Surely their hearts are in the right place. A new report from
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “America’s Children and
the Environment,” argues for a cleaner world. Specifically, it
states that children of women with a blood mercury concentration of
5.8 parts per billion “are at some increased risk of adverse health
effects.” That’s about 8 percent of American women of childbearing
age. And that concentration is about 10 times less than the minimum
recommended in the scientific literature. No one has documented
epidemiological evidence for damage at such levels. But, oh well,
what’s wrong with a little caution when we’re concerned about “the
children”?
A lot. The EPA, and everyone else around Washington, knows how
these stories play. They’re used as the excuse to bang Congress
into policies that can hurt and even kill.
Sure enough, a day after the report came out, the Washington
Post filed a story that led with this: “[The report] said
there is a ‘growing concern’ about exposure to mercury by women of
child-bearing age.” Two paragraphs later the policy banging began:
“President Bush has proposed legislation…. [S]ome environmental
groups consider [Bush’s] pace too slow, while some industry groups
consider it too ambitious.” These proposals mandate major
reductions in mercury from coal-fired power plants, the largest
single source in the nation.
To encapsulate this common Washington morality play: “The EPA
cares about children. Mercury is a poison. President Bush has
proposed a phase-out that takes too long, which will kill kids. To
stop this we need legislation, pronto.”
As Gary Gilmore said once (and only once), “let’s do it.” Get
rid of every single molecule of mercury from power plants. Will
anyone find a major effect?
Human activity currently emits 4,000 mega (million) grams of
mercury into the atmosphere. It can float around for a long time —
about as long as a flake of soot from a Chinese power plant — and
with the wind, under proper conditions, can go from Shanghai to
Chicago in a week.
The United States, with about 25 percent of the world’s total
economic activity, should logically emit about 1,000 of these
megagrams. But we only throw out, according to the EPA, 144
megagrams, or 3.6 percent of the world’s total. That’s a pretty
good bang for you mercury buck.
How much of this comes from the combustion of coal in U.S. power
plants? Again, the EPA has a figure: 46.9 megagrams. (Readers who
ask how they can be so precise: They can’t). So all those power
plants are producing about 1 percent of the total human
contribution to the atmosphere.
All of this means that there are plenty of densely populated
places on earth (e.g., China, Japan, Korea) that are exposed to one
heck of a lot more mercury from power production and other economic
activity. Where are the bodies? Where are the sick millions? We
Americans pay our environmental lobby billions of dollars per year
to find them. They aren’t there.
In fact, except for a few, very famous outbreaks of mercury
poisoning, such as the tragedy at Minamata Bay, Japan, caused by
massive industrial dumping beginning in the 1930s, there’s precious
little sickness to be found on this fairly large planet.
And, in the case of power plants, we don’t even know how much
gets taken up by humans. That’s because no one has ever bothered to
see if the mercury in Americans largely resembles the mercury, in
its chemical signature, that comes out of power plants. Nor has
anyone ever asked if the pattern of mercury elevation in landlocked
fish (the putative source for people) looks like the pattern of
mercury fallout from the nation’s matrix of power plants.
This is a classic example of regulating first and asking
questions later. It’s going to be pretty expensive to get a lot of
the mercury out, which is likely to lead to a considerable
reduction in the use of coal for energy production, resulting in
substantially higher power costs. At the same time there’s no
demonstrable benefit, given that no one can now demonstrate a
demonstrable harm in any truly scientific fashion.
When people really need power to save their lives, which they do
when it gets hotter than blazes in the nation’s urban cores, it may
not be there or it may be prohibitively expensive. We already know,
from the Chicago tragedy in July 1995, that power-related
reductions in air-conditioning can kill hundreds — and that’s
hundreds of people more than will ever die from the 1 percent of
global mercury coming from U.S. power plants.
