New EPA Mercury Rule Omits Conflicting Data

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Study Called Stricter Limits Cost-Effective

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 22, 2005; Page A01


When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a rule last week to limit mercury emissions from U.S. power plants, officials emphasized that the controls could not be more aggressive because the cost to industry already far exceeded the public health payoff.

What they did not reveal is that a Harvard University study paid for by the EPA, co-authored by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists had reached the opposite conclusion.

That analysis estimated health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did, but top agency officials ordered the finding stripped from public documents, said a staff member who helped develop the rule. Acknowledging the Harvard study would have forced the agency to consider more stringent controls, said environmentalists and the study's author.

The mercury issue has long been the focus of heated argument between utilities and environmental advocates. Health advocates say mercury is so harmful to fetuses and pregnant women that steps are needed to sharply control emissions; industry groups and the Bush administration have warned that overly aggressive measures would impose heavy costs. <more>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55268-2005Mar21.html

[nirvana3240]

1. so....

someone care to elaborate? What does this mean?

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2. The EPA recently came out with new pollution standards...

They based them on inaccurate data instead of their own Harvard study that they commissioned - because they didn't like what the study said (thats how I see it).

The study found that there were be benefits to people's health (or avoidance of costs, really) of $5 billion. The EPA wanted to go with a $50 million number. They say costs to industry would be $750 million. So they want to make it sound like industry has all these costs for not so much benefit.

The EPA said they would cut emissions by 50% - environmentalists asked for 90%.


Meanwhile - there was another study recently that linked these same emissions to autism. That may not have even been in the same cost analysis study as the one that was disregarded.


Today's story - the Democrats complained:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x21278

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3. Other past related actions by the EPA

(2003-July 2003)

EPA staffers are instructed by higher-ups not to analyze any mercury or carbon dioxide reduction proposals that conflict with the President's “Clear Skies” bill or, if they do, to keep the results under wraps. For example, an alternative proposal sponsored by Senators Thomas R. Carper and Lincoln Chaffee is analyzed by the EPA but its conclusions—showing that the Carper-Chaffee plan has some advantages over Clear Skies—are not released. According to one EPA staffer later interviewed by the New York Times, Jeffrey Holmstead, the assistant administrator for air programs, wondered out loud during a May 2 meeting, “How can we justify Clear Skies if this gets out?” And in June, EPA administrator Christie Whitman sends a letter to Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, informing them that the EPA will not do economic analysis on their alternative plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as they requested. Senator McCain later tells the New York Times that he did “not feel it was normal procedure to refuse to analyze a bill that is under the agency's jurisdiction.”


People and organizations involved: Bush administration, Environmental Protection Agency,Thomas R. Carper, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, Lincoln Chaffee, Jeffrey Holmstead

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June 5, 2003

A White House aide tells Congress that the administration overestimated the expected reduction in mercury emissions that would result from the implementation of its “Clear Skies” plan. The EPA is under court orders to finalize a mercury reduction plan, which would update the Clean Air Act, by December 15, 2003. The current version of the Clean Air Act has no provisions covering mercury, a byproduct of coal-burning power plants. The administration's “Clear Skies” plan had predicted that if sulfur and nitrogen compound emissions were reduced by 70 percent in 2010 as the plan proposes, there would be a concomitant reduction in mercury pollution from coal power plants to about 26 tons a year nationally. But a revised estimate put the expected reduction between 2 and 14 tons. Since Congress' current draft of the Clean Air Act had set a reduction target of 22 tons by 2010 based on the plan's previous figures, energy industry lobbyists and some pro-industry senators are now arguing that the mercury reduction goal should likewise be set to a smaller amount.


People and organizations involved: Bush administration

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November 26, 2003





      
EPA officials complete a draft proposal outlining plans to revise the conclusion of a court-ordered December 2000 EPA study which had determined that mercury emissions “pose significant hazards to public health and must be reduced.” As a result of the 2000 study, the agency had been ordered to propose a “maximum achievable control technology” (MACT) standard for all coal-burning power plants by December 15, 2003. But instead of complying with this mandate, the EPA's current draft proposal on the regulation of mercury emissions attempts to modify the December 2000 conclusion claiming that it had been based on a misreading of the Clean Air Act. Citing a different provision in the Clean Air Act, the draft proposal recommends a flexible regulatory approach that is more acceptable to industry. It suggests a market-based mandatory “cap and trade” program permitting utility companies to purchase emissions “credits” from cleaner-operating utilities to meet an industry-wide standard. It is estimated that their plan would reduce mercury emissions to 34 tons a year by 2010, or about 30 percent below current levels. But this is a much higher cap than the 26-ton limit initially specified in the White House's “Clear Skies” initiative (see June 5, 2003). The White House claims that by 2018 their “cap and trade” plan would result in a mercury emissions reduction of 70 percent, which is significantly less than the 90 percent reduction that would otherwise be achieved within 3 or 4 years, if the EPA were to keep to the original December 2000 ruling.


People and organizations involved: Bush administration, Environmental Protection Agency


          

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=the_bush_administration_s_environmental_record

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4. "Mr. Bottom Line" - John Graham

by Steve Weinberg

Quick: What's the dollar value of a human life? Of a river? John D. Graham says he knows. As the White House point man who weighs every health and environmental rule to decide if it's worth the cost, he's a bureaucrat with power over life and death.

(John) Graham's specialty is a long-established but controversial number-crunching technique called cost-benefit analysis. Its purpose is to quantify, in dollars, every cost and every benefit of a possible course of action. Because Graham has spent his entire professional life working to enshrine it (and its near cousin, risk analysis) at the center of public policy, his nomination process was highly contentious. He got thirty-seven "No" votes in the Senate -- second only to Attorney General John Ashcroft, a better-known figure appointed to a much higher-profile office. Among the letters sent to the Senate about Graham was a critique signed by fifty-one academics; they charged that he had repeatedly lowballed health and environmental benefits, used "extreme and highly disputed" economic assumptions, and issued hard-and-fast opinions on complex medical and scientific topics in which he had no training. <snip>

Recently, OIRA has been asking EPA to include an "alternative estimate" for the dollar benefits of some rules, using lower figures for the value society places on a single human life. EPA uses $6.1 million as its basic figure for one "statistical life." The alternative figures, drawn from certain economists' studies of how people value risk, start at $3.7 million. But the alternative estimate also assumes that the elderly are not willing to pay as much to protect themselves. It prices people seventy or older at 63 percent of people under seventy, or $2.3 million per elderly life. Applied to, say, air pollution -- which can be deadly to older people with vulnerable lungs -- figures like these make a rule look less valuable by an order of magnitude. <snip>

Most controversial of all was the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which Graham founded in 1989. Under Graham as director, up to 60 percent of the center's budget came from corporations, including Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Electric, Monsanto, and Union Carbide. The center has produced hundreds of diverse publications, including articles on daily dialysis for kidney patients and public attitudes about Alzheimer's. But some of its work under Graham seemed tailored to the lobbying needs of funders. A study paid for by the American Farm Bureau Federation, for instance, said that eliminating the most toxic pesticides could disrupt the food supply and lead to 1,000 premature deaths. (The idea that Americans would die of malnutrition from lack of pest control, wrote three scientists at Consumers Union, was "not remotely credible.")

http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/03spr/graham1.asp?r=n


They supposedly value life at 6.1 million (2.3 million if you are 70 or older) - do a cost-benefit analysis and then they throw out the data when it look like human life is more valuable than the cost to industry.