Study Left Out of EPA Report

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released new mercury emissions rules last week without including the results of a Harvard study on the public health benefits of reducing mercury pollution, a decision that has sparked an outcry from several Democrats in Congress.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, found that the EPA’s new limits on mercury emissions from power plants could yield nearly $5 billion in public health benefits a year, as opposed to the EPA’s estimate of $50 million.

“Our study suggests that the benefits of controlling mercury emissions is a little or a lot larger than the EPA’s report,” said James K. Hammitt ’78, professor of economics and decision sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, who co-authored the study.

According to EPA Press Secretary Cynthia Bergman, the Harvard study was left out of the EPA’s report because its final version was submitted on February 22, over a month after the EPA’s deadline, which “did not provide the EPA with sufficient time to thoroughly evaluate the report.”

But several Democrats in Congress said Tuesday that the EPA should have taken into account the Harvard study, which was funded by the EPA and peer-reviewed by EPA scientists.

Senator John F. Kerry, D-Mass., said in a statement, “Why did the administration hide its own research on toxic mercury pollution when the health of women and children is on the line? How can you make the right decision when the facts are buried to help corporate special interests?”

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a member of the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee, echoed Kerry’s criticism in a statement, expressing “outrage that the Environmental Protection Agency would suppress this report.”

“EPA used to stand for Environmental Protection Agency. Now it stands for ‘Every Polluter’s Ally’,” Markey said, calling the new rules “an industry giveaway” designed “to cater to the interests of polluters.”

The new EPA rules, released on March 15, represent the first time the federal government has capped mercury emissions from power plants. The rules will reduce emissions of mercury from the current level of 48 tons a year to 15 tons a year by 2026, according to the EPA’s website.

But according to Markey’s statement, without the new rules, existing Clean Air Act provisions would mandate that mercury emissions be less than five tons per year by 2008.

According to Hammitt, the EPA’s report failed to consider the effects of reduced mercury emissions on saltwater fish, and also ignored recent findings on mercury’s damaging effects on the human cardiovascular system.

“The EPA was certainly aware of these factors, but chose not to quantify them,” Hammitt said.

He said the Harvard study—conducted for the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management—attempted to quantify these factors by offering a range of estimated benefits.

“Because we don’t know if the effects of mercury emissions on these factors is real or not, we offered several figures to try to say what the benefits would be, conditional on different effects occurring,” Hammitt said.

But Bergman said in a statement, “The EPA’s experts concluded that the state-of-the-science on these relationships is too uncertain to justify a quantification of potential benefits.”