Many experts, including members of an EPA working group that had spent more than a year developing mercury regulations, were dismayed. "It was an exercise in futility," says Martha Keating, a former EPA scientist who sat on the panel and works for the nonprofit Clear the Air. Keating was also one of the first to notice that the EPA's proposed trading rule borrows wording, sometimes verbatim, from utility memos on mercury control. The EPA has dismissed these echoes as anomalies.

Industry groups certainly like the flexibility of the EPA's proposed regulations, which would set a nationwide emissions cap and give each plant a limited number of pollution allowances. Utilities could either install equipment to cut emissions below the allowed level and sell unused allowances or exceed the level and buy extra allowances from other sources. The total number of allowances would fall each year as the cap tightened.

Such "cap and trade" approaches are at the core of President Bush's Clear Skies Initiative, a suite of clean-air legislation that's currently stalled in Congress. This strategy proved cheap and effective when introduced in 1990 to stem acid-rain-causing emissions from power plants. What's more, lumping mercury and acid rain together under one trading system would save more than $1 billion in annual compliance costs, says the Edison Electric Institute, which represents most U.S. electricity companies.

But critics say that while trading worked well for the pollutants that cause acid rain, it is the wrong approach for a toxic substance like mercury. Because much mercury falls within 100 miles of its source, utilities that buy credits instead of installing controls could worsen local mercury deposition--so-called hot spots--says Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins University and former EPA official. "I don't think it makes sense," she says.

The administration has now backpedaled, extending the time for public comment and analysis. EPA chief Mike Leavitt told U.S. News that the December proposal was just a "starting point," and he expects "significant changes" in the final rule, to be issued at the end of this year. Leavitt says the agency is still studying a "range of different alternatives" for quick, efficient mercury cuts.

Smoking it out. Technology, however, could stymie faster timetables. Controls for other pollutants remove some mercury. But the Energy Department and industry are trying to develop technologies specifically aimed at mercury, such as sorbent injection--for example, shooting carbon dust into smokestacks, where it binds to the mercury, forming particles that can be sifted from the exhaust. Leavitt says he is "highly optimistic" about the method but believes "it will not be widely deployable until 2010 or after."

And even the best technologies won't choke off all sources of mercury. About one third of U.S. atmospheric mercury emanates from natural sources, such as volcanoes around the world, according to Christian Seigneur of Atmospheric & Environmental Research Inc., which recently did an industry-funded study of mercury deposition. An additional 21 percent drifts over from power plants in Asia, mostly China. Much of the mercury in oceangoing fish also hails from sources abroad. That's why many utilities say they're not entirely to blame. "Reducing mercury emissions from U.S. power plants makes very little difference," says Vicky Sullivan, environmental issues manager for Southern Co., which operates 21 coal-burning plants in the South.

Not so, says Harvard University atmospheric chemist Daniel Jacob. Mercury hot spots downwind of power plants show that local emissions matter, he says. "Reducing emissions from local plants will not eliminate the problem, but if it is a large local source, it will help."

With all sides in the mercury debate gearing up for a long fight, there are sure to be more questions for fishermen like Nadolski and more quandaries at the fish counter.

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