Email on Mercury From the USPIRG

[Jerry Blake]

Dear U.S. PIRG supporter,

Last Spring many of you (over 600,000 people nationwide) wrote to the Bush administration about cleaning up mercury pollution from power plants. In response, the EPA promised to conduct further analyses on greater mercury controls and that these would be available for public review.

Instead of doing that, the EPA announced that they will not even consider requiring power plants to reduce their mercury pollution by the maximum extent possible.

Please take a moment to tell the EPA to follow through on their promise to consider all options to reduce mercury emissions. Then ask your friends and family to help by forwarding this email to them.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser:
http://pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=877&id4=ES


Background

EPA scientists estimate that one in six women of childbearing age in the U.S. has high levels of mercury in her blood, putting 630,000 of the four million babies born each year at risk of health problems due to mercury exposure. EPA is required under the Clean Air Act to reduce mercury emissions from power plants, the nation's single largest source of mercury emissions, by the maximum amount possible by no later than March 2005.

After it was revealed early this year that EPA lifted key parts of its proposal verbatim from industry memos, EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt repeatedly promised that the agency would conduct further analyses on how to reduce mercury pollution to the greatest extent possible and that these proposals for greater mercury reductions would be available for public review. Instead, EPA recently announced that the public would be given 30 days to comment only on outside groups' technical analyses of their initial weak proposal and that EPA would not provide any new analyses or proposals of its own.

Under the Bush administration's proposal, power plants could emit six to seven times more mercury than allowed under the Clean Air Act and could delay these inadequate reductions from current emissions levels until at least 2018, far beyond the Act's 2008 deadline. The plan has sparked unprecedented public opposition - 13 attorneys general, 44 U.S. senators, 184 members of Congress, the EPA's own Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, medical and health groups, sportsmen's groups, and environmental organizations have urged the administration to drop its plan and instead move forward with a rule that protects children's health and complies with the law.

Please take a moment to tell the EPA to follow through on their promise to consider all options to reduce mercury emissions. Then ask your friends and family to help by forwarding this email to them.

To take action, click on this link or paste it into your web browser:
http://pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=877&id4=ES

Sincerely,

Gene Karpinski
U.S. PIRG Executive Director
[email protected]
http://www.USPIRG.org

P.S. Thanks again for your support. Please feel free to share this e-mail with your family and friends.

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[fatboy]

Hmmm, seems i like i remember posting in the off topic posts a while back about Bush being the worst Environmental president in thirty years. Not trying to get anything started, just an observation.

[Larry-Southern Indiana]

And you would be correct fatboy.


Larry