging the brains of the humans that participated, sooner or later nearly all of that mercury ended up on the bottom of rivers in direct contact with the surrounding biosphere. This problem continues today:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28596948/ns/world_news-world_environment/t/mercury-gold-mining-poses-toxic-threat/
At 1000 tons (or so) a year, it is the second largest source of mercury being dumped into the environment (behind the burning of fossil fuels). It causes very significant local contamination of gold mining sites all over the world (many of them run by wildcat prospectors who are e.g. going into the rainforest, digging up a patch of it, running large parts of the surface dirt and rock (known to contain gold) through the amalgam process, and in the process gradually boiling the mercury into the atmosphere and rinsing it into the waterways. Paper mills have similar problems (unless they are built to exacting standards).
Mercury is one of those substances for which there is no “safe” level. Mercury in the body — even a teensy bit — can be the proximate cause of cancer through well-verified chemical pathways, so it is just a crapshoot. Sure, small levels lead to a small risk, and we cannot eliminate that risk entirely because mercury is present throughout the environment at low levels naturally, but it is hardly unreasonable to want to lower that risk as much as possible.
Regarding the mercury vapor observed coming off of the ocean from a direction without anthropogenic sources — note well that does not in any way prove that the mercury involved with not originally anthropogenic in origin. We burn coal. Mercury vapor moves into the atmosphere, where it gradually settles out in e.g. soot and particulates and washes out in rain, with a lot of it ending up in waterways or the ocean. In the ocean, it is picked up in the food chain and/or concentrated in layers of water at certain temperatures.
In either case, simple fluctuations in water currents carrying mercury could cause it to rise to the surface at certain times of the day and be carried into the atmosphere along with water vapor. E.g. when it warms, the partial pressure rises, if the state of the currents involved is right. Or it could be released as a side effect of photosynthesis from algae that have taken it up. It isn’t that difficult to come up with hypotheses to explain how mercury could come to be released in bursts and non-uniformly from the ocean, and observing those fluctuations in no way proves that some fraction of the mercury in question isn’t anthropogenic — indeed, it almost certain is, the only question being what fraction.
To whoever asserted that there is “3 x the lethal dose” of mercury released into a room after a CF lightbulb breaks, thank you for that. I didn’t realize that I was dead several times over, but it does explain a lot. Or perhaps you meant “an entirely sublethal dose, unless you seal the room and sit in it, breathing, far longer than the oxygen in the room would last”. I’m not saying breaking CF lightbulbs is a great thing to do, but in a reasonably ventilated environment it is certainly not “lethal”
To people who are making the argument that oily fish is good for you, mercury or not, the correct argument is that oily fish is good for you, in particular good for your heart. Heart disease being rampant, the benefit from eating fish instead of beef and pork is pretty pronounced. Mercury is bad for you, but it takes a long time to kill you unless you are unlucky and get cancer from it sooner rather than later — death from cancer being a rather discrete event — and the overall risk from the mercury is smaller than the benefit from the fish, especially if you are old and may not live long enough to experience the worst of the effects of the mercury anyway. Also, eating fish occasionally further minimizes the risk because mercury does have a half-life in the human body — perhaps DocMartyn can enlighten us as to what it is — so that one can keep levels down by giving it time to be eliminated between meals.
However, who seriously wants to argue that the same oily fish without the mercury isn’t better for you? This isn’t like bacteria — I’m happy to believe that eating fish lightly contaminated with various bacteria is good for you, keeping one’s immune system strong and all of that, just like catching the rare cold keeps your immune system strong and helps prevent cancer — there is no plausible benefit to having mercury or lead in your system, only risk.
There is a reasonable amount of evidence in the form of differential cancer and chronic disease rates that living in a chemically toxic environment reduces life expectancy. In general it is not possible (or certainly is not easy) to fractionate that risk, in part because it is probably nonlinear and multifactorial, so that a moderate overexposure to mercury in a person whose environment is otherwise chemically neutral or beneficial may have less effect than “normal” exposure in a person whose system is already stressed by a surplus of lead. History is replete with examples of entire civilizations that poisoned themselves with (for example) lead plumbing (lead being “Plumbum”, the Romans come to mind), or as already noted Beethoven, thought to have poisoned himself through his habit of licking the point of his lead pencil (made in those days with actual lead) while composing. At one point in time we were making a pretty good effort at doing so by using leaded gasoline.
Personally I think it is absolute peachy of the EPA to do things like ban leaded gasoline and require coal burning plants to scrub soot and mercury and sulphur out of their exhaust — I don’t care if soot is harmless, it is ugly, I don’t consider any avoidable large scale chronic addition of mercury to the environment to be desirable, and while sulphur itself is ubiquitous and beneficial, sulfphur dioxide in air rains down as acid and causes observable damage. Sure, nitrous oxide is also produced and rains down as acid, but nitrates are eventually beneficial and indeed, the food chain relies on nitric acid produced by lightning to fertilize plants.
I can hardly do better than to conclude with:
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/family_fish_166020_7.pdf
Personally, I used to just fish like hell the two weeks I spent on Huron every summer and eat anything I caught (except catfish — bottom dwelling and fatty, no safe consumption limit amount in spite of the fact that I caught some big old cats over the years) and rely on Alpha Lipoic Acid (antioxidant and chelating agent) to help protect against the mercury and PCBs, just as I do for sashimi grade tuna and wild caught salmon now. The mercury is in any event in the very omega-3 fatty acids that are the primary benefit of eating oily fish, so the best one can do is try to protect against the risk while still preserving the benefit.
Still, because I fish — a lot, and in precisely those estuaries on the Carolina coast where anthropogenic mercury is concentrated — and love to eat those top of the food chain fish, I would love for the human race to ameliorate the rate at which we contribute to the baseline concentration of mercury in those estuaries. However, it is absolutely true that mercury from coal burning plants is a tiny fraction of the mercury levels there. A very recent study by some UNC people working at their marine lab (down the road a few miles from Duke’s where I teach in the summer) concluded that by far the greatest source of estuarine mercury was riverine input, basically mercury washing down the Cape Fear or Neuse rivers. A substantial amount of that mercury is very likely anthropogenic in origin, but not from burning things — leftover elemental mercury sitting on riverbeds left over from North Carolina’s gold rush (we were once upon a time the largest gold producer in the United States) and from the paper mills that were built to use the state’s ample timber resources down east.
The paper I looked at does suggest that there are sinks for mercury as well as sources — given time, mercury does clear out of a system — but the current levels are a dynamic balance between sources and sinks. It appears that baseline mercury levels in NC’s estuaries have actually been decreasing over the last 40 years, probably because of the disappearance of the paper mills and much tighter regulations on the ones that are still in operation, but even at low concentrations (order of ten parts per trillion) the food chain concentrates the mercury to parts per million and higher, in the worst biologically active form.
Which leads me by a tortuous route back to my original point. Yes, a cost-benefit analysis is important. There is no safe level of mercury, but there is a point of diminishing returns in efforts to control it. However, people will always choose to minimize or ignore the risks if those risks are displaced by years or decades and submerged into a morass of other contributing processes, which is how so very many people manage to smoke cigarettes because they will only probably or possibly kill them or cause them misery in the future. Tightly regulating the use of mercury in the making of paper and bleach and in other industrial applications is a no-brainer. Regulating mercury emissions from coal plants may or may not be worth the cost, but overall I personally would rather be safe(r) than sorry, and scrubbing coal stack output seems advised anyway just to keep the air generically “clean”.
rgb

DocMartyn says:
March 31, 2012 at 1:30 pm
…..The fact that the EPA/Obama administration has been increasing the levels of mercury in the environment due to its light-bulb strategy is a disgrace, Indeed, the administration is costing our future selves hundreds of billions in clean-up costs.
_____________________________________
One of the interesting points in the EPA’s National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutant Emissions From Coal-and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units…FINAL RULING
Was the inclusion of this paragraph on the comments.

…..The EPA received over 900,000 comments…. The comments express concerns about the presence of Hg in the environment and the effect it has on human health, concerns about the costs of the rule, how challenging it may be for some sources to comply and questions about the impact it may have on this country’s electricity supply and economy. Many comments provided additional information and data that have enriched the factual record and enabled EPA to finalize a rule that fulfills the mandate of the CAA while providing flexibility and compliance options to affected sources–options that make the rule less costly and compliance more readily manageable…. http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=EPA-HQ-OAR-2011-0044-5758

Nothing is said about whether those comments were about the new mercury-containing light bulbs or mercury coal. Heck until I read this article and the final ruling I only knew about the mercury in the light bulbs because activists were throwing a fit about it a few years ago. After a bit of looking it would seem mercury from new sources in the USA is a non-problem. That is why the twisty light bulbs would make a “major impact”
My WAG is that when the mercury-containing light bulbs outrage hit a couple years ago the EPA countered with the largest source of Mercury was coal powered plants from their 1997 Report to Congress. Of course nothing was said about the fact that all the big sources had already been taken care of. 75% of the industrial demand for mercury having declined between l988- l996 and the remaining biggie, the amount from municipal and medical waste incineration was expected to decline at least 90 percent from 1995 levels by 2000. In other words all the low hanging fruit had been taken care of already.
Googling: new mercury-containing light bulbs returns About 21,500,000 results so that is where the concern was.
Googling mercury coal returns about 18,400,000 results with the first one being from the EPA. mercury coal EPA returns about 2,680,000 results and mercury coal 2011 returns About 8,390,000 results. Like I said I think this was “miss-direction”

Notice: March 2011
EPA has proposed standards to limit mercury, acid gases and other toxic pollution from power plants. This rule will replace the court-vacated Clean Air Mercury Rule.
http://www.epa.gov/mercuryrule/

And then:

Mercury [Last Updated on Tuesday February 07, 2012]
Mercury is a naturally occurring element that is present throughout the environment. Human activity can release some of that mercury into the air, water and soil. In the U.S., coal-fired power plants are the biggest source of mercury emissions to the air. The EPA is working to reduce the amount of mercury in the environment. http://cfpub.epa.gov/schools/top_sub.cfm?t_id=41&s_id=30

Notice how that is different in tone from this report of 1997.
Mercury Study Report to Congress: Overview published in 1997

Mercury Control Technologies
Mercury is widely used in industry because of its diverse properties and serves as a process or product ingredient in several industrial sectors, however, industrial demand for mercury has declined by about 75 percent between l988 and l996, due largely to the elimination of mercury additives in paints and pesticides and the reduction of mercury in batteries. Most of the emissions of mercury are produced when waste or fuel containing mercury is burned. The U.S. EPA has already finalized emission limits for municipal waste combustors and medical waste incinerators. As a result, by the year 2000, emissions from these categories will decline at least 90 percent from 1995 levels.</b. In addition, mercury emission limits have been proposed for hazardous waste incinerators.
The largest remaining identified source of mercury emissions are coal-fired utility boilers. Although a number of mercury control technologies are being evaluated for utility boilers, most are still in the research stages, making it difficult to predict final cost-effectiveness as well as the time required to scale-up and commercialize the technologies. Because the chemical species of mercury emitted from boilers varies from plant to plant, there is no single control technology that removes all forms of mercury. There remains a wide variation in the end costs of control measures for utilities and the possible impact of such costs on utilities. Preliminary estimates of national control costs for utility boilers (based on pilot scale data) are in the billions of dollars per year. Ongoing research, as well as research needs related to mercury controls for utilities, are described in the document…. http://www.epa.gov/mercury/reportover.htm

It would help your case if you gave hospital figures for your country that show whether anyone ever goes to hospital with mercury poisoning; or whether urban myths have arisen from the unusual Minimata episode where a certain couple of chemical forms of mercury did the damage.
Personally, as a chemist, I’ve handled kilos of mercury and I am unaware of any damage to my health.
Precisely. And you might not be for ten or twenty more years, and the cancer that you get might or might not come with a label on it saying “caused by DNA damage due to mercury”.
As a chemist, you know the difference between poisoning — active and acute damage caused by ingesting a harmful substance — and the damage done by carcinogens and long acting toxins. People smoke for years and aren’t acutely poisoned by the tobacco smoke — or rather, they are, but at sublethal levels — but there is no doubt whatsoever that in the long run there is an enormous increase in the morbidity and mortality of smokers compared to the general population, one with considerable nonlinear synergy with secondary and tertiary toxins and carcinogens and risk factors.
Mercury (unlike zinc, copper, iron) is not a nutrient. The body makes no beneficial use of mercury whatsoever. Even if certain mercury-containing medicines are now or ever were beneficial as a chemotherapeutic agent (to treat e.g. syphilis or other illnesses) compared to nothing at all, the levels of mercury in the diet are utterly inadequate to receive any benefit of this sort under any circumstances, and as a chemist surely you can understand the reaction pathways where biologically active mercury damages DNA and interferes with metabolism as well as the pathways whereby relatively harmless mercury metal is converted to the toxic, biologically active forms (and vice versa — it is a two way street).
As for mercury poisoning, there are IDC-9 and 10 codes for mercury poisoning — of course it happens. Here is just one CDC report of a case:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001652.htm
Cases like this were no doubt far more prevalent back when mercury barometers where commonplace, but note at the bottom of the article that acute mercury poisoning symptoms are mild and non-specific and hence easy to miss or misdiagnose. One has to do a heavy metal toxicology screen to positively determine that is what is going on, and my wife and hospitals don’t order that for every patient who comes through the door with chronic fatigue syndrome or flulike symptoms. If diagnosed, there are chelating therapies for acute mercury poisoning. But that is not what this discussion is about! It is about the far more difficult to pin down health risks of chronic, low grade exposure to mercury. There one must rely on a mix of nearly anecdotal histories of human exposure and long term sequellae, and animal studies that clearly delimit the probable (and substantial) risks of various levels of chronic exposure.
Finally, as a chemist I am guessing that you used reasonable precautions when working with mercury, just as you would/did working with any other toxic or potentially harmful substance. I very much doubt that you heated it to boiling in the open air of a closed room because that would be stupid (or heated it to boiling at all outside of a hood, if then). Gold miners seeking to recover gold from amalgam in the rain forests of Brazil or Indonesia have no idea of the risks and have no idea of how to avoid them. Acute mercury poisoning is far from unknown there, and it will be decades before the differential health effects fully resolve from the chronic exposure and toxification of the environment.
Mercury is a dangerous, useful, element. As cinnabar, it is pretty. As fulminate of mercury, it is a foundation of modern guns and warfare. As any of a variety of mercury-containing compounds, it is an antiseptic. As yet another alloy, it was a useful and inexpensive way of repairing decay-damaged teeth. It helps one extract gold from native rock without having to melt it all and fractionate the resulting mess. It is a convenient material for electrolyzing NaCL into sodium and chlorine, so that the two components can be separately used for a variety of useful purposes (such as making bleach).
In the body, though, mercury is strictly at best neutral, and in general has a gradually increasing non-zero risk of negative sequellae that often occurs as quantum events in human life — getting cancer or not getting cancer — where some fraction of the occurring cancers are almost certainly caused by mercury, only we can never tell which ones.
Just as lead is a similarly useful but dangerous metal (but not for use in paint, gasoline, or the household plumbing), it seems entirely reasonable to want to do our best to avoid creating or aggravating concentrations of mercury that our best science suggests will result in increased human misery and suffering (quite possibly our own). Some of the measures used to control it are obvious; others are debatable (and I am not suggesting that this debate not occur or that the EPA is correct in their recent action). But it is not reasonable to enter the debate with the assertion that mercury is not toxic or dangerous when we know perfectly well that neither of these is true. Even Willis is asserting that the problem isn’t “is mercury a good or bad thing in the environment” — if we could wave a magic wand and eliminate it entirely from the biosphere of course we would. It is “does the degree of amelioration of the threats of mercury, given our current best knowledge of the dangers, brought about by scrubbing coal plant exhaust at very high expense, justify that expense”.
I think his argument is strong that it does not, but it is not yet (to me) persuasive because I simply don’t have that good a feel for the global numbers involved and do not agree that just the observation that there is a “lot” of mercury vapor observed above the oceans (where the mercury content of the oceans is not even parts per trillion, so we’re still not talking a high concentration) is relevant to the problem of the non-uniform deposition of mercury downwind of smokestacks, nor to the problem of its accumulation as bioactive mercury in the waterways those stacks precipitate it out into. It might be utterly irrelevant as far as average concentration in the air is concerned and yet still be a serious problem in the end-stage estuaries at the bottom of a biological filtration and concentration process. I’m not saying that it is, I’m saying that I don’t think that he has by any means provided proof that it is not, especially over decadal or century long time scales. Just a little bit more per year adds up to not that little a bit more over time, and it’s not like that mercury goes away in the meantime. At the very least one has to carefully study the rates at which natural processes do pull out mercury and figure out the global related rates problem that leads to a given equilibrium.
This is not “just” to argue with Willis, BTW — I have the greatest respect for him even where we sometimes disagree — it is to insist that before we pillory the EPA for being bad scientists or economists, we have to pretty much redo the job we presume that they should have done, which involves months of work for somebody who knows what they are doing, even with the Internet and access to all the (paywalled or not) journals. More likely months of work for a team of scientists, engineers, physicians, economists. Willis has made an entirely valid point worthy of discussion in that process — is the measure cost-beneficial when total risk is accurately assessed? There are good reasons to think it is not. But there are also reasons to think that it might be, and am playing the Devil’s Advocate here because I think there is a tendency to minimize the risks because of a crossover on-list that interprets the measure as yet another way to backhandedly control CO_2 emissions. Maybe yes, maybe no, but not convincingly portrayed either way.
I know people who work at the EPA (which is just down the road 15 miles or so away) and they Are Not Stupid. Just FYI. Nor are they politically left wing to a human. They care about exactly the same things you are I might care about. If they are zealous about their job, it is somewhat justified, because businesses do make a mess of things, often, given a chance.
rgb

March 31, 2012 at 3:30 pm
Dear Florian:
Don’t be naive. This EPA will propose greenhouse gas rules on existing power plants next. Then all hell will break loose when America gets the bill for that one.
_______________________________
And on top of that is the coming bill from the increase in food costs from the “Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010” When we are faced with rampant hunger because of the regulatory, financial, trade and foreign policies of the past 100 or so years, those of us who have been crying from the roof tops for people to take an interest in what really sustains them may be very well justified in saying, “Let them eat grass.” Remember, No Farmers, No Food.
You can then add in Bernanke doubling the US money supply in just four months. That leads to inflation of prices while deflating wages. Hyper-inflation is the terminal stage of any fiat currency.

Hyperinflation in the USA, May 2010

[snipped: I’m sorry, Gail, but please don’t use a thread about mercury and the EPA to push your ideas about the US monetary system. They may be correct, but they are wildly off-topic. Thanks, -w.]