A mercurial vote.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The U.S. Senate came tantalizingly close Tuesday to rejecting the Bush administration's retrograde strategy on mercury pollution.

The unusual 51-47 vote - with nine Republicans, including Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, supporting repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency rules finalized last March - sends a strong message to the White House that swifter and tougher measures are needed to protect children and pregnant women from the debilitating effects of mercury emissions.

It's doubtful, however, that the administration will reconsider its industry-friendly approach to mercury pollution. After all, it forged ahead with the new rules even after the Government Accountability Office and the EPA's own inspector general reported that the agency had intentionally skewed its analysis to make the administration's market-based approach look superior.

The EPA's approach to regulating mercury pollution has been so tainted - and the health consequences are so severe - that Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, sponsored a resolution under a rarely used 1996 law that allows Congress to challenge agency rules with a guaranteed floor vote. Repeal of the EPA rules would have required the agency to rewrite them in line with Clean Air Act standards, which require power plants to install state-of-the-art technology to reduce mercury emissions.

The new rules employ a cap-and-trade system that allows flagrant polluters to avoid reducing their mercury emissions by buying credits from cleaner power plants that may be located hundreds of miles away. For obvious economic reasons, coal-burning utilities and other industries favored this approach over traditional "command and control" alternatives that require major investments in equipment that captures mercury before it is released from smokestacks.

Administration officials rightly point out that the cap-and-trade approach has been effective in reducing some types of pollution such as acid rain. But it's a terribly ineffective strategy for dealing with mercury, which tends to concentrate in narrowly contained "hot spots." Under the new rules, mercury levels will, in fact, eventually decrease nationwide. But some areas will become steeped in mercury contamination as dirty power plants purchase credits from distant plants with little or no impact on local pollution.

The utility industry argues that repealing the administration's strategy would be too expensive. But the economic toll on industry pales in comparison to the health impacts for millions of women and children. By the EPA's own estimates, 15 percent of the 4 million babies born each year in the United States may be exposed to levels of mercury in the womb that can cause neurological damage and learning problems.

The Bush administration should put the interests of children and pregnant women above those of the power industry and replace its new rules with regulations that meet the higher standards of the Clean Air Act. Under that law, power plants would be required to achieve a 90 percent reduction in mercury emissions in three years. By contrast, the Bush strategy doesn't begin to cut emissions until 2019 and doesn't reach the goal of 70 percent reductions until 2030.

The new mercury rules ultimately make no sense from the standpoint of economics, public health or morality. Tuesday's Senate vote came close to forcing a repeal and rewrite of these pernicious new rules. Now the administration should finish the job.