Giving up Tuna? Breathing Is Next If you're like most people (including me, up until a month or two ago), you know that tuna and other top-of-the-food-chain fish contain unsafe levels of mercury and that childbirth-age women and nursing mothers, especially, are warned off these fish. What you don't know, probably (I didn't), is the mercury's source, or how it gets in these fish. Turns out that about three-quarters of it comes from coal-burning power plants; it dissolves in water, where micro-organisms convert it to methylmercury, a bio-available and highly toxic form that builds up in fish. The longer a fish lives, the more mercury builds in its flesh. You could, of course, eat less big fish, but there are other sources of mercury: increasingly, it's being found in vegetables and especially grains like rice that are grown near older, and even no longer functioning, coal-burning plants. It's another of those situations where individual solutions don't really cut it, because mercury is only one of about 80 (!) pollutants spewing from old-fashioned, unfiltered coal-burning plants[1]. And some of the toxins, which are deadly, are just plain unavoidable. Because, unlike mercury, they're not in tuna and rice. They're in the air. It was for these reasons that the journalist (and mother) Dominique Browning started Moms Clean Air Force. "When I was a young mother," she says, "and was told not to eat tuna, I didn't make the air-to-food connection; but it's outrageous that these issues are still being fought 21 years later. I was neither an environmentalist nor an activist, but I could no longer ignore important issues. Bravo. So important are these issues that, some time ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) developed regulations to ameliorate them. Almost needless to say, the industry - most of it, anyway[2] - and its representatives are fighting these regulations and trying to stall their implementation with all their power. This history[3] , like many sagas involving the E.P.A. and industry, is dirty and depressing. In 1990, Congress asked the E.P.A. to determine whether hazardous emissions from power plants should be regulated. Ten years later, the agency said that it was "appropriate and necessary" to do so. The Clinton administration did some stalling of its own. The industry promptly challenged that finding; a panel of judges almost as promptly dismissed the challenge. Regardless, in 2004 and 2005, the E.P.A. backed off its own determination and not only delayed and egregiously weakened the regulation of mercury emissions, but it completely exempted all other toxic emissions from power plants. The "why" of this has to do in large part with the cynicism and generally anti-environment stance of the Bush administration and its eagerness to make industry-friendly deals. This threw matters back into the states" hands, and many quickly devised stronger-than-E.P.A. schemes to regulate pollutants from power plants. To cut to the chase, in 2010 a federal judge told the E.P.A. to get its act together, and in December 2011, the agency developed the Mercury and Air Toxics[4] Standards (MATS), which, though challenged, appears likely to go into effect in 2015. Even those power plants that are part of the anti-MATS challenge are probably preparing for that. MATS is a pretty good rule, because by regulating mercury emissions it decreases many other harmful emissions as well. Mercury itself, of course, is bad enough: It's a neurotoxin that attacks brain cells (watch this vivid, slightly retro and certainly scary enough video of how mercury produces brain damage) and, depending on dose, a variety of other symptoms (including, in extreme cases, death). It's worth noting that 200,000 babies are born in the United States each year with mercury levels high enough to cause concern about symptoms from lower I.Q. to reduced hearing, seeing and speech to impaired mobility and more. But you can almost think of mercury as a poster boy for its equally and sometimes more poisonous teammates. The E.P.A. estimates that implementing MATS, which will cost power producers around $9 billion annually, will save as many as 11,000 lives per year[5] while significantly reducing asthma attacks, chronic bronchitis and other diseases. These plus other factors, the agency estimates, are worth as much as $90 billion to society. Ten dollars in health benefits for every dollar spent in pollution reduction, plus an overall increase in quality of life. Most if not all of the conditions cited in the cost savings of $90 billion resulting from the implementation of MATS have nothing to do with mercury, but with elements like chromium, nickel and arsenic, hydrochloric and other acid gases, formaldehyde and what you might just call "soot," particulate matter enters our bodies in a variety of ways, arriving in places where it doesn't belong and may do harm. "The irony here," says John Walke, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, "is that by controlling for mercury you control for many of these other pollutants, which can cause a number of problems, including heart attacks and strokes," and more than three million deaths annually across the globe, according to the World Health Organization. MATS is being fought by the Utility Air Regulatory Group, the litigation arm of the country's power plants, and by a variety of industry allies and (evidently) just plain toadies in Congress. For more details, and to try to figure out whether your power company - or elected "representative" - is a good guy or a bad guy, see Walke's blog entries here and here and elsewhere. For every day or year they manage to delay, the industry and its lawyers forestall the costs of installing modern cleanup equipment[7] while also forestalling relief from all kinds of chronic diseases for hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans. In other words, it's about a lot more than tuna. Which, of course, are also major contributors to greenhouse gases. In fairness, as you can see in this letter to The Wall Street Journal, some industry representatives have no problem with the proposed EPA rule. 3.Here is a timeline. I thought "toxins" was a noun, "toxic" an adjective and "toxics" a non-existent word. Either I'm wrong or bureaucrats aren't grammarians. Note that this is an estimate of lives saved; it's not known how many people die prematurely as a result of toxic emissions from power plants. A further unintended benefit of MATS is that by forcing the closure of some coal plants, shifting electricity production to natural gas, and so on, it will reduce carbon emissions. Which, by the way, is Made in America.