Its About Time

Well, it only took 22 years.  And the courts have had to get involved because, it seems, government can't do its job without them.  But the EPA is finally ready to set national limits for toxic air pollution - including mercury, arsenic and other bad boys - even for the big energy companies which have heretofore managed to avoid meaningful regulation.  The agency wants to set a deadline of three years to comply.

While the NPR story quotes one CEO as saying the three year deadline will be "impossible" to attain,  Sr. Vice President of Constellation Energy, Paul Allen, who's made the switch already, refutes that statement.  Allen says that it took his company only a little over two years to comply with his state's standards (which are similar to those the EPA is proposing) and, at "the peak of construction, put 1,300 people to work."  Sounds like good news to me.

As a mother and asthmatic, I take a hard line on this.  The article reports that the lawsuit which initiated this order (in 1990!) came about when Native American children who lived near a contaminated lake were showing much higher than healthy levels of mercury - because their families caught and ate a lot of fish from the lake.  Because of the high level of pollutants, the families had to stop fishing and lost a high quality, low cost source of food.  Once again, the poorest of the population suffer for pollution from those who are the richest. I have no sympathy for the power companies - or for their whining.  What made them think it was ok to dump mercury, arsenic, and acid gas into the atmosphere, the water and the land in the first place?  I would go even further and order that the companies themselves have to absorb the cost of the change - and not allow them to pass the buck yet once again to the struggling members of society by upping the cost of energy.