Fighting for Cleaner Air

Mercury is Threatening Our Health

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. Even small amounts of mercury can affect the way children learn, think, remember, and behave. If you've ever heard the expression "mad as a hatter," it comes from a time when mercury was routinely handled by hatmakers as a stiffening agent.

Nowadays, people are exposed to mercury primarily through eating fish-- especially big predator fish like tuna and swordfish. Did you ever think a pregnant or nursing mom would have to worry about eating a tunafish sandwich? Well, it turns out that one in six women of childbearing age in the U.S. have been exposed to mercury in amounts that threaten the health of their children, according to EPA. And forty-four states and territories have posted mercury advisories warning people to limit or avoid consumption of fish from more than 12 million acres of lakes and 400,000 miles of rivers.

So where is all this mercury coming from? The primary culprit is power plant smokestacks, which spew nearly 50 tons of mercury into our air each year.

In the long term, we could completely eliminate these emissions by shifting our nation's energy production from coal-burning power plants to renewables like wind and solar.

But there's also a short-term solution that gets us 90 percent of the way there - enforcing the Clean Air Act that Environmental Action and other activists helped pass more than 30 years ago. Under the Clean Air Act, facilities emitting hazardous substances--like mercury--are required to adopt available pollution controls within three years. Under this standard, power plants should be using existing technologies to reduce their mercury emissions by at least 90 percent by 2008. But they're not.

Instead, power plant owners are using their enormous political power to derail the Clean Air Act in Congress. Together with their allies in the Bush administration, they're aggressively pushing a bill that would give power plants a green light to keep pumping almost 7 times as much mercury into the air as the current Clean Air Act would allow.

And that's not all. The bill would also allow power plants to emit more soot-forming sulfur, more smog-making nitrogen, and grandfather some of the worst-polluting power plants from reducing their pollution at all.

Perhaps you've heard of this bill; the administration has cynically dubbed it "Clear Skies." But we're calling it "Unhealthy Skies" because that's what it would mean for us and our children.

Emboldened by the November 2004 election results, in December the administration announced a major push to pass Unhealthy Skies bill in 2005. In fact, when President Bush introduced Stephen Johnson as his nominee to direct the EPA, he announced that Mr. Johnson's first job would be to help pass Unhealthy Skies.

While a tough fight lies ahead, activists scored an early victory against Unhealthy Skies this spring. In January, we learned that the bill had been assigned to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and we got busy. We contacted our Senators, we contacted the media. We made our voices heard. And on Wednesday, March 9th, the committee failed to approve Unhealthy Skies on a 9 to 9 tie. Senators Lieberman, Clinton, Lautenberg, Baucus, Obama, Carper, Jeffords, and Chafee all voted against the bill. Even more remarkable is that this vote occurred after the Bush administration had rescheduled the vote three times in an effort to peel off one or more of these Senators. They couldn't do it.

The significance of this vote cannot be understated. It marks the first time that the Bush administration has lost an environmental vote - or perhaps any vote--in this Congress.

Unfortunately, our powerful opponents don't give up so easily. In the wake of the committee vote, they now are scheming to craft a "compromise" bill-- maybe only 5 times as much mercury--that could provide political cover for some of their Senate colleagues. And at least for now, it appears that they have found a willing and eager negotiator--Senator Tom Carper (D-DE).

To counter these tactics, Environmental Action has been running our largest-ever grassroots campaign. Over the summer, our activists have mobilized more than 100,000 citizens in 16 key states across the country. In addition, we're sponsoring a national e-petition telling key Senators "No Deals on Unhealthy Skies."