EPA Director Hangs Back on Ordering Mercury Studies

Despite an earlier promise, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t yet ordered new studies to help resolve a controversy over controlling mercury emissions.

The reason, said EPA Administrator Michael O. Leavitt, was that he had doubts about the assumptions the agency made in arriving at its conclusions. He said he was challenging the way the EPA determined how rapidly it could reduce pollution.

How quickly the government can cut mercury pollution from power plants without causing economic harm is of great interest to the utility industry, public health officials and environmentalists, and has prompted divisions between EPA career staffers and political appointees.

“This is a big decision and it’s one that I very much want to be done properly,” Leavitt said in a recent interview. The process, he added, would be “very open, inclusive and rigorous.”

Critics, inside and outside the EPA, said Leavitt’s failure thus far to order the studies he promised suggested that the administration was still reluctant to do its own analysis for fear that the results would justify deeper and faster reductions than it favored.

“We get talk but no action from the administrator,” said a longtime EPA staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Decisions about the proposed regulation were made before he came to EPA. He has been here for almost a year and the agency has still not done the work that is necessary to produce a better regulation.”

Mercury released into the atmosphere from the nation’s 1,100 coal-fired power plants is the largest single source of the neurotoxin in the United States.

Mercury has found its way into rivers and lakes, and an EPA analysis has found that about 600,000 babies born in the U.S. annually may be exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb, chiefly as a result of their mothers having eaten fish. Exposure can cause neurological and developmental damage. Nearly a year ago, the EPA proposed a flexible, market-based plan to reduce emissions.

The administration initially said its proposal would cut mercury spewed from power plants by 70% in 15 years.

But a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, public health advocates and environmentalists said this approach would delay significant reductions in mercury for decades. At the same time, they said, it would save the power and coal industries -- major campaign backers of President Bush -- billions of dollars.

The Times reported in March that the administration’s proposal used verbatim language provided by utility lobbyists. The paper detailed how longtime agency professionals had been told not to undertake scientific and economic studies to determine how big a mercury reduction was feasible. An EPA-appointed advisory panel that had requested the information was shunted aside in April 2003.

Subsequently, at the request of seven senators, the EPA’s inspector general opened an investigation into how the mercury proposal was developed. Completion of the inquiry is expected early next year.

Leavitt, who took office only a month before the rule was proposed last December, rebuffed a call by lawmakers in April to scrap the plan. But he agreed to delay its deadline three months -- to March 15, 2005 -- and said the EPA would further study how best to regulate mercury.

Leavitt said he had become so deeply immersed in the mercury debate that he was examining the assumptions that were fed into the agency’s computer model. The model makes projections about such things as the price of coal and the cost and availability of mercury-control technologies for various kinds of power plants. The model is used to assess how far, fast and at what cost pollution can be reduced.

In August, Leavitt outlined five principles the agency said would “provide a context for additional inquiry and narrow the focus of agency deliberations.” They include concentrating “on the need to protect children and pregnant women from the health impact of mercury,” encouraging “early adoptors of new technology” and maintaining “America’s competitiveness.”

Leavitt said he was spending considerable time discussing these matters with EPA’s career scientists, engineers and modelers. He expected to order new studies “based on assumptions that I have chosen in concert with broad discussions with other career scientists,” Leavitt said. Computer models, he added, “enlighten our thinking; they are not a substitute for our policy judgments.”

Of complaints about the delay, he said some staffers “may be accustomed to an administrator who takes their word for the assumptions.” Two veteran staffers expressed concern that the administrator’s role in devising new assumptions could politicize the EPA’s analysis.

Leavitt said he would make the final decision on the mercury rule in consultation with the White House and other agencies.

The proposed rule includes two approaches. The option preferred by the administration would set a national cap on emissions and then permit individual companies to choose whether to reduce their emissions or buy “credits” from other companies to do that. The EPA and industry maintain this would provide an incentive to cut emissions quickly without imposing burdens on utilities.

When it announced its proposal, the EPA said this would reduce the current 48 tons of emissions annually by 70% by 2018. But Leavitt acknowledged in March that this reduction would be achieved only when the rule was “fully implemented.” EPA models suggest this would be 2025, or later.

The second proposal would mandate reductions at all plants. The Clinton administration determined in 2000 that mercury was a toxic substance and therefore subject to strict regulation under the Clean Air Act. Advocates of this approach said it would produce dramatic reductions in three years.

The Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group, has concluded the EPA could require a 75% reduction by 2008 and achieve health benefits that far outweigh the relatively modest costs to industry, said Martha Keating, a task force senior scientist and former EPA staffer.

Pollution-control equipment manufacturers say that, with existing technology, they could reduce emissions 50% to 70% by 2008 to 2010. “We can go further, faster,” said David Foerter, executive director of the Institute of Clean Air Companies, which represents air pollution control equipment manufacturers.

Industry representatives countered that technology that could assure deeper reductions with different types of coal under all conditions was not yet proven. They warned that requiring such reductions could have dire economic consequences, including prompting a shift from coal to more costly natural gas.

“[This] would mean a significant impact on the price for electricity generation, home heating and food production, the very sectors of greatest concern to consumers who can least afford price increases,” said Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a group of power-generating companies.