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EPA Ignores Rejection of Clear Skies
Environmentalists were thrilled that Clear Skies died in committee. Let’s see how they feel about the EPA promulgating its rules anyway. People seemed to like the chart that I made to document the EPA’s lies about the Clear Skies initiative, so I’ve adapted the chart to compare the new mercury regulations announced today to the limits set by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (below the fold).
| Actual Emissions in 2000 | Clean Air Act Emissions Recommendation | Final Reduction (based on 2000 levels) | |||
| Mercury | 48 tons | 5 tons in 2008 | 90% | ||
| Actual Emissions in 2000 | New EPA Emissions Caps | Final Reduction (based on 2000 levels) | |||
| First Phase Cap | Second Phase Cap | Third Phase Cap | |||
| Mercury | 48 tons | 31.3 tons in 2010 | 27.9 tons in 2015 | 24.3 tons in 2020 | 49% |
| Percent Increase over CAA | 626% in 2010 | 558% in 2015 | 486% in 2020 | ||
Adapted from the tables on the EPA Clear Skies “fact”sheet and at Clean the Air, with extra mercury data taken from the AP article linked above.
So the new limits are a massive rollback; that’s no surprise. Now let’s talk about the cap-and-trade program.
Most environmentalists are familiar with the meme that mercury trading is a bad idea, but I’m not sure how many people understand why. Most mercury is emitted as fly ash, which is made up of heavy particles that have a low atmospheric residence time, which means that after it comes out of a smokestack it only stays in the air for a few hours to a few days before landing on the ground. For obvious reasons, the shorter the atmospheric residence time, the less distance a compound will travel while airborne.
The current cap-and-trade programs for SOx and NOx under the Clean Air Act have been successful because these compounds spread relatively far before deposition. The portion of mercury that is not part of fly ash can spread relatively far as well, since its particles are smaller and thus take longer to gravitate or precipitate back to the ground, which is why some Chinese mercury emissions rain down on California. Most mercury emissions though, are in the form of fly ash, in which mercury is bound to large particles that cause it to gravitate back toward the ground within hours, or even fractions thereof.
The EPA’s proposed trading program for mercury will leave much of the country mercury-free, while damning any area with the unfortunate luck of being located near a mercury emitter that decides to buy additional permits rather than reduce their pollution. Did I say “luck?” What I meant was “low land value,” since land value correlates strongly with sources of pollution, especially older factories and power plants, which have a high cost of abatement and are more likely to just buy extra permits and keep on polluting.
