The Republican Neurological Disorder Promotion Act

Get to know your mercury emissions because they may give you Parkinsons one day....

Taken from the book F.U.B.A.R.: (please excuse the air america snarkiness)

Mercury: the stuff in your old thermometers. It's also the stuff that, when there is enough of it in the air, causes all sorts of birth defects and neurological damage to children. Limiting the amount of mercury that's released into the the air as a by-product of the manufacture of some industrial products is the focus of the Republican Neurological Disorder Promotion Act of 2005, the more honest title for a bill that Republicans call the "Clear Sky Initiative."(doublespeak for anyone who's read 1984)

Truth be told, we don't think that Republicans want to promote neurological disorders, though it would probably help them electorally. But they don't seem to care that a few hundred thousand neurological disorders might result from loosening standards on these industries. Hey, if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few skulls.

On March 15, 2005, the Bush administration proudly unveiled new regulations that called for coal-fired plants to cut their mercury emissions by 22 percent by the year 2010. Good for them, right? Well, the truth is more complicated than that, and we better get it out now, while we still have the brain capacity to understand it.

Mercury is a known neurotoxin. It has been linked to increased autism rates in children - one study has shown that for every thousand pounds of mercury emitted into the environment, autsim rates increase by 61 percent. In the United States, each year power plants alone pump fifty tons into the air, from where it often settles in the water, and then in fish, which absorb it. That's why in 2004 the FDA warned pregnant women to stay away from eating all big ocean fish - because the mercury the fish had absorbed could seriously endanger a baby's development.

Mercury has been shown to:

• cause deafness, blindness, mental retardation, and cerebral palsy in children.
• cause numbness, dementia, and death in adults.
• cause ADD, and Parkinson's in adults in even small exposures.

***KEY PARAGRAPH COMING UP, DON'T MISS IT***

In February 2005, about a month before President Bush announced his new mercury "reforms", the inspector general of the EPA reported that "the agency's senior management instructed staff members to arrive at a predetermined conclusion favoring industry when they prepared a proposed rule last year to reduce the amount of mercury emitted from coal fired power plants." The technological and scientific analysis by the agency was "compromised" to keep cleanup costs down for the utility industry. The report said the agency's staff was instructed to determine that the best pollution-control methods available to power-plant owners would cut mercury emissions to 34 million tons from 48 million tons, a result that was approximated only on the the third time the agency made its computer calculations. The earlier results showed that this technology might achieve greater reductions, but these were rebuffed by senior managers, the report said.

***KEEP GOING YOU'RE ALMOST DONE***

It concluded that the agency should go back to the drawing board and "conduct an unbiased analysis of the mercury emissions data." And this from a guy who works or, possibly in light of this report, worked, at the agency.

So not only did the EPA fudge the numbers to make it look harder than it actually is to control emissions, a month later, the Government Accountability Office issued a report saying that the EPA studies that promoted the Bush "market-based" Clear Skies Initiative scheme "distorted the analysis of its controversial proposal to regulate mercury pollution from power plants, making it appear that the Bush administration's market-based approach was superior to a competing scheme supported by environmentalists.

That's how a "reform" of 22 percent can actually be not such a good thing, which some media outlets noted at the time:

The Bush administration Tuesday told the operators of coal-fired power plants to cut mercury emissions by nearly 22 percent over the next five years, hailing the reductions as the deepest cuts technologically possible for cleansing the air of the neurological toxin.

But nearly a dozen power plants nationwide have done far better already - some cutting mercury emissions by as much as 94 percent - in test projects paid for by the Bush administration.

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As if that's not enough, the act actually requires several states to allow more mercury into the air we breath, more mercury than their current legislation allows for. That bears repeating: the federal regulations "reform" that Bush trumpets actually requires some states to allow more poison into our air. Wisconsin has joined a lawsuit with 10 other states in defiance to the federal act... in Wisconsin's case, this would mean that they have to allow twice as much mercury to be emitted in the next ten years as they would have under their current laws. Viva clear skies! And not so viva people!