From National Resources Defense Fund: New standards that will greatly reduce the amount of toxic mercury being spewed by power plants are under attack and The Senate will soon vote on a bill by Senator Inhofe (R-OK) that would repeal mercury standards issued earlier this year by the EPA. The standards also cut other air pollution toxins, e.g. arsenic, lead, cancer-causing dioxins and acid gases.
Power plants are the largest man-made source of mercury, a neurotoxin that poisons children’s developing brains. Reducing this pollution from power plants will each year prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths, nearly 5,000 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks, 5,700 hospital and emergency room visits and 540,000 days when people miss work and school.
From HHS on Mass.gov: The prevalence of asthma is higher in Massachusetts than most other states in the US.
So, I called Brown’s office to find out how he will vote on the bill, S.J. Res 37, and the aide told me that he hasn’t issued a statement on it. I repeated the question about how he plans to vote on it and the aide repeated the answer about no statement but he would be happy to pass my concerns on.
I thought I’d pass them on myself to all of you.
Discuss
27 Comments . Leave a comment below.If he votes the wrong way on this it totally warrants an environmental attack ad. This is sort of one those no-brainer enviro concerns…we KNOW it’s bad, there is not one person saying “more mercury is good!” or “we really haven’t proven the voracity of mercury science” – keep us apprised…
…how Senator Brown can get away with calling himself “independent” and “bipartisan” in his TV ads, always citing media sources to back up the claim? Seems to me he’s been anything but.
Take how a person votes on a bill and extract anything you want out of it? I thought people were a little deeper here… Do you really think Sen Brown wants dirty water and mercury in the air?
Was President Obama’s extension of the Bush Tax Cuts a “Stamp of approval” for tax cuts for the rich? He signed the bill right and the “rich” kept their tax cuts… right? If the point of this is simply to throw some red meat the left on Brown then fine. But really…
BTW, if so many of you (and others) are so concerned about the air we breathe then stop driving your cars to work and play, shut off your AC this summer, go buy some solar panels… or maybe support building some new nuke plants. Electricity has to come from somewhere and people don’t have a lot of extra money to pay for expensive “clean” electricity.
Regulations have huge impacts on costs. I’m sure there is somewhere more versed on EPA Storm water regulations but these regulations could costs cities and municipalities hundreds of millions of dollars if they ever decided to enforce them. You’d have to pick up your dog droppings in your yard for fear the rain would wash the droppings out onto the street and down the sewer and into/near our water supply. I would support any politician who voted against these onerous regulations… but that doesn’t mean “I want dog crap in my drinking water”.
I have personally witnessed people in unions driving cars, hypocrites!
I think Senator Brown values the support of extremists like Senator Inhofe far more than the health of his constituents.
The restrictions on mercury (and other toxins) emissions should have been enacted long ago. One of the ways we reduce healthcare costs is by not knowingly poisoning our population with mercury and similar toxins.
What is your claim/beef about dog droppings? We know that storm water pollution ravaged Boston Harbor for generations. I’m pretty sure that dog droppings in suburban yards were not a major component of that pollution.
And of course, the money from the various industries with interests to keep such regulations from being placed on them.
Democracy, open to the highest bidder. That’s what we have now.
The costs do not go away, they get passed along to the people down wind, “externalizing costs” in economics parlance. If what consumers paid for electricity bore the true costs of producing it, the higher rates would spur more innovation and conservation. (I just got back from walking 2 miles to the post office, rather than driving.)
Solar panels are easy to get in Massachusetts, thank god. Look into it.
For no cost but the electricity you already pay. (Solar leasing.)
This isn’t an assessment of the Senator; you can do that yourself.
This is a campaign against him, and a potentially useful tool in that campaign.
Autos don’t emit mercury in measurable quantities. Coal fired power plants do. Furthermore, the cost to mitigate [not eliminate] that emission from power plants is collectively FAR LOWER than the cost to mitigate the same amount of mercury emissions from other sources. The fact of the matter is that it is almost always cheaper to mitigate a specific quantity of emissions from point sources [large individual emitters] than from a large collection of small sources [like autos].
Furthermore, if you live in New England, reducing your AC use won’t reduce mercury emissions, because in ISO-NE, the few remaining coal units are inframarginal in almost all hours, meaning that if we all turned off our AC it would be less natural gas generation being used, with the same amount of coal… and the same amount of coal emissions.
Further-furthermore, New England + New York has about 6GW of coal fired power plants, some of which have the mercury filters and some don’t. The Great Lakes down to the South East, on the other hand, has about 200GW of coal fired power plants, most of which don’t have the mercury filters. Even if New England switched to 0 coal, we’d still get all that lovely mercury from NJ, PA, OH, etc.
Further-further-furthermore, the mercury regulation does NOT have a huge impact on cost. Because the coal assets are inframarginal in New England and because deregulation means that the electric company doesn’t own the coal plants, the ratepayers are unlikely to see higher costs as a result of adding the mercury mitigation devices, because the coal units bid their marginal cost, and capital upgrades aren’t included in the bid. This means that the cost is eaten entirely by shareholders, not ratepayers. For the plants which are shutting down [like Salem], it isn’t the mercury ruling which is leading to the shutdown… it’s the combination of the cost of SO2 and NOx abatement, PLUS the extremely low price of natural gas, PLUS the increasing cost of importing coal from South America, which is where most New England plants get their dirt to burn.
I provide expert testimony to state regulatory boards on exactly this area.
P.S. Per MWh generated, nuclear power costs MORE than solar panels in total cost to purchase and operate, and that doesn’t include the disposal costs [you can bet it costs more to dismantle and dispose of a nuclear power plant and its spent fuel than photovoltaic panels]. Regardless of how you feel about nuclear risk or nuclear waste, new nuclear power is far too expensive, which is why there have been ZERO proposals for investors to build nuclear power plants and sell the energy on the open market — the only proposals are ones where a regulatory agency require the ratepayers to hold the risk, not the shareholders. The free market signal is clear — nuclear is a bad investment.
Excellent post, stomv. Kudos.
What would costs per MWh be for coal generation if full mercury, SO2, and NOx abatement equipment were installed? Can a coal plant even meet the new mercury, SO2, and NOx standards technologically?
The following issues are facing tighter regulations [Clean Air Act 1970, 1977, 1990] are all pending, proposed, or effective within the next five years, although not all plants have to comply with all [a function of size, location, and other matters]:
* Hg
* SO2
* NOx
* ash waste
* water discharge
* some other smaller matters
The nuance is that some of these don’t cost per MWh, they cost per MW or even closer to “flat fee”. That means that a coal plant which is big and used often will get retrofitted, but a coal plant which is smallish or not operated as many hours won’t be economic to retrofit because the cost of a new natural gas plant [or wind farm] has lower total cost. ‘Tweener plants — 400 MWish units, operated something like 50% of capacity, with average heat rates [efficiency in turning coal to electricity] are marginal — maybe they’re more economic to retrofit, maybe they should be retired. It depends on their age, how much is paid off, and dozens of other factors.
The total cost can easily be $100s of millions, but you’ve got to understand that a pair of 800MW units operating at 85% capacity generate about 12,000,000 MWh, which at $40+/MWh is worth $500M+ in revenue a year.
Coal plants most certainly can meet the standards, because the EPA is, generally speaking, limited to BART: best available retrofit technology. That means that the EPA can’t create a regulation which isn’t achievable with a retrofit.
I’d just add that some of the requirements can be met [partially if not wholly] by switching to a low sulfur Powder River Basin coal [or other low sulfur coal]. Plants pay more to buy it and ship it from Wyoming to Ohio than Appalachian coal, but it can help avoid a large capital expense and therefore be the more economic of the two choices.
Excellent. Thank you.
My understanding is they put out much more mercury than the coal fired plants.
At least not in recent history, according to the EPA. It wouldn’t kill you to do your own research, but here we go…
1990-1993
Utility coal boilers 58.8
Industrial, commercial, and institutional boilers 14.4
Medical waste incinerators 51.0
Municipal waste combustors 57.2
Hazardous waste incineration 6.6
Gold mining 4.4
Chlorine production 10.0
Electric arc furnaces 7.5
Other industrial processes 36.5
Mobile* N/A
Notice that coal is more than the incinerators combined. But check this out:
2005
Utility coal boilers 52.3
Industrial, commercial, and institutional boilers 7.4
Medical waste incinerators 0.2
Municipal waste combustors 2.4
Hazardous waste incineration 4.1
Gold mining 2.4
Chlorine production 1.1
Electric arc furnaces 7.3
Other industrial processes 24.4
Mobile* 1.1
See how incineration and combustion went way down — but coal fired power plants did not?
To recap: while incineration used to be high, coal has always been the highest emitter. However, in the 2000s, the emission of Hg from industrial boilers, medical waste incinerators, muni waste combustors, hazardous waste combustors, Au mining, Cl production, and other industrial processes all fell substantially, by a total of 138 tons per year. Coal plants are now responsible for more than all other sources combined; it’s their turn to apply readily available technology to dramatically reduce their mercury emissions.
I know the mid west has dirty coal plants – I believe MA has the cleanest.
A few years back I saw a map of mercury pollution – didn’t seem to be coming from our coal fired plants.
MA certainly doesn’t have the cleanest coal plants — that honor is shared by Vermont, Rhode Island, and Washington DC. They don’t have any coal plants, and therefore have zero coal induced emissions.
I’ve never seen a claim that Massachusetts has the “cleanest” and I’m not sure how you’d compare different emissions [we emit less of X but more of Y, now what?]. Even among Hg emissions, I’ve not seen a list.
What I have seen are maps of Hg across the country. There’s no question that it’s *worse* in the midwest, but the science is also clear — Hg rides along PM2.5 and PM10 to travel 100s of miles, and then gets in waterways where it travels even further.
The point: the mercury emissions from coal fired power plants in NY and New England would be reduced by this ruling which Scott Brown hasn’t publicly supported, AND some of the mercury emissions from coal fired power plants located west of us make their way to our state, thereby impacting the health of us — particularly our babies — directly.
I’ve never seen a map of Hg emissions from point sources, and I doubt you have either — that kind of data is incredibly difficult to compile, and even more difficult to compare because different point sources have different measurement techniques. What I have seen are mercury deposition maps, both “wet” (water measurements) and “dry” (atmospheric measurements).
Here’s one: notice that MA is better off than MO, but also notice that we’ve got plenty.
Finally, it is a national problem. Given that pollution doesn’t respect municipal boundaries, it’s clearly a federal issue. For example, western NY suffers from the coal plants in PA and OH in paticular, but NY can’t legislate those plants to mitigate their pollution. Why shouldn’t we expect our Senator to support fairness — the citizens of western NY don’t get any benefit from those OH and PA power plants [NYISO doesn't import power into upstate NY from the midwest], but they suffer the pollution.
Learning a lot from you. Thanks
Thanks Judy! I have noticed that I’ve used some acronyms and abbreviations:
ISO-NE: Independent Service Operator of New England. These are the folks with the cool control room who dispatch power plants, transmission, and so forth to ensure that your electricity always works… and when things break, these guys limit the damage and then dispatch bucket trucks and engineers etc. to fix things.
NYISO: New York ISO. Same idea, but instead of the six New England States, they handle 100% of New York.
AC: Air conditioning
GW: Gigawatt == 1000 megawatts == 1000×1000 kilowatts.
GWh: Gigawatt-hour == 1000 MWh (megawatt-hours) == 1000×1000 kWh (kilowatt-hours). Whereas watts are power, watt-hours are energy. Your household uses some number of kWh each month, hopefully closer to 100 but perhaps closer to 1,000.
Hg: mercury. Very small amounts are toxic, and particularly damaging to pregnant women and to babies. It starts airborne, then gets in water, then accumulates in the flesh as fish eat smaller fish, etc. Mercury is often, though not always, the reason for fish consumption limits.
SO2: sulfur dioxide. It’s an air pollutant. Combined with NO2 it forms acid rain. It also results in respiratory disease, etc. Natural gas power plants don’t emit any SO2; coal and oil fired power plants emission varies due to the kind of coal or oil and whether or not they have flue-gas desulfurization. SO2 emissions are down about 30% since 1980 but are expected to come down much further with the EPA rulings.
NOx: nitrogen oxides [dioxide [NO2], or just oxide [NO]]. These guys not only help form acid rain, they’re also a major contributor to smog, and form the “bad” tropospheric ozone which the weather channel warns about, not the “good” ozone we want over Antarctica.
EPA: Environmental Protection Agency, proposed by and created by President Dick Nixon.
Au: Chemical symbol for gold.
Cl: Chemical symbol for chlorine.
PM2.5: particulate matter known as “fine particulate matter”, it is 2.5 micrometers in width or smaller. Why 2.5? Turns out that this is the size which embeds in your lungs by penetrating the gas exchange membrane.
PM10: same idea but 10 micrometers. It doesn’t have the same health implications and tends to “fall” out of the air faster than PM2.5. Both contribute to smog and low visibility as well as asthma and other respiratory problems.
from the mass dep
Looks like we suffer from our own waste more than from coal.
That chart is from 1995. Read the text associated with it here:
http://www.mass.gov/dep/toxics/stypes/hgch3c.htm
As you can see from the data I reported above, that chart is nowhere close to the reality in 2005, no less 2012. Furthermore, measuring the Hg emitted in MA does not lend clarity to the source of Hg in MA, since Hg crosses state boundaries.
It looks like we are suffering from you using nearly 20 year old data to try to make a point which is as pointy as a soccer ball.
Senator Brown’s staff repeatedly cannot provide information on the Senator’s stands on environmental issues, and once again we learn that no criticism of any kind will be tolerated.
Not just mercury regs are being voted on; standards that might be rolled back
What to do if you received almost half a million dollars in campaign contributions from PACs and individuals in the energy and natural resources sector? (see graph at opensecrets.org)
Thanks to all for filling in with such valuable info.
NRDC also wrote: To force the Senate to hold a vote on whether to repeal the mercury standards, Sen. Inhofe is using a procedure that requires the support of 30 senators on a petition. Sen. Inhofe says he has at least 29 other senators behind his plan, but has been unwilling to release the names of these “Dirty Thirty.” It’s bad enough to try to reverse basic health protections; it’s indefensible to try to do it in secret.
I’ll be traveling Thursday and unable to keep an eye on what’s happening, so perhaps someone else could. Maybe Scotty can tell us who’s in the Dirty Thirty.
Last, let”s address the “cost of regulation” that we hear and read about so often. Perhaps a kid with asthma and her/his family can tell us. Maybe some miners’ families can tell what they think about lax and unenforced regulation. Or people who lost their home and savings when the unregulated mortgage/banking/Wall St. triumvirate flexed its unregulated magic on them.
Takers?
Yet 41 can block a vote via threatened filibuster, so I have two questions:
How are these two rules reconcilable?
Do Democrats not understand Senate rules? It seems they never use them to their advantage.
just a thought.
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