New Hampshire Senate to Vote on Approach to Mercury Rule

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New Hampshire Senate to Vote on Approach to Mercury Rule

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Published: March 24, 2005


"You're worrying me"... <snip>

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule to limit mercury emissions from power plants. But rather than requiring across-the-board cuts in emissions it gave companies the ability to buy and sell pollution allowances. In the short run, some plants could buy allowances from cleaner companies and delay making large expenditures to cut emissions.

New Hampshire is one of the places that could be left to grapple with the emissions problem itself if local power plants - chiefly the Bow plant of the local utility, Public Service of New Hampshire - uses the flexibility the environmental agency granted last week to postpone a cleanup of what in 2003 was 116 pounds of mercury coursing upward from their stacks and raining down on the lands and waters to the southeast.

The Bow plant, known locally as the Merrimack plant for the river nearby, is one of hundreds in the country that, collectively, put out 48 tons of mercury annually, making them the largest single remaining source of airborne emissions of the toxic metal. In the 1990's federal regulation reduced emissions from other sources, like municipal incinerators.

<snip>

The measure, as approved by the committee last week, requires that mercury emissions from power plants be cut to 50 pounds annually by 2008 - 10 years ahead of the E.P.A.'s timetable for New Hampshire. By 2010, maximum emissions would be 24 pounds. In response to the testimony of Nancy Girard, vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation's New Hampshire Advocacy Center, the committee approved an amendment to the bill that would prohibit the emissions trading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/national/24mercury.html?th&emc=th


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I think it is unconscionable that the regulations are written to make it easier to keep pouring more mercury into the environment.