GOP Senator Wants Tighter Mercury Rules
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine will introduce legislation that would create a nationwide mercury-monitoring network to identify dangerous mercury hot spots.
Collins is also pledging to reintroduce long-standing legislation meant to significantly reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
"For the last five years she's introduced the Clean Power Act to reduce mercury emissions by 90 percent," says David Hunter, a staff scientist for Collins. He said he expected nearly every member of the New England delegation to sign on.
A call for tighter controls of mercury regulation has gained new momentum after the publication of a report by the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation in a recent edition of the journal BioScience that identified five hot spots, or areas of dangerous mercury concentrations, in the Northeast, including the upper Adirondacks in New York and New Hampshire's Lower Merrimack watershed. The findings stoked controversy by linking those and nine other suspected hot spots to specific sources, namely regional coal-fired power plants.
Supporters of the research, as well as Collins, are criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency for relying on computer-modeling results rather than ground-level data to justify the federal cap-and-trade policy of mercury emissions credits. The authors, David Evers and Wing Goodale of the Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham, Maine, studied elevated mercury levels in fish and wildlife throughout the area.
The Electric Power Research Institute, which attended the press conference, told reporters that "mercury emissions trading will not exacerbate hot spots" and faulted the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation's methodology.