Leahy Steps Up Push To Repeal Controversial Mercury Pollution Rule;
Senate Vote Looms Next Week

[Below are the remarks of Sen. Patrick Leahy from a news conference today (Thursday) on the Leahy-Collins resolution to repeal the Bush Administration’s controversial EPA rule on mercury pollution.  Repeal of the rule would force EPA to follow the more stringent terms of the Clean Air Act.  Leahy is using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) in his bid to repeal the rule.  This will be only the third time in its history that CRA has been used in an effort to repeal a federal agency regulation.  The Senate vote may happen on Monday.  The 60-day (Senate Legislative Days) clock for bringing the Leahy-Collins resolution to a Senate vote runs out on Monday, but Leahy is working with Senate leaders on the possibility of obtaining unanimous consent in the Senate to extend that deadline by a few days.  Leahy’s bipartisan resolution is cosponsored by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.), and by 31 other senators (total of 34, with additional senators indicating support but not cosponsoring).  The abstract of a new peer-reviewed study about the connection between mercury pollution and mental retardation – as well as an estimate of costs to the U.S. economy of this connection – was also released today at the news conference and is available on request and is posted on the Leahy website (leahy.senate.gov).]

Statement Of Senator Patrick Leahy
On S.J. Res. 20, A Resolution To Disapprove
The Administration’s Mercury Rule
September 8, 2005

If we ever wondered what a mercury pollution rule would look like if it were written by the polluters, now we know.  This is pretty much it.  Given the trust that people have justifiably had in the Environmental Protection Agency since its creation during the Nixon Administration, it is sad, and it is appalling, to see how the agency has been captured by polluting special interests in decisions on limiting mercury pollution.

And it is regrettable that the American people and many of their representatives in Congress have been forced to the conclusion that the mercury rule has been so mishandled and so co-opted by special interests that this rare effort to override this rule has become necessary.  But it has become necessary.  And in the coming days the United States Senate will have a choice to make about the future of toxic mercury pollution --  

Do we follow the Bush Administration, and the well-funded special interests who are creating most of this mercury pollution, in taking several steps backward, forcing the American people to wait at least another decade before cleaning up the toxic mercury that is spewing out of old dirty power plants across the country? 

Do we allow this new rule to let toxic mercury -- a substance so harmful that it causes birth defects, IQ loss and mental retardation – continue to poison children and pregnant women, while costing taxpayers billions in healthcare costs?  Shouldn’t the proliferation of warnings that our states and the federal government have had to give to sportsmen and women and to the general public about the consumption of fish – fish caught in our own waters -- be enough to shame our government into action?

Do we allow this rule to move forward when EPA’s own Inspector General has said it does not comply with EPA and Executive Order requirements?  And when the General Accountability Office has said there are “major shortcomings in the economic analysis?”

Or do we uphold the bipartisan work that produced the Clean Air Act, protect the health of pregnant women and children, and begin now to clean up the toxic mercury emissions  now. 

Instead of working to enforce and implement the Clean Air Act, as two previous Administrations had, the Bush Administration has turned the Clean Air Act on its head.  With this rule the Administration revokes an earlier EPA finding that it is “necessary and appropriate” to require that each power plant apply technology to reduce mercury emissions. 

Although I am somewhat impressed that they can make this statement with straight faces, I am appalled at their audacious disregard for the health of the American people, and, like the scientific community, I am baffled by their gymnastic arguments.

This rule is all the more shameful because the evidence of public health and environmental damage from mercury and other toxics is clear enough for action right now.  Look at EPA’s own estimate of the number of newborns at risk of elevated mercury exposure, which has doubled to 630,000.  EPA also found that one in six pregnant women has mercury levels in her blood above EPA’s safe threshold. 

And today we will hear about a new peer-reviewed study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Center for Children’s Health and the Environment, which concludes that our country loses two billions dollars each year from the impact of mercury on children’s brain development.  Yet it seems that many in Congress have wanted to join the Administration in trying to avoid any public daylight on this flawed rule.  At a minimum, our effort will open this issue to some sunshine. 

One reason for the Administration’s lack of candor clearly is the discovery that this rule has polluting industries’ fingerprints all over it.  EPA’s first proposal for these rules lifted exact texts from memoranda provided by utility industry lobbyists. 

For all their talk of family values, the Administration has again put the value of corporate contributions -- not families -- first.  It is not a family value to tell a whole generation of women that their health is not important.  It is not a family value to put another generation of young kids at risk of learning disabilities.  These mercury rules do just that.

It is time to put people first, and to stop letting the big polluters and the special interests write the rules and run the show over at EPA.

The people we represent in the United States Senate will be watching the choice that the Senate -- and we as individual senators -- will make in this vote.  Will we side with the people, or with the polluters?

This rule would leave mercury pollution from power plants, the largest emitter of mercury in the United States, as the only source of toxic air pollution that is allowed to avoid rigorous emissions standards under the Clean Air Act.  That is a daily, tangible and dangerous risk to the health of the American people that we need not, and we should not, accept.

The Administration’s mercury rule is a danger to America’s women and children.  It is time to do it over, and to get it right.

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