EPA faces fight on mercury policy

WASHINGTON -- House and Senate Democrats introduced legislation yesterday that would force the Environmental Protection Agency to scrap a plan that would allow polluters to trade for the right to emit a certain level of mercury rather than face mandatory cuts.

The plan, announced by the Bush administration in March, is intended to reduce dangerous mercury emissions for the first time, but ease the burden on businesses by allowing them to trade for the right to keep emitting mercury in exchange for other plants agreeing to cut emissions even further.

But critics, including members of the New England delegation on Capitol Hill, say the Northeast would be burdened by the plan, because the region has some of the most severely polluted sites in the country. One Republican, Senator Susan M. Collins of Maine, joined Democrats yesterday in backing the effort to derail the plan.

''This is just a major issue for us regionally," said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, a sponsor of the House legislation. ''It's clear that we need to deal with this problem, and these . . . rules are a step backwards."

EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said the legislation would only delay the reduction of mercury levels in the ecosystem.

''The EPA and the Bush administration continue to feel strongly that we must act now to effectively reduce mercury emissions from power plants," Witcher said. ''This action threatens to delay the world's first mercury regulation on power plants."

Northeastern states and maritime Canadian provinces have nine ''hot spots" of mercury, a toxin produced by older coal-fired power plants. Mercury can damage the nervous systems of children, leading to mental retardation and blindness.

Critics fear that the tradable credits program will just make those hot spots hotter. Unlike acid rain pollution, which was successfully limited through a similar free-market trading program, mercury pollution is usually local, rather than spread out evenly across the atmosphere.

''We support the acid rain trading program," said John Walke, clean air director of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. ''But like the vast majority of states and public health officials, we oppose trading in a neurotoxin, like mercury."

Environmental groups say they want the government to require power plants to use available technologies to reduce mercury emissions instead. Mercury emissions are currently unregulated, but the Clean Air Act of 1990 required the EPA to come up with a plan to limit polluting industries.

In 2004, the EPA announced it would study two ways to regulate mercury: mandatory cuts and the trading system. A GAO report in February criticized the agency's study of the two methods, and said it ''did not provide sufficient information to compare the two options and determine which would provide the greatest net benefits."

The Bush administration's trading program would not start until 2010, and aims to cut emissions by 69 percent in 2018.

Walke said that New England was vulnerable to mercury pollution because of its older power plants and location downwind from the Midwest.