Nick Pacitti

Nicholas Lahanas

10/26/09

Mercury: Clear Skies on the Horizon

“Mercury is present throughout the environment in small quantities in rocks and in watery environments, including lakes, wetlands and oceans” (“ ”). This statement shows that mercury is around us in our environment. It is a pollutant, which is tough to hide from considering the area in which it hides. It can affect many people, but its main threat is to infants whose mothers diet consists of fish during their pregnancy. Mercury is also prevalent in the air, as it is emitted there from power plants and coal plants. Mercury is a problem that is hard to control, but there are laws and rules that are working on limiting this pollutant from getting into our air system. These plans, which are currently trying to help the United States achieve “Clear Skies”, are a work in progress. They are currently regulating how much mercury is allowed into our atmosphere with a plan that one-day mercury emission will not be a problem that the environment has to deal with. This pollution may just be a problem that can solved in the near future. Mercury is a pollution problem that is being fixed and it seems as though one day it may become an afterthought.

Mercury poses a great threat to our environment. Since mercury is built up in wetlands it causes a danger to the fish that live there. The problem with that is that the fish take in the most toxic form of mercury, methylmercury. In turn it poses a risk to the humans and the animals that are eating the infected fish.  It is not so much the mercury that causes the threat, but rather the toxic form of mercury, Methylmercury. Methlymercury causes many problems for people, but most importantly, it causes problems for pregnant women. It can give a person various different impairments such as damages to ones memory or attention skills, and it causes various other effects. The chemical normally gets transmitted to unborn infants still in the womb, or newly born infants whom are breast-fed. The milk coming from a woman gets poisoned with the mercury through the consumption of fish. Even the intake of food containing mercury has been deemed a health risk.  It also can cause organ failure in adults who eat fish a large amount over a long period of time. Mercury, however, is also spread throughout our atmosphere.

Mercury also poses a threat from being emitted into our atmosphere by electric power plants and coal-fired power plants. “U.S. power plants, overall, are responsible for about 1 percent of current global emissions” ( ). Although, globally, mercury transmitted through the air is not responsible for a huge amount of the mercury problem, it still accounts for almost one-third of the mercury emitted nationally.  Though the rate in which mercury enters our atmosphere is always fluctuating, it still brings polluted air into the environment. The causes of mercury in the air are the same, but it still raises a huge threat knowing that one can breathe in mercury while they may be walking down the street or opening their windows to get “fresh air”.

However, there are ways markets are trying to limit this pollutant. Before 2002, Mercury was a pollutant that was never regulated. Meaning power plants were able to dump as much mercury into the air as they wanted with no remorse or consequence. In 2002, President Bush created the Clear Skies Initiative, which called for its emissions into our atmosphere to be cut by sixty-nine percent. Then there came the Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR), which caps and reduces the mercury emissions that are coming from coal power plants. This rule made the United States the first country in the world to control mercury emissions. The laws and rules states above help the atmosphere with our mercury problem, but it does not solve the problem as a while.

With the laws and rules, which were previously stated above, set to control how mercury is disposed into our atmosphere; they do not solve the problem entirely. Sure the rules are there to prevent mercury from poisoning our air, but they do not answer the problem of how to get it out of the fish that people eat. That is a problem that almost is entirely too hard to deal with. The simple solution is to put a complete stop on fish, which obviously is absurd. But in reality, the feasible solution is for breast-feeding women to be educated on the risks of what mercury can do to ones infant and hopefully that will limit them from consuming fish. While that plan is a long shot, there are plans to make the emission of mercury into our atmosphere become almost none existing.

“The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy is developing a portfolio of environmental control technologies…provide power plant operators with the multi-pollutant solutions needed…at the lowest possible cost to ratepayers” ( /). That statement is a summary of a longer statement, which is basically saying that there are plans being developed at a reasonable rate, which will not too expensive for the taxpayers. These solutions are all ways that are trying to regulate how much mercury is going into our atmosphere. Currently, Mercury emission is being regulated by the Clear Skies Initiative and it calls for “approximate 45 percent reduction beginning in 2010 and a 70 percent reduction beginning in 2018”. If this plan is successful than that would be a huge benefit for the upcoming generation of humans who now do not have to deal with the problem of mercury polluting their atmosphere. Another plus to this plan, if it is successful, is that it can help U.S. taxpayers save approximately anywhere from five hundred and fifty million dollars to eight hundred million dollars a year by the year 2010. Even a half of that money would still be a positive result to this plan. Hopefully, this plan works out in the long run and can optimistically eliminate almost all of the mercury from our atmosphere.

If we had to recommend any policy change it would be some sort of change for the way the mercury problem with fish is handled. During our research for this essay, we could hardly find anything on there being a plan of limiting mercury in fish. We understand that is nearly impossible, but if we had to recommend some sort of policy it would be one that deals with this problem. If not a policy then there should be warnings on fish that are bought. Prior to doing this research we had no idea that there was ever any danger in eating fish and that it contained any mercury. We feel as though that should be a fact that more people should know about and even be put on labels for the fish being bought at supermarkets. The EPA states that there are fish that you can eat without risk of mercury poisoning, that includes tuna and salmon.  We understand there are fish like that which may be safe, but again how would one know. We would recommend a policy be created to fix this problem and let it be main lined.

On another note, we feel as though the policy created by President Bush, from the looks of it, appear to be a very successful plan. Although, like many other Americans, we were not a huge fan of Bush, but we feel as though he had got us going in the right direction towards fighting our problem with mercury being in our air and therefore we are not worried about mercury as an air pollutant because we feel as though it will soon be a problem that America will not have to worry about. We can only hope other nations imply the same plan as it can be very beneficial to the survival of our atmosphere.

All in all, the problem of mercury as a pollution is being treated very seriously and hopefully one-day will it no longer be a threat to humans. The foundations are laid out for it to be minimal in our atmosphere so hopefully in the long run it can be eliminated completely. We still fear for mercury in fish and hopefully a solution for that can be created soon. Mercury is a pollution problem that is being fixed and it seems as though one day it may become an afterthought.