EPA may tighten its mercury plan

WASHINGTON -- Under pressure from environmental groups and state officials, the Bush administration says it is rethinking its proposed rules limiting mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants and as a result may tighten the proposal.

Administration officials have become uncomfortable with analyses indicating that if the proposal is adopted, the Environmental Protection Agency could miss, perhaps by more than a decade, its own 2018 deadline for reducing those emissions by 70 percent.

Mike Leavitt, who took the helm of the environmental agency only weeks before the proposed regulations were announced, was largely uninvolved in their initial development. But in the last several weeks, EPA employees say, he has immersed himself in briefings about the rules that have provoked criticism from scientists, state officials and environmental advocates.

"I've spent hours in briefings," Leavitt said in an interview on Monday. "I've been crawling through the blueprints of power plants. I've been meeting with people on technology, both engineers and scientists."

On Friday, Leavitt briefed the White House, where, administration officials say, he indicated that his agency would consider exploring tougher alternatives or adjustments to the proposal.

"What our models now show is that we wouldn't get there as soon as we expected we would," Jeffrey Holmstead, assistant environmental protection administrator in charge of the air office, said of the agency's goal in an interview on Sunday.

Coal-burning power plants are the nation's largest source of unregulated emissions of mercury, spewing about 48 tons of it a year, equivalent to some 40 percent of all human-caused mercury emissions. But court-ordered deadlines, resulting from a lawsuit that environmental groups brought against the Clinton administration, mandated the EPA's introduction of a mercury proposal by last Dec. 15, with a final rule due on Dec. 15 of this year.

The proposal that the Bush administration offered in December, and that it is now reconsidering, would allow power plants to buy and sell among themselves, starting in 2010, a limited right to pollute with mercury, much as with the current regulation of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.

Environmental groups, which criticize that approach as questionable under the Clean Air Act, favor a stricter system that would force all power plants to install pollution controls by 2007, a deadline that utility companies call technically unfeasible.

EPA staff members have themselves complained that analysis has been unusually limited for a regulation so complex.

And critics note the proposed rule includes verbatim language supplied by two separate industry advocates, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Several complete paragraphs were lifted from three memos provided by Latham & Watkins, a national law firm whose clients include large coal-fired utility companies.

More serious, according to critics, the proposal also includes exact language provided by West Associates, a research and advocacy group representing 20 power and transmission companies in the Western United States.

"The most important point is that the analysis isn't complete," Leavitt said in Monday's interview. "I've asked for an array of additional analysis to be done."

Mercury has become a politically delicate issue for the administration, particularly in the Great Lakes states, some of them crucial in the presidential election and almost all with statewide mercury-contamination warnings about eating fish.

Mercury is also an issue among another important constituency: women. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that one woman in eight has mercury concentration in her body that exceeds safety levels. And scientists at the EPA recently said that of some 4 million babies born a year, 630,000 -- double the previous estimate -- might have been exposed as fetuses to unsafe levels of mercury. In January, a committee of doctors advising the children's health office of the agency sent a letter to Leavitt raising concern that the proposed rules did not provide enough protection for children.

Further, since the proposal was issued in December, several states, Connecticut and New Jersey among them, have moved to regulate mercury pollution more strictly than the administration.

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