A mother's take on the EPA mercury limits

I grew up in a beautiful small town perched on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River, in an industrial region of southwestern Pennsylvania.

While charming, this town was within breathing distance of a coal-fired power plant, the world’s largest zinc smelter, an oil refinery, several steel mills and foundries, a couple of plastics factories, and a synthetic rubber plant.

Many hot summer nights, when we slept with the windows open, I fell asleep holding the blankets over my face to filter the stink from the air.

Toxic vegetables, toxic fish

Arsenic, lead, mercury, zinc and cadmium contaminated the soils. During my childhood, residents were advised not to eat vegetables grown locally or any fish caught in the local rivers and streams.

For my grandparents. this was a hard message to accept. Despite laboratory tests that revealed dangerous levels of soil pollution, they kept eating vegetables from their garden.

Both suffered serious cancers of the digestive tract.

Children should be safe from neurotoxins

Mercury is a dangerous neurotoxin, and although this is widely known and the technology exists to keep it out of the air, water, and food chain, it is still to this day being spewed into our environment.

Like any parent, I want my child’s ability to see, hear, walk, feel and learn to be unaffected by mercury. And, as a professional wildlife ecologist, I am concerned that mercury and other pollutants that bio-accumulate up the food chain.

So that’s why I’m so pleased that the Environmental Protection Agency recently passed a historic rule in 2011 that will cut mercury and other toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants, using proven and readily available technology.

Why has it taken so long to limit mercury pollution?

The AES Beaver Valley power plant, within sight of my hometown, emits 40 pounds of toxic mercury per year, plus 900 pounds of hydrochloric acid. Just a little further down river, the Bruce Mansfield plant is even deadlier, emitting 145 pounds of mercury per year and more than 390 pounds of hydrochloric acid. These toxins go directly into the air my family and friends breathe, their soil and their water.

As a mother, I am thrilled about EPA’s new rule because it will significantly reduce the levels of mercury entering our environment and food supply.

Stacy Small-Lorenz Conservation scientist

So, why has it taken so long to get such a sensible rule in place?

To paraphrase EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s words, if industry were to spend more on engineers and less on lobbyists, more on scientists and less on lawyers, then this problem could have been solved long ago.

Amen.

The fight isn’t over

But even with the final rule in place, the battle is not over. Already, industry lawyers who put profits before people are lining up to sue over the ruling, and they are exerting strong political influence. One historic battle has been won, but the war on our children’s health by profit-driven polluters rages on.

While many major utility companies support cleaner air, the biggest polluters will use Congress and the courts to try to kill the new mercury rule.

We need your continued support to fight back and save our clean air.