WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Monday proposed a market-based system of pollution controls designed to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants by nearly 70% over the next 15 years.
The administration simultaneously proposed an alternative approach that would reduce the emissions by 29% by the end of 2007 using a traditional regulatory system requiring all plants to install pollution controls.
But the administration expressed its clear preference for the "cap-and-trade" approach, which would create a market-based trading system that would set pollution control targets for individual power plants and give each plant a corresponding number of pollution credits. Plants that cut their mercury emissions faster than their targets could sell their excess pollution credits to those that lagged.
Utilities said they would be challenged to comply with either scheme but praised the administration for promoting a cap-and-trade policy, which they say offers more flexibility.
Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, an electric utility association, described cap-and-trade as "a concept that has proven very cost-effective in reducing emissions."
Public health and environmental advocates and their supporters in Congress criticized the proposal as an inadequate response to an environmental problem that is endangering children's health. Developing fetuses and young children face the highest risk from mercury exposure, which has been linked to significant neurological and developmental impairment.
"It is clear that the government is aware of the risks of mercury, understands that aggressive regulations work, but remains unwilling to undertake these needed public health protections," said Dr. Robert K. Musil, chief executive officer of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a public health advocacy group.
Coal-fired power plants are the biggest source of mercury emissions. When mercury particles and gases drop into water, some of them turn into a highly toxic form known as methylmercury, which enters the aquatic food chain. People are exposed to mercury primarily by eating fish, and the Environmental Protection Agency and many states have issued warnings on consumption of fish.
Jeffrey Holmstead, assistant EPA administrator for air programs, said the agency could not predict whether fish would be less contaminated, or people less at risk, as a result of the proposal to cut mercury emissions.
