Christie DEP AWOL In US Supreme Court’s Review of EPA’s Coal Power Plant Mercury Standard

NJ’s laws & regulations are highlighted, but Christie fails to join neighboring AG’s Brief

Another example of Christie’s political ambitions

Christie Betrays NJ’s Clean Air Legacy – Defers to Faux “War On Coal”

… [EPA] found that seven percent of U.S. women of childbearing age were exposed to mercury levels exceeding the reference dose. Annually, several hundred thousand children born in the United States have been exposed in utero to unsafe mercury levels. The serious harms caused by prenatal exposure to low levels of mercury – including impaired attention, fine motor function, language skills, visual-spatial abilities, and verbal memory – limit children’s ability to learn and achieve.  ~~~ State AG’s amicus brief to Supreme Court

NJ has long been a national leader in protecting public health by establishing strict air pollution controls for in-state pollution sources and working cooperatively with northeastern states – including joining in lawsuits – to assure that EPA holds neighboring states accountable for the out of state pollution they export into NJ.

A major component of that effort has been in the scientific investigation of the environmental and public health risks of toxic mercury.

The DEP has backed that science up with strict regulations on all facets of mercury, especially air pollution control requirements.

Back in 1993, the Florio Administration established the strictest mercury emission standard in the world at the time for garbage incinerators. A little over a decade later, in 2004 DEP proposed strict mercury pollution controls on NJ power plants.

According to DEP

On July 14, 2006, DEP adopted new rules that require further reductions in mercury emissions from certain facilities.5 The rules called for up to a 90 percent reduction by 2008 of mercury emissions from the State’s 10 coal-fired boilers in power plants. The rules also required New Jersey’s five MSW incinerators to reduce mercury emissions at least 95 percent below 1990 levels by January 3, 2012. The new rules also mandated a reduction of mercury emissions by 75 percent by 2010 from the State’s iron and steel plants.

In 1990, Congress listed mercury as a “hazardous air pollutant” under the Clean Air Act and mandated that EPA adopt air pollution controls on power plants,  imposing what are known as Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT).

After two decades of EPA study and delay due to legal challenges by polluting industries, finally in February 2012, EPA adopted those MACT standards.

The dirty coal power industry immediately sued to block them.

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case.

Today’s NY Times editorial blasts the coal industry, see:

• Clean Air Act and Dirty Coal at the Supreme Court

The name of the law at issue before the Supreme Court on Wednesday is the Clean Air Act. It is not the Coal Industry Protection Act, despite what that industry’s advocates seem to want the justices to believe.

Congress passed the legislation in 1970 and substantially strengthened it in 1990 to safeguard human health from air pollution generated by power plants, vehicles, incinerators and other sources.

One of the most toxic of these pollutants is mercury, a heavy metal that accumulates in waterways and the fish Americans eat. While mercury is particularly dangerous to the vulnerable, developing brains and nervous systems of young children and fetuses, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that improved air-quality standards prevent the premature deaths of as many as 11,000 Americans each year from exposure to mercury and other toxic air pollutants.

Coal industry backers, notably the Senate’s majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, view every regulation, whether aimed at protecting human lives or the future of the planet, as nothing more than a “war on coal.” But profits and human health are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, the technology to meet the E.P.A.’s new mercury standards is already in place at most coal-fired power plants nationwide.

Senator McConnell is leading the charge – on behalf of dirty coal – in attacking the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan proposed rule that seeks to reduce CO2 emissions from existing power plants – what McConnell calls the Obama “War on Coal”.

[Note: in an unprecedented move, and despite NJ’s Global Warming Response Act emission reduction mandates, the Christie DEP joined McConnell in attacking EPA’s proposed rule, demanding that it be withdrawn – hit link to read DEP comment documents .]

The Union of Concerned Scientists filed an amicus brief that laid out the implications.

Even NJ based PSEG supports the EPA rule and has filed an amicus brief in the case. Amazing when the State’s largest polluter is out in from of the Governor and DEP in supporting emissions reductions.

Interestingly, an amicus brief filed to the Court by 15 State Attorneys General notes:

Faced with ongoing delays in the promulgation of Section 112 emission standards for power plants, many of the undersigned states implemented comprehensive controls on power plants within their own borders. Between 2000 and 2010, at least fifteen states [including NJ] enacted regulations requiring coal-fired power plants within their borders to reduce mercury emissions.

NJ was one of the first states to set emissions controls on mercury.

Given NJ’s legacy on aggressively defending clean air and DEP’s national leadership on mercury air pollution controls, it is simply outrageous that Gov. Christie refused to join our neighboring states – including Delaware, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine – in defending the EPA mercury rule.

Instead, Christie sided with dirty coal and joined the politics of the Republican reactionary attack on the faux Obama “War on Coal”.