There are a lot of unknowns regarding the Clearn Air Act, but it looks like a cap on mercury similar to those on sulfur and nitrogen is likely.
The Environmental Protection Agency, resolving a lawsuit aimed at cutting the flow of mercury and other toxic substances from coal- or oil-burning power plants, has agreed to develop standards by late 2011 for limiting such emissions.
John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of a dozen groups involved in the litigation, said that as of last December, when the suit was filed, only 28 percent of the coal-burning power plants in the United States had basic scrubbers for such pollution, which he called “a two-decade-old technology.”
This week the National Academy of Sciences reported that the annual cost of health damage related to emissions from coal and oil burning totaled about $120 billion in the United States, with half of that coming from coal.
