Environmentalists Praise Obama Administration’s Measure
Mercury, a long know harbinger of illnesses especially to children, is finally seeing its near-demise as a particle of air pollution. This comes about with the Obama administration’s amendment of the Clean Air Act after 20 years of battle between, on one hand, environmentalists and public health proponents, and on the other hand, the energy sector.
The measure cuts mercury and other toxic emissions from power plants, the former by about 90 percent, reducing, according to the administration, about 11, 000 premature deaths. Power plants’ emission of mercury per trillion BTUs of energy output is limited to 1.2 pounds.
A period of three years is provided for companies to install retrofits and clean up their emissions of mercury, arsenic, acid gases and other 70 other air toxins substances, with a year’s extension.
In a show of solid support, the White House released a short video of Obama highlighting the fact of then Pres. George H. W. Bush’s imprimatur on the EPA in a “bold and necessary” law authorizing it to cut toxic air emissions in 1990. Added Obama, the law was never fully implemented with the opposition of special interest groups.
Expectedly, this has drawn criticisms from the energy industry which labeled the move as another of President Obama’s ‘job-killing’ ventures. Industry lobbyists and Republican congressmen who constantly opposed stricter clean air measures, issued warnings of non-stop blackouts and job layoffs should the rule be implemented. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) went as far as vowing to propose a bill to stop the imposition of the new mercury regulations early next year when Congress resumes its regular session.
The energy lobby group Electric Reliability Coordinating Council offered that the new rule posed drastic negative impacts to the energy industry. E-mailed its director Scott Segal, “It will increase the cost of power, undermining the international competitiveness of almost two dozen manufacturing industries, and it will reduce employment upstream in the mining sectors.” He added that it will cause, by 2020, the loss of about 1.44 million jobs.
However, in a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service released in August 2011, it found out that the impacts of the mercury rule were exaggerated by the industry as most of the inefficient 50-year old coal plants were in the process of being decommissioned.
Advised Ralph Rizzo of the Public Service Enterprise Group in Newark which had been retrofitting its coal-fired plants since 2006 and creating local jobs in the process, all that is needed is to invest on engineers and construction crews to implement the necessary changes “rather than spending the next two years hiring lawyers” to evade the inevitable.