Climate 411

New Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Will Protect Children and Save Lives

By Fred Krupp / Published: December 21, 2011

This is one of the best weeks I’ve had in a long time.

Right on the heels of today’s landmark court decision upholding European laws to reduce airplane pollution, we got another historic moment for the environment and public health.

Today, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson unveiled the new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which will place our country’s first-ever national limits on mercury and other toxic air pollution from coal- and oil-fired power plants.

Every decade or so, the United States takes a giant step forward on the road to cleaner, healthier air. Getting the lead out of gasoline was one. Reducing acid rain was another.

Today’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, 21 years in the making, are a new giant step forward.

Power plants are responsible for half of all manmade mercury emissions, as well as 75 percent of acid gases, and 60 percent of arsenic.

Mercury exposure can cause brain damage in infants, and can affect children’s ability to walk, talk, read and learn. Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of babies are born each year with potentially unsafe levels of mercury in their blood.

Many of the other toxic pollutants also controlled by the new rules — such as chromium, arsenic, dioxin and acid gases — are known or probable carcinogens and can attack the brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys.

Cost-effective and tested technology solutions are available to reduce mercury pollution and other toxic air contaminants from power plants by more than 90 percent. Many states have already led the way in adopting policies to control mercury emissions, helping to drive investment in technology solutions, but this is the first time we’ll have a national standard.

According to EPA, the new rules will:

  • Prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths each year
  • Prevent up to 4,700 heart attacks each year
  • Prevent up to 130,000 asthma attacks each year
  • Prevent up to 5,700 hospital and emergency room visits each year
  • Prevent up to 540,000 missed work or school days each year

The rules will also provide employment for thousands. The updating of older power plants with modern air pollution control technology will support:

  • 46,000 new short-term construction jobs
  • 8,000 long-term utility jobs

The value of the air quality improvements for human health alone will be as much as $90 billion each year.

I can’t overstate the importance of these new standards. We should all thank President Obama, Administrator Jackson, and everyone at EPA for protecting our air – and our health.

This is the perfect holiday gift for America.

Posted in Clean Air Act, Health, Jobs, News, Policy / Comments are closed

America’s Leading Mercury Scientists Call for Strong Air Pollution Standards

By Kritee / Published: December 14, 2011

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce its long-awaited Mercury and Air Toxics Standards any day now.

The new standards would place the first-ever national limits on mercury and other toxic air pollution from coal- and oil-fired power plants, and the issue is already being examined from every possible angle – politics, economics, business, health, you name it.

Now a new group is weighing in.

Just yesterday, 23 of the country’s leading scientific experts on mercury wrote a letter to the White House about the proposed new standard and its importance to the health and safety of all Americans.  And I had the honor of joining them!

Together, our group of scientists represents at least a million hours of study on mercury and its effects. But this is the first time we’ve publicly weighed in, as a group, to support this vitally important standard.

We felt compelled to write to President because, during recent Congressional hearings – despite voluminous scientific literature to the contrary – a few people actually claimed that there is no science to back up the health benefits of decreasing pollution from power plants.

Our letter is our answer to that ridiculous claim:

As mercury scientists and physicians, we strongly refute such statements

And we:

… affirm our belief that the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) will protect the health of thousands of Americans each year.

Some of us have studied how mercury travels in our air, soils or waters — and how it ends up in our bodies. Some of us specialize in how various forms of mercury affect everything from our individual enzymes and cells all the way to our ecosystems. We have, collectively, traced mercury all the way from smokestacks to the cells in our bodies. We also represent physicians who actually treat patients, including children, who have chronic pulmonary, cardiovascular, and neurological diseases caused by air pollution.

And we all came to the same conclusion, which we put into our letter:

… minimizing all mercury exposure is essential to improving human, wildlife and ecosystem health because exposure to mercury in any form places a heavy burden on the biochemical machinery within cells of all living organisms.

Our letter both affirms our support for the scientific findings of EPA’s Science Advisory Board on the health impacts of methylmercury, and goes a step further – to highlight the toxicity of all forms of mercury.

Here are our key points:

  • The neurological development, particularly brain maturation, of fetus and young children are severely affected by methylmercury, the form of mercury that collects and concentrates in aquatic food chains.
  • While the neurotoxicity of methylmercury to the young has been widely acknowledged, the effects on children and adults through exposure to all other forms of mercury have not been effectively publicized. No form is mercury is safe.
  • Mercury has no biologically beneficial function; indeed, each atom that ends up in the body can be toxic to all types of cells.
  • Mercury is such a potent toxin because it bonds very strongly to functionally important sites of proteins including enzymes, antibodies and nerve growth-cones that keep cells alive, “intelligent” and safe.

One of my personal heroes is the late Dr. Kathryn R. Mahaffey, who conducted careful studies for over a decade to test the mercury levels in the blood of women of child bearing age in the U.S. Her research is the reason we know that about 10 percent of babies born in America each year have mercury levels sufficient to cause adverse neurological and developmental health effects. Along with her collaborators, she also carefully compiled information on the effects of all forms of mercury on our endocrine system, including hormones that control functioning of our reproductive system.

The pioneering research tools and methodologies developed by several of the mercury research giants who have signed on to this letter helped Dr. Mahaffey reach her conclusions. Some of the signatories are now building on Dr. Mahaffey’s work in insightful ways. For example, Dr. Chad Hammerschmidt from Wright State University has written that unless we decouple mercury emission from power production, we could have as many as 30 percent of children born in the U.S with too much mercury in their blood. Along with their collaborators, Drs. David Evers, Charlie Driscoll and Thomas Holsen identified that local mercury emissions are linked to such high mercury concentrations in multiple biological species that these areas of high mercury emissions were referred to as biological mercury hotspots.

I would love to write more about the fundamental ways in which the signatories of this letter have added to the understanding of the transport, transformations and toxicity of mercury, and I encourage you read the entire letter to see who they are, and to learn more about the work they do.

We fully understand the remaining uncertainties in our understanding of the global mercury cycle. Yet we believe there is irrefutable proof for:

  • The local and regional deposition of mercury from coal-fired power plants within the U.S.
  • The toxicity of each and every atom of mercury in any form, and
  • Rapid reductions in mercury levels in many biological species upon reductions in mercury emissions from local sources

Thus, we attest to the wisdom of stringent national-level mercury regulation. Now we need our policy makers to act. We need them to create and support a strong Mercury and Air Toxics Standards.

Posted in Clean Air Act, Health, News, Policy, Science / Read 2 Responses

New Report on Climate Change Says Wilder Weather is Headed Our Way

By Keith Gaby / Published: November 18, 2011

A new report by some the world’s top researchers confirms that climate change will make the extreme weather we’ve seen recently even worse in the future.

The report was released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It synthesizes two years work from 100 experts who analyze data from all over the world.

Their conclusion: climate change is bringing us more extreme weather, and it’s likely to get worse and have greater negative impacts over the next century.

Here’s what EDF’s Chief Scientist, Steve Hamburg, had to say today:

We’ve all been experiencing these dangerous storms and heat waves, and this report provides strong evidence of the links between impacts of dangerous weather and climate change. Now we need to start using this data to find ways to protect ourselves and our communities.

Here are some of the highlights of the report – or lowlights as the case may be:

Here in the United States, we’re likely to see

  • Higher temperatures and more hot days through the next century (Record-breaking heat that would have been a once-in-20-year high are likely to become a one-in-two-year event)
  • More frequent and heavier rains, especially in winter
  • Stronger hurricanes that will do more damage
  • Increased droughts, especially in the center of the country
  • Higher sea levels, which means more coastal erosion and other damage
  • All these changes will affect our agriculture, water supplies, health – even tourism. And all that, in turn, will affect our economy.

That’s more bad news on top of an extremely unpleasant year of bad weather. America suffered through a number of extreme weather events, including these compiled by Climate Central:

  • The Groundhog Day Blizzard blanketed 22 states and crippled travel. The deadly blizzard was one of Chicago’s top five snowstorms on record.
  • Some of the worst flooding in history hit us in the spring, from the Upper Midwest all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. More than three times the normal spring rainfall caused the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers to overflow. Flooding in Minot, North Dakota damaged 4,000 homes and forced 11,000 to evacuate. More than a million acres of farmland flooded in Missouri and Arkansas.
  • Hurricane Irene became the first hurricane to make landfall in New Jersey in 100 years, and inundated people from Virginia all the way north to Vermont. Tropical Storm Lee following right behind Irene. Their combined rainfalls led to damaging floods in the East.
  • Record-setting rainfalls were recorded across the country. August 2011 was the all-time rainiest month in New York City, Newark and Philadelphia; 2011 will be the rainiest year ever in Cleveland, Scranton, Binghamton and Harrisburg. 14 places in Wyoming and Montana set precipitation records in May, and seven places set new all-time records for the single rainiest day ever.
  • Deadly tornado outbreaks caused damage across the Southeast. 748 twisters touched down across the South in April, the most ever recorded in a single month. The EF-5 tornado that destroyed Joplin, Missouri was America’s deadliest single tornado since modern record-keeping started in 1950.
  • Extreme heat across the region had people sweltering. Texas had the hottest summer for any state in U.S. history, going back to when modern records were first kept in 1895. New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado had their hottest summers on record — as did Tallahassee, Florida and Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Wichita Falls, Texas had 100 days when the temperature was more than 100 degrees; Austin had 67 days over 100 degrees. Washington D.C. hit an all-time record high of 105 degrees on July 22.
  • Severe droughts caused massive damage in the Southwest. Texas had the worst one-year drought on record.
  • Wildfires — which are linked to droughts –burned across the West. 3.5 million acres burned in Texas — the state’s worst wildfire season ever. 156,000 acres burned in New Mexico and 538,000 in Arizona.
Posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Extreme Weather, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, News, Science / Read 4 Responses

Clean Air Act Rules Will Save U.S. $82 Billion on Health Care

By Kusai Merchant / Published: November 17, 2011

The Clean Air Act was originally designed to save lives, protect public health and safeguard the environment – and it has been a clear success story on those fronts.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) own analyses show that Clean Air Act rules yield hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits. These include the value of avoided premature mortality, negative health impacts, lost worker productivity due to illness, and environmental improvements such as increased visibility and agricultural productivity.

Now EDF and Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) have released a new report that takes a closer look at one segment of those benefits.

Our new analysis [PDF] finds that four major rules of the Clean Air Act will yield more than $82 billion in Medicare, Medicaid and other health care savings for America through 2021.

The report is called Saving Lives and Reducing Health Care Costs: How Clean Air Rules Benefit the Nation [PDF].

It looks at four new rules recently proposed or finalized by EPA:

Those four rules are expected to lower emissions rates of a number of air pollutants, including mercury, arsenic, dioxins, acid gases, smog, and soot.

Reducing levels of those dangerous substances will, in turn, reduce rates of premature mortality, chronic bronchitis, heart attacks, respiratory hospital admissions, and emergency room visits related to asthma.

That, in turn, will result in health care savings of $82 billion, including;

  • $44.6 billion in Medicare and federal-level health care savings
  • $2.8 billion in state-level Medicaid and other state and local savings
  • $8.3 billion in out-of-pocket individual savings
  • $24.7 billion in private insurance savings

Our report is one more piece of evidence that clean air rules are a good investment for America. We can save lives, protect public health, and save billions of taxpayer dollars that are currently being spent by programs like Medicare to treat pollution-related illnesses.

Our report also shows that the polluter-led attempts to roll back clean air rules would not reduce costs, but rather shift costs from polluters onto the American people.

Our new report also includes a second analysis of health care savings expected from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which finds implementation of these programs could yield over $612 billion between 2000 and 2020 in reduced Medicare, Medicaid, out-of-pocket and private insurance spending.

You can read the full report here [PDF].

Posted in Clean Air Act, Economics, Health, News / Tagged | Comments are closed

EDF Applauds New Fuel Efficiency and Emissions Standards for Cars and Trucks

By Vickie Patton / Published: November 17, 2011

America has driven a little bit further down the road toward clean and fuel efficient cars.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Transportation just announced their joint proposal to set new, stronger fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks – for model years 2017 to 2025.

EDF’s Fred Krupp said the announcement:

 … is more good news for American consumers, auto manufacturers, public health and the environment. By 2025 we’ll have cars that on average get more than 54 miles to the gallon, save their owners more than $8,000 in fuel costs, save our country more than two million barrels of oil a day, and drastically reduce the carbon dioxide pollution in our air.

This is the second phase of setting new fuel efficiency standards for cars. The Administration already set standards for model year 2012 to 2016 cars, which will reach an average of 35.5 miles to the gallon.

They also set new standards for trucks and buses. (Our experts have written about all of this before, of course – most recently here)

But the newly proposed standards are the biggest step forward yet. Together with the earlier improvements, they will:

  • Save Americans a total of $1.7 trillion in national fuel savings over the life of the program.
  • Reduce our oil consumption by an amount more than our 2010 oil imports from the entire Persian Gulf, by the year 2025
  • Reduce our carbon dioxide pollution, over the life of the program, by the equivalent to the emissions from the entire United States in 2010

You can get a lot more details, and a illustrative graph, on our new fact sheet.

Posted in Cars and Pollution, Clean Air Act, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, News, Policy / Comments are closed

More Evidence That the Benefits of EPA Rules Vastly Outweigh the Costs

By Susanne Brooks / Published: November 11, 2011

Yet another study is confirming what we’ve known for quite some time — the benefits of EPA’s clean air rules vastly outweigh the costs.

An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reinforces what other studies have told us time and time again: clean air is a great economic investment.

Unfortunately, that fact is often lost in the unfounded attacks on EPA that have gotten so much attention lately, in the media and even in Congress.

EPI’s analysis examines the combined effect of EPA rules that have already been finalized under the Obama Administration, as well as those currently in the proposal stage. It finds that:

The dollar value of the benefits of the major rules finalized or proposed by the EPA so far during the Obama administration exceeds the rules’ costs by an exceptionally wide margin. Health benefits in terms of lives saved and illnesses avoided will be enormous.

Of course, the most important benefits of clean air are those related to human health. Just three of these rules (Cross-State Air Pollution (CSAPR), Mercury and Air Toxics, and Boiler MACT) are estimated to save up to 57,500 lives a year.

Those lives saved, plus illnesses avoided and other environmental improvements translate to enormous economic benefits:

  • Setting aside CSAPR, the combined annual benefits from all final major rules exceed their costs by $10 billion to $95 billion a year. The estimated benefit-to-cost ratios for those final rules range from 2-to-1 to 20-to-1.
  • The net benefits from CSAPR range from $112 billion to $289 billion a year.
  • The combined annual benefits from three major proposed rules exceed their costs by $62 billion to $188 billion a year. The estimated benefit-to-cost ratios for those proposed rules range from 6-to-1 to 15-to-1

The results are even more striking in chart form:

Benefits and costs of EPA rules

(For more details on EPI’s analysis, see our new fact sheet.)

EPI has also shown, in a previous analysis, that EPA clean air rules can also have a positive impact on overall employment – including 28,000 to 158,000 jobs from the Mercury and Air Toxics rule for power plants alone.   

In fact, Josh Bivens of EPI recently testified before the U.S. House of Representatives on the Mercury and Air Toxics rule for power plants. He said:

Calls to delay implementation of the rule based on vague appeals to wider economic weakness have the case entirely backward – there is no better time than now, from a job-creation perspective, to move forward with these rules. 

It’s time for everyone – and especially Congress — to recognize that EPA rules are not only good for our health, but also our economy.

(For more on how cleaner air can save lives, improve health, and help our economy, see the following previous EDF blog posts:  “Thank You, EPA,” “The Clean Air Act Amendments: Good for Our Health AND Our Economy,” and “Newsflash: Clean Air Act saves lives, boosts GDP.”)

Posted in Clean Air Act, Economics, News, Policy / Comments are closed