Delay in Coal Pollution Rules Took Toll in Lives

A tough new pollution standard for power plants proposed this week by the Environmental Protection Agency will cost utilities at least $10 billion, and several companies have already signaled that they will close aging coal plants rather than upgrade to meet the new standards. The new rules require major reductions in mercury, arsenic and other hazardous emissions.

Associated Press A generating plant in Thompsons, Tex.

Yet while industry may howl over the costs, the utilities can hardly be surprised: the pollution controls have been in the works since at least 1990, when President George H.W. Bush — with broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress — signed into law sweeping amendments to the Clean Air Act requiring the E.P.A. to take aggressive steps to identify and curb major sources of hazardous air pollution, including emissions from power plants.

That it would take more than 20 years for federal regulators to finally propose toxic emissions standards for the power industry is testament to both the slow wheels of bureaucracy and the clout of the nation’s utility and coal interests, which bitterly — and for years, successfully — fought the controls, even as other industries bowed under.

Former E.P.A. officials involved in the development of the power plant regulations in the 1990s and 2000s acknowledged that the long delay in controlling toxic emissions from power plants had taken a toll in human lives.

“This is long-unfinished business,” said John Bachmann, who retired as associate director for science and policy for the E.P.A.’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards in 2007, after more than 30 years with the agency. “We’ve lost some opportunities, and it’s cost thousands of lives.”

During the Clinton administration, Mr. Bachmann said, a Congressional mandate to develop controls for mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants was initially set aside so that the agency could focus on curbing industry emissions of nitrogen and sulfur oxides, which cause acid rain, through an ultimately successful cap-and-trade program.

“The whole idea was to hit these guys hard on acid rain and figure out what to do about the rest of the stuff later,” he said. “The thing got put off on purpose by a political calculus.”

In the mid-1990s, when the agency at last began developing standards for mercury — then identified as the power plant emission of greatest concern — they were met by stiff resistance by industry groups, which financed and publicized independent studies and reports casting doubt on the public health threat of mercury contamination.

“They put a whole lot of money into campaigns to make mercury look innocuous,” said Philippe Grandjean, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and expert on mercury pollution.

The industry campaign found willing ears in Congress, which responded to a comprehensive 1998 report by the E.P.A. conclusively linking mercury emissions from power plants to cognitive harm in developing fetuses by demanding an independent study by the National Research Council — one that would take another two years to produce.

That study, delivered to Congress in July 2000, yielded yet another damning verdict on mercury, which was clearly seen to pass from contaminated fish to humans and cause harm to fetuses. In the report’s wake, even industry groups seemed to wave the flag of surrender.

”We wanted this issue about mercury to be settled based on the best science available, and that’s essentially what the academy has done,” Paul Bailey, vice president for environmental affairs at the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry’s largest trade group, said at the time.

”We expect the E.P.A. to decide that they are going to regulate mercury from us,” he said. “What we’re focused on is working with them to fashion a program that makes sense.”

In December 2000, the E.P.A. listed power plants as sources of hazardous air pollution under the Clean Air Act, a critical and largely irreversible step on the path toward setting standards for pollution controls.

Yet while the die was seemingly cast for regulation of mercury and other toxic emissions, under the incoming George W. Bush administration, the effort to control power plant pollution would again falter.

During Mr. Bush’s first term, legislation was developed to create a cap-and-trade program for mercury, similar to the program that had successfully reduced acid rain pollution in the 1990s. But despite Republican control of both houses of Congress and the White House between 2002 and 2006, the legislative effort on mercury failed.

With the threat of legal action by states and environmental groups looming, top E.P.A. officials took the unorthodox step of reversing the Clinton administration’s December 2000 listing of power plants as sources of hazardous air pollution. The delisting allowed the agency to implement the industry-favored cap-and-trade program for mercury through administrative fiat.

But even before the decision was made, E.P.A. attorneys warned top officials that the move was in all likelihood illegal and would almost certainly be reversed in the courts.
“The lawyers basically advised them that they were going to lose,” Mr. Bachmann said. “It was wishful thinking, and it didn’t work.”

Indeed, within months of the decision a coalition of states and environmentalists sought to overturn the decision through a federal lawsuit. In February 2008, a federal judge ruled in the groups’ favor, giving the E.P.A. three years to develop the pollution standards in accordance with federal law.

On Wednesday, the agency met their court-ordered deadline, issuing the proposed rules. The regulations are expected to be made final by the end of the year, and utilities will then have three or four years to comply. By the E.P.A.’s calculus, the pollution controls will prevent 17,000 premature deaths and 11,000 heart attacks per year once fully implemented.

For clean air advocates, the release of the rules is a milestone. But for some they will have come too late.
“This could have been done 20 years ago,” Mr. Bachmann said. “These delays, as they’ve mounted up, have had a cost in people dying sooner. And it’s not trivial.”