E.P.A. Weakens Controls on Mercury - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/climate/epa-mercury-coal.html

E.P.A. Weakens Controls on Mercury

The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls, a move that would effectively loosen the rules on other toxic pollutants.

A coal-fired powerplant in Winfield, W.Va. The 2012 rule has been credited with preventing thousands of premature deaths.Credit...John Raby/Associated Press

By Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport

• April 16, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic.

The new Environmental Protection Agency rule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental lawyers said would fundamentally undermine the legal underpinnings of controls on mercury and many other pollutants.

By reducing the positive health effects of regulations on paper and raising their economic costs, the new method could be used to justify loosening restrictions on any pollutant that the fossil fuel industry has deemed too costly to control.

"That is the big unstated goal," said David Konisky, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. "This is less about mercury than about potentially constraining or handcuffing future efforts by the E.P.A. to regulate air pollution."