The New York Times reports: E.P.A. Chief Stands Firm as Tough Rules Loom:

In the next weeks and months, Lisa P. Jack­son, the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency admin­is­tra­tor, is sched­uled to estab­lish reg­u­la­tions on smog, mer­cury, car­bon diox­ide, min­ing waste and vehi­cle emis­sions that will affect every cor­ner of the economy.

She is work­ing under intense pres­sure from oppo­nents in Con­gress, from pow­er­ful indus­tries, from impa­tient envi­ron­men­tal­ists and from the Supreme Court, which just affirmed the agency’s duty to address glob­al warm­ing emis­sions, a project that car­ries pro­found eco­nom­ic implications.

The new rules will roll out just as Pres­i­dent Obama’s re-elec­tion cam­paign is get­ting under way, with a White House high­ly sen­si­tive to the prob­a­bil­i­ty of polit­i­cal dam­age from a flood of gov­ern­ment man­dates that will strike par­tic­u­lar­ly hard at the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor in states cru­cial to the 2012 election.

No oth­er cab­i­net offi­cer is in as lone­ly or uncom­fort­able a posi­tion as Ms. Jack­son, who has been left, as one advis­er put it, behind ene­my lines with only sci­ence, the law and a small band of loy­al lieu­tenants to sup­port her. 

Well, she’s also got you and me. And that’s not triv­ial. These new rules include the first reg­u­la­tions on mer­cury emis­sions from coal plants. Coal plants are the major source of tox­ic mer­cury in the fish you eat (bad for you, bad for the fish, bad for the bird that eat the fish, bad, real­ly for every­thing), so rein­ing those emis­sions in is a huge step for­ward for the envi­ron­ment and for pub­lic health. These reg­u­la­tions have been in the works since the 1990 amend­ments to the Clean Air Act, and after a regret­table rule­mak­ing hia­tus under the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, they are a wel­come addi­tion. David Roberts at Grist, prob­a­bly the best envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy jour­nal­ist out there, has a great series on these new rules and their impli­ca­tions.

Those new rules, if they’re strong and well-enforced, won’t just reduce tox­ic mer­cury emis­sions. By rais­ing the price of mak­ing elec­tric­i­ty from coal, these reg­u­la­tions will push util­i­ties to close old­er coal plants and to shift towards clean­er fuels, fuels that don’t just release less mer­cury, but that have low­er green­house gas emis­sions. Com­bined with the EPA’s new reg­u­la­tions on car­bon diox­ide (and oth­ers soon to come), this could have a major impact on the US car­bon foot­print, though less than could be achieved through a com­pre­hen­sive cli­mate bill.
As the fig­ure shows (bor­rowed from this arti­cle at Grist, which drew on this report from ICF), most of the impact from these rules is expect­ed to come in the Cen­tral US, which will have to replace 25 gigawatts (GW) of elec­tri­cal gen­er­a­tion, while west­ern states will be rel­a­tive­ly unaf­fect­ed. But among the states hit hard­est will be Pres­i­den­tial bat­tle­ground states like Ohio, Flori­da, Wis­con­sin, Min­neso­ta, Michi­gan, Mis­souri, Flori­da, West Virginia. 

Of course, those are also the states most dra­mat­i­cal­ly impact­ed by coal min­ing and coal burn­ing, so there ought to be some polit­i­cal upside, espe­cial­ly if util­i­ties react by build­ing new nat­ur­al gas plants and new wind farms to make up for loss­es in coal capac­i­ty. The jobs and clean air cre­at­ed by such moves would be boons to the local com­mu­ni­ties. Whether they’d out­weigh poten­tial bumps in elec­tric­i­ty rates remains to be seen: with unem­ploy­ment hov­er­ing between 9 and 10 per­cent, lots of peo­ple will notice job cre­ation, but every­one gets an elec­tri­cal bill, and the envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits will be dif­fuse, and long term.

These mer­cury reg­u­la­tions are sure to be polit­i­cal­ly con­tentious, so if you’d like to see the EPA final­ly estab­lish strong lim­its on mer­cury emis­sions, you should con­tact your mem­bers of Con­gress and your gov­er­nor and your util­i­ties and tell them that you want these rules to be imple­ment­ed, and you want them to be strong. Then ask them (espe­cial­ly gov­er­nors and util­i­ties) whether they’ve sent in com­ments on the new rules, or whether they’ve oth­er­wise tak­en a posi­tion. Feel free to leave a com­ment here with the respons­es, or if you get the runaround. We can all help you get answers to the sim­ple ques­tion of whether your pub­lic offi­cials sup­port a plan that would save lives and pre­vent birth defects, still­births, and miscarriages.