Don't relax mercury rules

Kansas City Star: For public health reasons, the Bush administration should forget plans to loosen regulation of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Mercury is an extremely toxic substance, particularly harmful to pregnant women and children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 8 percent of women of child-bearing age have levels of mercury in their blood that would be unsafe for a fetus. Each year 300,000 children are born with potential neurological or development problems because of their mothers' exposure.
The largest source of mercury pollution: power plants that send it out of their smokestacks. People are exposed by eating contaminated fish, which is the reason most states have posted alerts to warn people not to fish in certain waters.
In 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency told Congress that mercury was hazardous. Yet documents obtained recently by environmental groups show that the agency is poised to allow power plants to continue mercury-laden emissions at the same time it announces a limit on how much total pollution can occur.
Prior finding
This loosening of regulations is expected even though previous EPA administrator Carol Browner concluded that mercury should be strictly regulated as a toxic substance. Browner was in the Clinton administration.
President Bush has his own unfortunate ideas about regulating the pollution of power plants. In another example of kowtowing by the administration to the energy industry, Bush's EPA rule would allow power plants to trade pollution "credits" that would allow them to avoid installing pollution-control equipment. The result would be "hot spots" of mercury contamination in lakes near the plants that buy their credits from others.
The administration's record on behalf of the polluters is shameful. Bush should be stopped by Congress on this one.