Muddled thinking on mercury

Environment officials act like they've lost a few brain cells, says the Sierra Club's DAN McDERMOTT. So have the rest of us. Something must be done

By DAN MCDERMOTT

Monday, April 15, 2002 - Print Edition, Page A11

The highest-ranking environmental bureaucrats from around the country are meeting in Toronto today to once again grapple with bringing the electricity sector's emissions of the nerve-toxin mercury under control. Hang on to your brain cells, if past performance is a guide.

Coal-fired power plants are the largest airborne source, and the largest unregulated source, of mercury pollution in North America. Deputy ministers of the environment from the provinces, territories and the federal government have the task of establishing a Canada-Wide Standard (CWS) for mercury. Their political masters, the ministers, were supposed to take action to reduce power-plant mercury emissions in 1999. They didn't. The new deadline is for this year and it is again the interests of the coal lobby that seem likely to prevail.

Mercury is a persistent, bio-accumulative nerve toxin. In high doses, mercury kills. Hundreds of people died as a result of mercury poisoning in Minamata Japan in the 1950s. Even in very small doses, mercury can cause neurological and developmental damage to unborn babies and young children. In most cases, mercury attacks the brain and the nervous system. Mercury makes you stupid.

Canada's other large mercury-emitting sectors have acted and are succeeding in achieving substantial reductions. Between 1995 and 1999, the primary base-metals sector reduced mercury emissions by 40 per cent; municipal garbage incinerators reduced by 91 per cent; hazardous waste incinerators reduced by 79 per cent.

And the electricity-generation sector? It increased its mercury pollution by 62 per cent, flying in the face of public health, environmental integrity and everyone else's good-faith efforts to control this toxin.

Mercury can do its damage vast distances away from the original source point. Arctic communities are nowhere near major mercury sources, yet mercury pollution is rampant in Arctic ecosystems and in the bodies of our northern residents. Over 60 per cent of the residents of some Canadian Arctic communities have registered dangerous levels of mercury contamination in their bodies.

Absent government action, we can expect continued warnings about consuming mercury-contaminated fish caught in most Canadian bodies of water. The tone of these warnings is escalating as well. Recent scientific studies indicate that mercury is especially harmful to a developing human fetus. The only debate on this point is on the wisdom of pregnant women eating any fish at all. Remember when fish was considered brain food?

Public health and environmental advocates throughout North America have consistently recommended that electricity generators be required to reduce mercury emissions by 90 per cent by 2010. This goal is widely accepted as being achievable through a variety of potential options that include renewable energy, energy conservation, switching to less polluting fuels such as natural gas, and retrofit technologies applied to coal-fired generators. Canada's Minister of the Environment, David Anderson, has publicly and repeatedly voiced his support for the 90-per-cent reduction target.

So why isn't a 90-per-cent mercury reduction program for electricity generators in place? Power and politics are being allowed to trump science, public health and the environment. The reality of neurologically damaged babies and devastated populations of Canadian loons appear to be not enough to counter the interests of those who profit greatly from burning cheap coal to generate electricity. The rules of the Canadian regulatory framework now make it far more difficult than ever before to take effective action to limit releases of even toxins as obvious as mercury.

During a November, 2001, Environment Canada-sponsored conference, government officials twisted and turned as they spewed a steady stream of excuses for either further delay or a meaningless standard. The most inventive twist was the idea of replacing the concept of a mercury-reduction rate with that of a so-called "mercury-capture rate." This new language seeks to claim credit for the portion of mercury that would never have gone up the stack. Thus, as environmental researcher Anna Tilman has pointed out, a 28-per-cent mercury emission-reduction rate becomes a 50-per-cent capture rate.

The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) is comprised of the environment ministers of Canada, the 10 provinces and the three territories. Decisions are arrived at through consensus. This means that Prince Edward Island could, if it wanted to, effectively block action on reducing the flow of a particular pollutant. In the case of mercury, the polluters' godfathers are coal-addicted Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

At the end of this round of the Canada-Wide Standards process, Canadians may have to turn to Mr. Anderson. He may have to use his powers under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) to enact the 90-per-cent mercury emission reduction standard that he has supported and knows to be necessary to protect the health of Canadian ecosystems, ourselves, and our children.

Or perhaps it's time to realize that burning coal to generate electricity is an antiquated and destructive practice that should be cast into the past and cease to be part of our present. That would reduce the electricity sector's mercury emissions by 100 per cent. Dan McDermott is director of the Sierra Club Eastern Canada Chapter.