WASHINGTON - March 24 - Center for Progressive Regulation Member Scholars Rena Steinzor and Lisa Heinzerling, in a just-published article in the Environmental Law Reporter (ELR) accuse the Bush Administration of a “stark and unapologetic exercise of power” aimed at easing polluting industries’ responsibility for their pollution at the expense of human health.

The Administration’s recent proposal to significantly weaken mercury regulation prompted sharp public outcry, which in turn led EPA Administrator Leavitt to announce he planned to review the proposal again – although he has not withdrawn the proposal, so his announcement has no formal impact. Steinzor and Heinzerling describe the proposal as “a decision to relieve the burden on industry regardless of the impact on public health.” They write that “Meaningful opportunities to control mercury were decimated because the Bush Administration could decimate them, despite persuasive scientific evidence of harm; the Clean Air Act’s crystal-clear statutory mandates; the availability of better and cleaner alternatives; and the manifest inappropriateness of trading as a mechanism for controlling toxics. It is this stark and unapologetic exercise of power that makes the Administration’s mercury policies so much more than business as usual.”

The article cites overwhelming evidence that mercury pollution – chiefly, but not exclusively from power plants and chlor-alkali facilities – is harmful to public health. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that 1 in 12 women of child-bearing age in the United States have unacceptably high levels of mercury in their blood, a condition that could cause their babies serious harm.

The article traces industry’s and the Bush Administration’s ongoing efforts to muddy the scientific waters with respect to the health effects of mercury pollution. That effort has included:

• Administration suppression of government reports documenting the danger of mercury;
• Scare tactics aimed at persuading working Americans that regulation of mercury would force jobs overseas;
• A cynical effort to ignore the overwhelming weight of evidence about mercury’s danger, and instead focus solely on a slanted reading of a single, controversial study suggesting otherwise.

The article also reveals that Dr. Gary Myers, one of the authors of the controversial study – an epidemiological study involving people on the Seychelles Islands and concluding that low levels of mercury exposure do not have harmful neurological effects – has taken previously unreported grants of roughly $500,000 from industry sources with a direct interest in the research. Specifically, Myers and his research team accepted $486,000 in funding from the Electric Power Research Institute, $10,000 from the National Tuna Foundation, and $5,000 from the National Fisheries Institute. But in testimony to Congress on the Seychelles research, in which he dismissed the overwhelming weight of evidence from a range of studies other than his own, he never revealed his funding to committee members. Indeed, Myers has published on the subject without acknowledging the funding, and he and his conclusions are routinely promoted by industry and its allies representatives in Washington, again without acknowledging the funding.

Steinzor and Heinzerling write that the failure to disclose the industry funding is particularly troubling because the Seychelles study and Myers’ work on mercury in general are touted by the utility industry and its conservative allies as government-funded, and therefore above reproach. “Congress, EPA, and fellow scientists should know his funding sources when they evaluate his claims, particularly because they fall so far outside the mainstream scientific view on the subject,” Steinzor said.

“Industry’s campaign against regulation of mercury is dangerously duplicitous,” Steinzor says. “And the Bush administration has been a willing co-conspirator. They claim, in the face of plain contradictory facts, that their proposal to slow regulation of mercury to a crawl is superior to existing plans to regulate more quickly and more strictly. It’s simply not true. Their effort is an abuse of the law, and an insult to the environment, and it is made with callous and deliberate disregard for clear evidence of mercury’s effect on children’s health.”

“The Administration treats many of their most radical environmental proposals like test balloons,” Heinzerling says. “As they did with arsenic, they tried to get away with this absurdly permissive mercury standard – even going so far as to recklessly misread the Clean Air Act’s requirements. When public outcry threatens their political support, they pull back – as with arsenic. It remains to be seen whether the Administration will revise its proposal, or just delay it until after the election. But whatever happens, it’s clear that the Administration’s approach to environmental regulation is about easing up on polluting industries to the greatest extent they can get away with it politically. The standard should be protecting health and the environment, but for these guys, it’s about politics and money.”

Steinzor is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland. Heinzerling is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. A pre-publication copy of the article is available at www.progressiveregulation.org (see “Environment” issue page), or by emailing mfreeman@progressiveregulation.org. The Environmental Law Reporter is a publication of the Environmental Law Institute, on the web at http://www.eli.org/.

###