A mercurial vote.Byline: The Register-Guard The U.S. Senate came tantalizingly tan·ta·lize tr.v. tan·ta·lized, tan·ta·liz·ing, tan·ta·liz·es To excite (another) by exposing something desirable while keeping it out of reach. 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
Gordon Harold Smith (born May 25, 1952) is Oregon's junior United States Senator, currently serving his second term. He is a member of the Republican Party. of Oregon, supporting repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), independent agency of the U.S. government, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1970 to reduce and control air and water pollution, noise pollution, and radiation and to ensure the safe handling and 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 de·bil·i·tat·ing adj. Causing a loss of strength or energy. Debilitating Weakening, or reducing the strength of. Mentioned in: Stress Reduction 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 The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the United States Congress, and thus an agency in the Legislative Branch of the United States Government. and the EPA's own inspector general reported that the agency had intentionally skewed skewed curve of a usually unimodal distribution with one tail drawn out more than the other and the median will lie above or below the mean. skewed Epidemiology adjective Referring to an asymmetrical distribution of a population or of data 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
Susan Margaret Collins (born December 7 1952, in Caribou, Maine) is an American politician, the junior U.S. Senator from Maine and a Republican. , 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 EPA eicosapentaenoic acid. EPA abbr. eicosapentaenoic acid EPA, n.pr See acid, eicosapentaenoic. EPA, n. 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 hot spots acute moist dermatitis. ." 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 United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. 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. |
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