EPA Director Further Delays Action On Mercury Studies - LA Times

[hatrack]

WASHINGTON — "Despite an earlier promise, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency hasn't yet ordered new studies to help resolve a controversy over controlling mercury emissions. The reason, said EPA Administrator Michael O. Leavitt, was that he had doubts about the assumptions the agency made in arriving at its conclusions. He said he was challenging the way the EPA determined how rapidly it could reduce pollution.

How quickly the government can cut mercury pollution from power plants without causing economic harm is of great interest to the utility industry, public health officials and environmentalists, and has prompted divisions between EPA career staffers and political appointees. "This is a big decision and it's one that I very much want to be done properly," Leavitt said in a recent interview. The process, he added, would be "very open, inclusive and rigorous."

Critics, inside and outside the EPA, said Leavitt's failure thus far to order the studies he promised suggested that the administration was still reluctant to do its own analysis for fear that the results would justify deeper and faster reductions than it favored. "We get talk but no action from the administrator," said a longtime EPA staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Decisions about the proposed regulation were made before he came to EPA. He has been here for almost a year and the agency has still not done the work that is necessary to produce a better regulation."

Mercury released into the atmosphere from the nation's 1,100 coal-fired power plants is the largest single source of the neurotoxin in the United States. Mercury has found its way into rivers and lakes, and an EPA analysis has found that about 600,000 babies born in the U.S. annually may be exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb, chiefly as a result of their mothers having eaten fish. Exposure can cause neurological and developmental damage. Nearly a year ago, the EPA proposed a flexible, market-based plan to reduce emissions."

EDIT

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-mercury7nov07,1,6537933.story?coll=la-news-a_section

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Translation: A certain level of human death and hardship are

acceptable.

[Buzz Clik]

2. Leavitt is unqualified to make these decisions...

and those in the upper levels of the EPA who might have been able to help have been been flushed, demoted, or are being ignored. Leavitt was brought in to be Bush's butt boy, and he hasn't disappointed.

[NVMojo]

3. Asshole Leavitt isn't going to do anything when he knows that

right between California and Utah, Nevada has FOUR PROPOSED BRAND NEW COAL FIRED POWER PLANTS UP FOR CONSTRUCTION and one of them is owned by Newmont Mining Company, a foreign mining company, and will be constructed near Elko, near the Salt Lake City area in the nearest air shed and NO ONE wants to piss off a gold mine!!! Chickenhawks kill the environment and those who breathe it!!!