Fishing groups find common ground on mercury pollution

By David Steinkraus

Wednesday, February 25, 2004 12:00 AM CST

Lined up today in Chicago will be more than the usual list of environmental groups. Sporting organizations, too, will be there to tell the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that its proposed rules on mercury emissions are a danger to the public and the resources that they treasure and use.

For two days - today and Thursday, the EPA is taking testimony on its proposed changes to air pollution rules. It's the mercury rule that has the sporting groups agitated and which brought several of them together on Tuesday morning in a telephone conference with reporters.

The continued emission of mercury, primarily from coal-fired power plants, is harming the lakes and the people who live around them and depend on them, said teleconference participants. Mercury in the food chain puts infants at risk of neurological damage, endangers adults who eat fish, damages aquatic creatures, and imperils the millions of jobs and billions of dollars that flow from the sport-fishing industry. In some places, they said, fish-consumption advisories are thicker than fishing rule books and catch-and-release fishing is no longer an option for anglers because fish are so

contaminated.

The EPA rule is not the best that we could achieve, participants said, and what it will do is preserve contamination of the environment. They object to the proposed cap-and-trade system. Companies which emitted less mercury than allowed could sell their excess "capacity" to companies not meeting the limit. The result, participants said, is that heavy polluters could keep on polluting by buying credits, and this would create local hot spots.

"The trading is just ludicrous," said Sam Washington of the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, an umbrella organization of sporting groups. It's like a modern version of the of the indulgences paid to medieval churches, he said, "where you pay for your sin elsewhere and you're free to commit it somewhere else."

Most of the mercury dropping into Midwest lakes comes from coal-fired power plants, participants said. If companies are allowed to trade emissions credits, then some parts of the country will be clean while others remain polluted. What is needed is a rule that will protect all the nation's waterways, they said.

A study found that 43 percent of the mercury deposited in Lake Michigan came from power plants within 60 miles of the lake, said George Meyer, executive director of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation. And 23 percent of the mercury pollution in the country, he said, comes from just six Midwestern states: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.

"A good plan if implemented, would reduce mercury emissions by 90 percent by 2008, and we believe that's technologically possible to do. Those figures come as a result of the EPA's own studies," Washington said. The EPA's proposal would produce only a 30 percent reduction in mercury emissions by 2010, he said.

Some utilities have agreed to some mercury emission reductions, Meyer said, "but when we need to get the 80, 90, 95 percent reductions they say it can't be done. ... In fact technology has shown that it can be done." Filters can capture more than 90 percent of the mercury at some power plants, he said. Another technique, called sorbent injection and developed in municipal waste incinerators, has been shown in tests at a power plants to stop 90 percent of mercury from existing plants and up to 95 from new plants, he said.

Indiana ranks fourth in the amount of mercury emitted from power plants, said Paula Yaeger, of the Indiana Wildlife Federation, and has lost many jobs and companies. Creation of new jobs may be important, she said, but important to that is the quality of life for workers, and connected to that is the quality of water resources. "And if we're going to be shortsighted and destroy it for future generations, whatever economic growth we've built towards now will be very short-lived."

There is a problem for proponents of strict controls on mercury, teleconference participants said, and it's comprised of money and frustration.

The frustration comes from the apparent inability of citizens to see their wishes affect government action. In Indiana, many people are Republican party loyalists, Yaeger said, "but at the same time our representatives aren't listening because we don't have the financial resources that some of the other corporations do to lobby in that direction."

"The political will is not coming from the people," said Scott Sparlin, of the Coalition for a Clean Minnesota River. "The average person is mad about the issue, is concerned about the issue, knows about the issue, but typically here we have again in the United States, people at the top are not listening. ..."

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