Fighting Mercury Rollbacks in South Carolina
SELC urges South Carolina to lead the South in mercury protection
Thousands of unborn children, breast-fed infants and children in South Carolina are exposed to toxic mercury pollution each year, putting them at risk for lowered intelligence, learning disabilities and irreversible brain damage. As a result, South Carolina has advised against consuming certain types of fish from 1,683 miles of its rivers, over 45,000 acres of its lakes and all of its coastline.
©SC Dept of Tourism
Children and pregnant women are advised against eating fish from all of South Carolina's coastline because of their high levels of mercury pollution.
Like the rest of the nation, South Carolina's largest source of mercury pollution is coal-fired power plants. The good news is South Carolina is well positioned to develop strong utility mercury regulations that protect public health and the environment at no additional cost to South Carolina utilities.
Under a federal rule, mercury-spewing power plants are not required to adopt the strictest available pollution controls to curb their mercury emissions. Instead, EPA, through adoption of the federal Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) in 2005, attempts to control mercury through a cap-and-trade scheme, delaying clean-up by decades and allowing even the dirtiest power plants to continue to pollute by buying credits from a cleaner plant across the country.
For South Carolina, these rules are so lax that residents of the state would actually be better off with no mercury regulation at all. That's because to comply with other clean air regulations unrelated to mercury pollution, South Carolina's major coal-fired electric utilities have, or soon will install, major pollution controls that will also achieve higher levels of mercury reduction than required under the federal CAMR. As a result, South Carolina utilities will emit far less mercury pollution than authorized under the lax CAMR.
The South Carolina Board of the Department of Health and Environmental Control voted in January 2007 to adopt mercury regulations that will reduce mercury slightly more than is federally required by CAMR but stops short of requiring any of the state’s coal-fired power plants to install additional controls to reduce mercury. Furthermore, South Carolina utilities will be allowed to make millions of dollars selling excess mercury allowances without requiring them to take additional steps to reduce mercury at any of their coal-fired units.
The DHEC-adopted regulations do go further than the federal rule by setting aside 25 percent of the excess credits in a separate account that utilities would have access to should they exceed their annual allowance. However, those excess credits will not be “retired” from available use by utilities until 2023.
South Carolina failed to take the big step it could have in adopting mercury regulations that would have significantly reduced emissions statewide at a cost that is free to utilities and free to taxpayers.
