Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Toxics - Mercury, 'cap and trade,' smoke and mirrors [San Francisco Chronicle]: EPA to issue new rule on mercury emissions; Not all power plants will need to cut pollution The rule is certain to be contested in court by environmental groups, who charge that it places the financial interests of power companies over public health. Industry groups back the cap-and-trade approach as more practical and cost-effective than the alternative that environmentalists prefer: limiting emissions at every plant.... The EPA's actions in developing the mercury rule prompted intense criticism by the agency's inspector general and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, which said the agency ignored scientific evidence.... To justify the new approach, the administration reversed a decision by the Clinton administration to list mercury as a 'hazardous air pollutant.'  I think it was Adam Smith who said, a couple of centuries ago, that 'perfect markets require perfect information.' You can't get perfect information through, in Barry Commoner's apt phrase, 'linguistic detoxification' -- an approach this administration finds all too comfortable I tend to be partial to market based solutions as part of the transformation armametarium, but I doubt that you get an effective solution with effective drivers. In the case of CO2, the Kyoto Protocol may be sufficient. In the case of a potent neurotoxin like mercury -- where the public health impact can be staggering -- any 'caps' in a cap and trade system need to start low, and get ratcheted down fast. BACT ('best available control technology') can't be allowed to drive the ratchet rate. On the contrary, the cap needs to ratcheted down fast enough to drive technology and process innovation. Either that, or the rule promulgators and the government officials that appoint them could volunteer to move their own families downwind and downstream of those plants. Now there's some simple and elegant regulatory cybernetics! (Historical footnote: Might Dupont's vaunted safety record have anything to do with a legacy of having managers -- back when they were a munitions company -- live near the plants, not on some hillside miles away? Mmm... could be!) 2:42:44 PM    comment []  trackback []

Toxics - Body burden The Oakland Tribune (which has been appearing, unsolicited and unwanted, on my doorstep for months) has never been one of my go-to media sources. But they've impressed me this week, with a three part series on the body burden of toxic chemicals carried by at least one typical US family -- a family the newspaper had tested, with some shocking results. This is our 'body burden' -- our chemical legacy, picked up from our possessions, passed to our children and sown across the environment. It's the result, scientists say, of 50 years of increasing reliance on synthetic chemicals for every facet of our daily lives. Only recently have regulators grasped its scope. Health officials have yet to fully comprehend its consequence. We are all, in a sense, subjects of an experiment, with no way to buy your way out, eat your way out or exercise your way out. We are guinea pigs when it comes to the unknown long-term threat these chemicals pose in our bodies and, in particular, our children. The main articles: What's in you? The great experiment The body chemmical Plus many sidebars, with additional detail and resources. (Plus a surprisingly lame search engine that makes it all but impossible to find everything. So it goes.) We make perfume from petroleum and preserve food in plastic. Our chances of dying in a building fire are almost nil. We clean bathrooms without scrubbing, spill coffee without worry of a stain. Yet these modern wonders come with a price. As synthetic chemicals have saturated our lives, so too have they permeated our bodies. We don't know the effect it has on our health. But scientists do have suspicions. Autism, once an affliction of 1 in 10,000 children, today is the scourge of 1 in 166. Childhood asthma rates have similarly exploded. And one in 12 couples of reproductive age in the United States is infertile. One may not cause the other; to draw such links remains, for now, beyond the grasp of science. Industry and other scientists say exposure remains well below levels considered harmful [~] the Hammond Holland's numbers notwithstanding. Our ability to detect these compounds, invisible even five years ago, has outstripped our ability to interpret the results. Publishing body burden data, in other words, does little but make people worry. But if it was your 2-year-old, would you want to know? I wonder: When will 'property rights'advocates take up the right to 'biochemical privacy'? 7:07:59 AM    comment []  trackback []