The EPA lied -- nobody died by Steve Milloy

For years Steve Milloy has challenged the EPA on its claims about how deadly small organic particulates are.  His recent opinion piece to the Washington Times is most interesting.  See here.

Steve Milloy says:

In April 2012, I broke the news that EPA had been quietly conducting human experiments with certain outdoor pollutants that EPA had claimed were, essentially, the most toxic substances on Earth. EPA had repeatedly claimed since at least 2004 that any level of inhalation of fine particulate matter emitted from smokestacks and tailpipes could cause death within hours or days. The old, young and sick were most vulnerable, according to EPA.

To prove their assertions that fine particulate matter was so deadly, the EPA paid the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina to expose human subjects to fine particulate matter and even chlorine gas to try to do them harm.  Recently, the National Academy of Science had to admit that no one died and no harm was established by the illegal tests. Yes, the EPA was intentionally trying to harm people, though it had told the test subjects that they would not be harmed.  It apparently really did think that fine particulates were very dangerous and it was willing to expose people to what it claimed was deadly concentrations of fine particulates to prove they were right.  Only the fact they were not right prevented the EPA from killing the test subject people.

Milloy says:

So when the first Obama EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, testified to Congress that “Particulate matter causes premature death. It does not make you sick. It is directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” that was a lie, one compounded by her next false claim that particulate matter kills about 570,000 Americans per year. When the second Obama EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, wrote to Congress; chief outside EPA science adviser Jonathan Samet wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine; and EPA-paid university researchers working with the American Heart Association said that there was no safe exposure to particulate matter those too were lies. 

As it turns out, the only time EPA told the truth about particulate matter was when it told its human guinea pigs that the experiments were harmless. Meanwhile the Obama EPA used the phony killer particulate matter scare — backed by almost $600 million in utterly fraudulent scientific research and fueled with secret scientific data — to virtually wipe out the U.S. coal industry, severely harming coal miners, their families and their communities.

The EPA has also claimed that carbon dioxide, the basis for life on Earth, is a pollutant. It also has claimed that mercury from coal-fired power plants is deadly, with no evidence that this is true and no explanation for the failure to evacuate huge areas of the USA where the natural sources of mercury dwarf any possible emissions from coal-fired power plants.  See here and here.  This is also the government agency that incompetently released contaminants from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River.

What do you do with such a wrongheaded, dishonest, and dangerous government agency? You fire its employees, put it under new management, and hire new people who are rational and competent.  You make it a much smaller agency with highly limited powers.  At least this is what one would do if one wanted a rational, competent, and reasonably benevolent government. 

My Reply to "Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability"

Richard Matthews posted Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability at the Green Market Oracle.  Here is my comment in response:

There is no scientific consensus that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is correct. Most scientists who do say they believe in catastrophic man-made global warming cannot offer a clear explanation of the scientific theory that claim is based on.  Those who offer a theory very often disagree with one another.  Then there are many scientists who see the hypothesis as false, though many of them believe that carbon dioxide does cause some warming, which may be regarded as beneficial, not catastrophic.  Then there are still other scientists, including myself, who understand that the effects of carbon dioxide on the surface temperature are many, all of them very small, and more of them cooling effects than warming effects.  The net result is that CO2 has an insignificant effect. This is why the effect of CO2 has not been measurable to date.

There are many benefits to conserving energy.  Those real benefits are best achieved by people individually choosing them, not by government mandates and subsidies.  Real benefits will be pursued in the free market.  It is only harmful energy policies that need to be imposed by government.

The EPA ruling that CO2 is a pollutant is scientifically unsupported.  Its claims that mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants was a real danger were also without scientific justification.  Years of mercury precipitation data have failed to show any downwind mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants that can be seen above the dominant natural sources of mercury in the USA.  If mercury is such a hazard, there are huge swathes of land in the southern American West and Great Plains states that have to be evacuated due to natural sources of mercury.  Yet even in those areas of relatively high natural mercury contamination in the USA, there is no epidemiological evidence of harm to people.

The last sentence in blue was not in the original comment.

Pipeline and Coal-Fired Power Plant Alarmism

In view of the recent controversy about the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Paul Driessen post I just recently put up called Pipeline Anarchy, I want to refer back to a post of mine in November 2011 called Democrat Socialism, Energy, and Pipeline Hysteria.  One of the points I made was that the U.S. was already extensively filled with oil and gas pipelines.  Many of them were old and were not nearly as safe as the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline or as the Dakota Access Pipeline.  It makes little sense to prevent the building of these pipelines on safety or environmental grounds, since they are improvements in the system.  I also pointed out that most any aquifer was already crossed by less superior pipelines.  Now we learn from Driessen's article that the Dakota Pipeline in the only area unconstructed is running parallel to an already existing pipeline.

From my earlier post:

In 2009, there were 148,622 miles of oil and oil product pipelines in the U.S.  There were also 1,539,911 miles of natural gas pipeline in the U.S.  The Keystone XL project wanted to add 1,661 miles of oil pipeline to this massive network of pipelines.  Some of the major pipelines now in existence are shown in the map below.

The green-coded pipelines are major oil pipelines, the red lines are major gas pipelines, and the blue lines are product pipelines. 

Returning to the present:

The pipeline case in which a safer pipeline is denied while less safe ones continue in use has an interesting parallel in the case against coal fired power plants.  The Obama EPA established a regulation that required power plants to release much less mercury than they do into the atmosphere.  The claim was that despite the low concentrations of mercury, a pregnant woman eating a constant diet of fish from nearby rivers might suffer some health problem based on cherry-picked studies of islanders who ate nothing but seafood from the ocean with its 200 ppm of mercury.  There have long been recommendations that pregnant women not eat too much seafood, as an abundance of caution.  But, pregnant women are presumably thought incapable of following a similar recommendation for avoiding too much fish from rivers as an abundance of caution.

See my posts Coal-Fired Power Plants Produce Insignificant Mercury and Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants.  It is clear that many areas of the country should be evacuated due to the overwhelming concentrations of mercury from natural sources of mercury, such as the mineral cinnabar if the mercury from coal-fired power plants is a problem.  If it is safe to live in much of the American Southwest and the southern Great Plains states, then it is generally immaterial whether one lives near a coal-fired power plant as far as mercury exposure is concerned.

It is also of no significance that coal-fired power plants produce more carbon dioxide than do natural gas power plants or than wind generators do for reasons described in Why Greenhouse Gas Theory is Wrong -- An Examination of the Theoretical Basis.

But, we must have many horrors, terrors, and alarms from which ever bigger government can pretend to save us.

26 Nov 2016:  10 other fossil fuel pipelines cross the Missouri River upstream from the Dakota Access Pipeline already.

The EPA -- Once Again Incompetent

I have shown that the EPA rulings on harm done by mercury from coal fired power plants make no sense at all.  There is absolutely no epidemiological evidence of increased mercury sickness or of asthma downwind of major clusters of coal-fired power plants.  Indeed, maps of mercury concentrations precipitated from the air show no such correlation with coal-fired power plants.  The EPA also cherry-picks studies of the health effects of mercury from fish on some islanders, while ignoring other studies of other islanders which show no mercury effects.  They then extrapolate from the cherry-picked exaggerated effect to predict an effect at levels microscopic to the natural mercury levels found in many areas of the United States.  The reckless ruling against coal-fired power plants based on the mercury argument is incompetent and highly unethical.

The EPA has also claimed that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, even though it is necessary to plant growth and humans exhale it.  The EPA falsely claims increased CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use will cause catastrophic man-made global warming.  On the basis of this foolish claim, it is putting out a Clean Power Plan which will require the closing of many coal-fired power plants and some gas-fired power plants and the very inefficient use of many of the remaining gas-fired power plants.  The use of a global warming model with hugely exaggerated warming effects says that the new, highly disruptive and expensive ruling will lower temperatures by 0.02 Kelvin, even as vast new coal-fired power plants will produce far more CO2 than the U.S. reduction.  Wind and solar energy are to be greatly increased to replace them on the electric grid.  Yet wind and solar energy are very expensive and very unreliable.  Once again the EPA is mired in incompetence and arrogantly insists on doing great harm to energy users, investors, and workers.

Recently, the EPA demonstrated its incompetence and its unethical behavior by dramatically releasing incredible amounts of gold mining waste water laden with lead, cadmium, and arsenic into the Animas River of the San Juan River Basin.  This water flows into the Colorado River and Lake Powell.  The EPA was slow in announcing the disaster and will not take the level of responsibility it expects of businesses that it goes after vigorously when they have such disasters.  This is the government and the government is never guilty of immoral activity.  Just ask the government if you do not believe this.

There is always a double standard for business relative to government.  The standards to which businesses are held are much, much higher.

Asthma and Coal-Fired Power Plants -- Is there a connection?

As the concern of Americans about claims of catastrophic man-made global warming has diminished, the Progressive Elitists and their EPA have ramped up a campaign against coal-fired power plants based on those plants causing asthma.  The ads put particular emphasis on them causing asthma in children.  Obama even recently claimed that one of his daughters has asthma because of coal-fired power plants and other use of fossil fuels.  Does this viewpoint have an anchor in science and known data?  Let us examine this issue, because surely none of us want children to suffer because coal-fired power plants provide us with inexpensive and reliable electric power.  It may well make sense to use more expensive power, whether natural gas or better scrubbed coal-fired power plants if the coal-fired power plants are truly implicated as the cause of asthma.

In examining this, I am going to use information from a slide presentation on the prevalence of asthma in the US by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  It is found at the bottom of the page here.

Now, it might be that emissions from coal-fired power plants are the exception and this is a known cause.  Let us see if that would be consistent with other data of the CDC.

This graph shows increasing asthma from 1980 to 1996 and then increasing asthma from 2001 to 2010.  The gap in data is because the method for making the determination of asthma prevalence changed in the years between these two sets of data, so it is difficult to be sure that we are comparing apples to apples.  The apparent increase in asthma is very large in this time.  The odd thing is that the fraction of electric power generation by coal fell in this time and of that falling fraction, more and more effort was made to produce the power from coal more cleanly.  If asthma increased from 3% of the population to 8% during this time, there must be factors causing asthma which are far more important than the contribution that might be made by coal.

It is interesting that the increase in asthma since 2011 is primarily due to an increase in asthma among Black Americans.  Now it might be that coal-fired power plants are much more likely to be upwind of Black neighborhoods, the white Progressive Elitists being so efficient at Not in My Back Yard special interest tactics.  But let us remember this difference as we look at the following data and remember that people of different ethnic backgrounds do often have different susceptibilities to different diseases.

Now this is fascinating data.  Note how dramatically asthma prevalence changes by gender and age.  Surely exposure to the emissions of pollutants does not change so dramatically by age or gender as this.  It might be possible that the susceptibility to pollutants does change this dramatically, but that sure would seem to be a stretch.  Boys to 14 years old are much more likely to have asthma than girls, but girls have a steadily increasing probability of becoming asthmatic through age 17 and then have a slight general decrease in asthma after that, while remaining much more likely than males to have asthma at all ages 18 and beyond.  But males after 14 have a substantial lowering of probability to about age 44, before their probability starts to rise again.  This happens despite the fact that men are more likely than women to spend more time outside in their adult years, where they are supposedly being more directly assaulted by the emissions of coal-fired power plants.  These age and gender behaviors sure seem more likely to suggest a primarily internal biochemical cause as the primary cause of asthma.

Now here it is interesting to note that ethnic Asians are much less likely to have asthma.  I doubt that ethnic Asians are much less likely to live downwind from coal-fired power generators than is the average American.  In fact, a disproportionate fraction of them live in California, which despite its history of smog, has few coal-fired power plants.  Also, while Native Americans have high rates of asthma, most of them live in the American West where coal-fired power plant density is low compared to that in the East.  For some reason, people of multiple race have much higher rates of asthma than any other racial group, except those of Puerto Rican descent, who are about twice as likely as White Americans to suffer asthma.  Once again, this would all seem more likely to point to asthma causes with more of a basis in human biochemistry than in exposure to coal-fired power plant emissions.  Apparently, it is also very bad to have a low income.

By area of the country, it is slightly worse to be from the Northeast and Midwest than from the South and West.  It is worse to be from outside a metropolitan area than from inside one, though the difference is small.  In general, this makes one suspicious of the idea that pollution is an important cause of asthma.  To be sure, one might question whether the use of insecticides by farmers might be the reason for higher rates outside of cities, but one would think if this were true that this would be well-documented.  Besides, insecticides are actually used heavily in cities to fumigate dense housing from cockroaches and other insect inhabitants and mice and rats.  Metro areas are hardly free of similar insecticides as are found in the country.  The slightly greater non-metropolitan asthma percentage is more likely due to natural allergens such as pollen then it is to man-made chemicals.  Many people with asthma have a very rough time when pollen levels are high.  Again, this is a suggestion that the main causes of asthma are not environmental, but genetic or internal human biochemistry combined with natural irritants.  This is so much the case that there is a small advantage in living in a metropolitan area where overall human emissions pollutant concentrations are much higher than in the non-metropolitan areas.

Of those who have asthma, are they more likely now than earlier to have more asthma attacks?  Well no.  The graph above shows a slight drop in the number having attacks in the last 12 months, whether children or adults.  If the causes of asthma were environmental and those environmental factors were getting worse to cause an increase in the number of people reporting that they have asthma, then would it not be likely that the percentage of those with asthma who had attacks in the last 12 months would be increasing?  That it is not seems to suggest a likelihood that asthma is caused by human biological factors and/or more people are becoming aware of what asthma is and are becoming conscious of having the disease.

Now, let us examine the data for those who have actually had an asthma attack in the last 12 months.  Among those who have asthma, the percentage of each group having an asthma attack in the last 12 months varies very little.  The very small differences in the percentage of each ethnic group's asthma population having an asthma attack in the last 12 months inclines one toward the idea there may be an asthma gene which one either has or does not have.  The very similar percentages by region tends to argue that coal-fired power plants are at most a small factor and that environment generally is likely also to be a small factor.

This map of asthma incidence is remarkable.  It is interesting that there are sharp gradients by state.  Texas and Louisiana have low incidences, while New Mexico and Oklahoma have relatively high incidences of asthma in their populations.  Washington and Oregon on the West Coast have high incidences, but California has a low incidence.  All of the Rocky Mountain states have high incidences, despite those states not being noteworthy for pollution.  A narrow band of states across the middle of the Great Plains has relatively high incidences, while states north and south of the band have low incidences.  All of the South has a low incidence and all of the Northeast above the Mason-Dixon line has a high incidence.

The EPA makes the false claim that half the mercury in the atmosphere comes from coal-fired power plants.  I proved this nonsense in my blog post Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants.  In that post, I showed that any mercury output from the coal-fired power plants was overwhelmed by natural sources of mercury in the atmosphere.  I showed that there was a complete lack of correlation between the EPA map showing their claimed power plant mercury emissions and actual measurements of mercury precipitation from the atmosphere.  However, their mercury emissions map may be of use here as a general measure of the pollutant output of coal-fired power plants, such as it is, around the country.  If the plant is supposedly not removing mercury output, then there may be other pollutants it is not removing in proportional measure.  So, here is that map:

Now comparing this map to the asthma prevalence by state in the map above this one, it is seen to be plausible that the high asthma incidences in the states Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky might be due to emissions from coal-fired power plants.  But, there is almost no coal-fired power plant emission in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho to explain their high asthma incidences.  The large concentration of coal-fired power plants in East Texas where most of the state population is coexists with a very low incidence of asthma in Texas and downwind Louisiana.  The high incidence of coal-fired power plants in northern Alabama and Georgia near those states highest population centers coexists with a low rate of asthma in those states.  Oklahoma has a high rate of asthma, but its coal-fired power plants are almost all downwind of its population centers in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Norman, Lawton, and Edmond.  It is also hard to understand how West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina can have low incidences of asthma with so many coal-fired power plants.  In short, there is no correlation between the coal-fired power plant emissions and the incidence of asthma.

This is not too surprising given that the CDC started its slide presentation on asthma by stating that its causes were generally not known.  The CDC has decades of skill in measuring and mapping the regional incidence of diseases and tracing them back to common sources.  If coal-fired power plants were a significant cause of asthma, surely they would have identified this cause long ago.

You would never know about this glaring lack of evidence from the ads being shown of asthma-suffering children on TV lately, which the Progressive Elitist propagandists are shamelessly blaming on coal-fired power plants.  This claim is as false and base as the claim that man's use of fossil fuels will cause catastrophic degradation of the environment and represents a threat to man's continued existence.  There is no rational justification for the claims in either case made by the alarmists who are endeavoring without let-up to further empower the government to eliminate our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of our own happiness.  It can only be understood as a power grab, allowing Progressive Elitists to dictate our values to us and to micromanage our lives.

Update 21 April 2015:  If man-made global warming is causing asthma attacks as the EPA and Obama claim, why is it that hospital admissions for asthma are lower in the summer than in the winter?  If the claim is that smog and ozone are playing a role, then how is it that asthma prevalence has increased while both smog and ozone have generally decreased each decade since 1970?  What is more, ozone and smog levels caused by man are surely higher in metropolitan areas than outside them, so why is the prevalence of asthma lower in metropolitan areas than in non-metropolitan areas?  The EPA claims that common pollutant emissions are down 62% as of 2013 from levels in 1980!  Smog is down 33% since 1980 according to the EPA.  Is it possible to be more irrational than this Obama EPA is in its asthma claims?

Obama Cannot Kill King Coal

Some time ago I wrote an article called King Coal Will Continue to Rule the World.  To follow up on that with aspects of the current situation let us note that:

• Japanese demand for natural gas increased greatly following the Fukushima disaster.  This fueled an increase in natural gas prices throughout Asia and Europe.
• With natural gas prices so high in Europe, where little fracking is taking place, natural gas is affordable for energy production for electricity only during peak demand periods.
• What is affordable in Europe and elsewhere is American coal.  US coal exports increased from 50.1 billion tons six years ago to 129 billion tons.  This is an increase by a factor of 2.57 times!
• If you buy into the garbage idea that man's CO2 emissions have a catastrophic impact by causing severe global warming, is it really better that US coal be burned around the rest of the world and not in the electric generating plants of the US?  Does it really make sense for us to increase our electricity costs by not using coal so the rest of the world can lower their costs by using American coal?
• If you believe that coal-fired power plants produce very harmful emissions such as mercury and sulfur, is it better to have our coal burned in power plants most of which are not as well scrubbed as our power plants?  Of course, I have shown that mercury is not the problem our EPA has made it out to be here and here.

Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants

The Environmental Protection Agency has recently put into effect a ruling called Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that requires power plants to greatly decrease their mercury emissions.  This directive is aimed primarily at coal-fired power plants and is said to be authorized under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.  The EPA claims that electric power units are responsible for 50% of the mercury air pollution in the United States.  The EPA provides a U.S. map with power plant mercury air emission quantities as well, including a scary health claim. 

Let us put this map into a rational perspective by comparing it with the total measured mercury air pollution across the country.  In this way we can extract a good sense of the contribution of man-made power plant mercury air pollution compared to that of natural sources.  If we live in an environment in which natural sources of mercury produce far more mercury emissions than do electric power plants, then we may look at the cost to benefit evaluation very differently than the power-lusting EPA does. 

Now, I have actually done this in an earlier post on this blog using total mercury air deposition maps for the years 2009 and 2010.  That post is Coal-Fired Power Plants Produce Insignificant Mercury.  Clearly the EPA was either not interested enough to learn about the mercury pollution problem to read that post or it was so motivated by emotional political concerns that it knowingly ignored the facts of reality cogently explained in my previous post.  However, in the interests of educating American voters, I will try to influence thinking Americans on this topic once again and use the newer total mercury air pollution maps of 2012 and 2011 to do so.



The Mercury Deposition Network measures the total deposition of mercury from the atmosphere each year at many stations across the USA.  These maps are found here. The mercury deposition distributions from the atmosphere across the USA for 2011 and 2012 are shown below. 

 

As in 2010 and 2009, the highest concentrations of mercury deposition from the atmosphere occur in the west, with particularly high rates in the Rocky Mountains, areas east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Southwest, and areas of the Great Plains states.  The Southeast is much less bad and as one works up the East Coast through the Middle States into the Northeast, the amount of mercury deposition decreases.  This general story of the mercury deposition concentrations is supported by all of the mercury deposition maps for the years 2009 - 2012.

California varies from year to year, having been rather bad in 2012, but not bad in 2011 and 2010, and somewhere in between in 2009.  If electric generating plants produce half the mercury deposition in the US as the EPA claims, it sure is hard to imagine that the mercury output of electric power plants in California varied so much in those years to explain the major variations in mercury depositions there.  It turns out that U.S. fires cause about as much mercury to become airborne as do electric generating plants.  According to Willie Soon and Paul Driessen, U.S. fires produce an average of 44 tons of airborne mercury a year.  Now, we can make some sense of the California variability.  2012 was a much worse fire year in California than the other three years and 2009 was the second worst of the four years.

Now according to the EPA, electric power plants in 2005 produced 53 tons of airborne mercury.  This was down from 59 tons in 1990.  It we assume the same rate of decrease after 2005 as between 1990 and 2005, in 2012 the mercury output would be estimated to be about 50 tons.  This is barely more than the 44 tons due to wildfires in the U.S.  This has consequences.  If the EPA says that 50 tons of output is the source of half of the airborne mercury, then the wildfire contribution is 44%.  This leaves very little for other man-made sources and for any other natural cause.  This, I will demonstrate, is a crock!

To see why, let us look at the mercury deposition maps and compare them to the distribution of the electric power plants.  The bulk of the electric power plants are in the East!  The worst of the mercury deposition is well to the west of them.  Since prevailing winds are from the west to the east, there is no way those huge swathes of red in the West are due to the electric generating plants mostly in the East!  Even granted that there are more wildfires in the drier and more sparsely inhabited West than in the East, there is no way the 44% of the airborne mercury due to fires is the cause of those huge red areas.  The numbers and the distribution of mercury do not add up.  There are clearly natural sources of mercury that are much more important than the EPA's colorful and self-empowering story would allow.

To hammer another nail in this sadly incompetent or untruthful story, note that the EPA map of power plant emitters shows a very large concentration of such emitters in the Ohio Valley, stretching from Eastern Missouri; through southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio; Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.  This cluster is such a large fraction of what the EPA says is 50% of the mercury airborne pollution, that if they were anywhere near right, there would be a bright red area where this cluster of power plants is and also to the east of them where the prevailing winds would carry their mercury output.  So what do we see?  We see some light red in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana that seems to carry over from the redder areas west of them.  We see a lot of tan in Kentucky, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.  But note the particularly dense cluster of mercury output from power plants according to the dubious source of the EPA in eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania, and ask yourself why this is not the brightest of all red areas on the distribution maps.  And ask why eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey are largely green, indicating a low deposition of mercury in those downwind areas.

Consider the case of Idaho.  There are no power plant emission sites in the EPA map of such sites in Idaho.  Washington and Oregon states to the west of it have almost no power plant emitters.  Nonetheless, Idaho is in large part red in the two distribution maps here, as it was in the two earlier years as well.  Why?  It is not because Idaho is overwhelmed with forest fires.  No, there are other important natural causes of mercury emissions which can produce much higher concentrations of airborne mercury depositions than can the densest cluster of power plants.

Overall, it is clear that the contribution electric power plants make to airborne mercury is actually trivial in comparison to natural sources of airborne mercury.  As I pointed out in my previous post on this subject, this is likely mostly due to the wind erosion of the many mercury deposits brought to the surface by the volcanoes, which have long been extinct, but once were plentiful in the southern Rockies and in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It is very clear that electric power plants produce insignificant quantities of airborne mercury compared to the natural sources.

So if the EPA actually cared about Americans' health and if airborne mercury actually was a danger to us, then it should find the natural sources of mercury and clean up those sites.  Where a vein of cinnabar (mercury sulfide) is exposed, it would see to it that it was covered with a layer of concrete or in some other way kept from further erosion.  Of course, the west is already covered in the dust from such sources, but finding the richer sources of mercury would in time decrease the hazards.  Such an effort would have more effect than cleaning up the electric power plants in all likelihood, given the puny mercury output of the power plants.

In the meantime, people who choose to live in the West should at least be educated that they are exposing themselves to this mercury hazard.  Except, if it really is a hazard of great concern, then we should see significant health problems in the American West due to the high concentrations of airborne mercury there.  We should have no need to refer to far away island peoples with a heavy seafood intake to evaluate the medical problems caused by mercury.  This is what the EPA seems to do, though it will not make those studies public and some such studies are known to show no real problems.  There is general agreement though that most of human intake of mercury is due to eating seafood or fish from mercury-rich streams and rivers.  Eons of natural erosion of mercury deposits and volcanic outputs have loaded the oceans with about 200 ppm of mercury.

So are there any studies that show that the high concentration areas for airborne mercury in the West are the cause of elevated mercury illness problems?  No, not that I can find.  Is there any evidence of higher rates of mercury induced illness in the areas around the cluster of power plants on the Ohio River, especially in southern and eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania?  There is a study by the West Virginia Dept. of Health and Human Resources entitled Exposure to Mercury in West Virginia by Barbara J. Smith that concludes:

Data are inadequate to determine if:

• mercury in West Virginia fish tissue is increasing or decreasing,

• West Virginian’s are exposed to more mercury than people in the United States,

• reducing mercury emissions in West Virginia will result in reductions in mercury residues in fish caught in West Virginia waters and

• adverse health effects are occurring in West Virginian’s due to mercury exposures from
eating fish.

It seems clear that epidemiologists and physicians have been unable to find any connection to date either between the comparatively high mercury deposition rates throughout much of the American West or in the vicinity of the major cluster of power plants in the Ohio Valley.  This has not inhibited the EPA in proclaiming itself a hero in stopping evil power plant operators from spewing mercury into the air.  No, even though power plant mercury is clearly of insignificant quantities relative to natural sources, the plant owners are expected to shut down or make very expensive installations of scrubbers to remove all traces of mercury from their emissions.

Shutdowns will result in the rot of large capital investments, the loss of jobs, and required replacement of plants with new plants which will direct more capital away from other business endeavors.  In some cases, electricity capacity shortages may result.  The installation of new scrubbers that can remove mercury will also redirect capital from other endeavors and it will increase the cost of electricity production.  In both cases, the added capital investment will require electricity cost increases for consumers.

If the mercury emissions of power plants were significant compared to natural sources and if some health consequences in areas of high mercury deposition could be demonstrated, then it would be rational to make a cost-benefit analysis of power plants that emit mercury.  One might conclude that the installation of mercury scrubbers was necessary or that coal had to be replaced by natural gas as the fuel.  However, given that neither of these rationally critical conditions can be shown to exist, it is a fool's errand to require the actions the EPA has mandated with the MATS ruling.

Given the false story the EPA is telling about airborne mercury depositions, it is clear that it is either incredibly incompetent in making rational scientific and economic assessments and/or that it is simply and only interested in increasing its own power.  There is good reason to believe that "and" and not "or" applies in that statement.  The story the EPA tells when it claims carbon dioxide is a pollutant which will cause catastrophic man-made global warming is just another such case in which its science and economics are extremely deficient.  Once again, in the carbon dioxide emissions case, it is also very clear that the EPA is only interested in gaining power.

It is also very clear that the EPA is fulfilling Obama's and the Progressive Elitists' vendetta against coal under both MATS and under its claim that CO2 is a pollutant.  Having a renegade administration that is trying to wipe out a major coal and energy industry is very harmful to our standard of living.  This is even worse given that they have reduced our production of oil and gas on federal lands and offshore as well.

The More Flexible Obama EPA Post-Election Ambush

Obama has had several of the new rules promulgated by his radical EPA put on hold until after the election.  Apparently, missile defense shields are not the only topic on which he will have more flexibility after the election.  He is well aware that these rulings will cause the loss of many jobs and he does not want those job holders and their families to know this before the election.  This is especially a dirty trick on the poor and those on fixed incomes that the Democrat Party used to pretend to champion.  They are already spending about 24% of their very limited incomes on energy largely due to the out-of-control efforts of the EPA to raise energy prices for fossil fuels and to mandate the increased use of very expensive alternative energy sources.  With friends like these, the poor need no enemies.

Senator Jim Inhofe has had a report written by the minority staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works which was published in October and documents the long list of new rulings that EPA is going to slam the American economy with after the election when Obama will be more flexible.  The results of the EPA rulings on hold will be the virtual elimination of the use of our huge coal reserves which have provided Americans with the least expensive electricity and energy in general in the world.

This Obama administration is also intending to limit the use of oil, not just foreign oil, but also U.S. oil.  This is the real reason that Obama prevented the building of the Keystone XL pipeline which would have brought a much needed supply of Canadian oil from Alberta and American oil from the shale oil deposits of North Dakota to Cushing, Oklahoma and to the Gulf of Mexico oil refineries which have been getting less and less oil from mismanaged nationalized oil companies in Venezuela and Mexico.  Killing the Keystone XL pipeline cost us 20,000 jobs immediately and about 465,000 jobs total by 2035.  That dependable supply of oil would have increased jobs in the Bakken shale oil formation of North Dakota, increased refinery jobs, increased other chemical industry jobs, and provided lower cost oil, gasoline, plastics, and fertilizer to all of the economic activities dependent upon them.  Our exports of products would have been increased.

The Obama administration is planning to replace state regulation of tight shale oil formation fracturing with federal regulations so that oil and gas from our huge shale oil and gas formations can be reduced and made more expensive.  Oil companies have been using hydraulic fracturing since 1949 when it was pioneered in Duncan, Oklahoma.  Since then it has been used 1.5 million times without any proven case of water contamination, which has even been admitted by the radical EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.  Yet, it is in the name that such contamination might happen that very expensive regulations are to be slapped onto frakking operations.  The real reason is to prevent the use of fossil fuels because the Democrat Party has bought into the nonsensical hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and has little care about how many jobs are eliminated and how much the cost of living rises as they chase that chimera. 

The Obama administration has succeeded in reducing the production of natural gas on federal lands and in federal waters by 11% in 2011 compared to 2010.  They decreased oil production from these areas by 14%.  But oil and gas production on private land is regulated by the states and such states as Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan have been allowing oil and natural gas production to boom.  This has created a shale gas industry with 600,000 jobs, which is expected to grow to 870,000 by 2015.  By 2035, there may be 1.6 million jobs in the industry.  In 2010, this nascent industry was already adding $76.9 billion to the U.S. GDP.  If re-elected, Obama and his many henchmen are determined to keep this wondrous development for jobs and our standard of living from happening.

According to an April study released by the U.S. Geological Survey, North America has 26% of the world's recoverable conventional oil resources.  This excludes our rich shale oil, tight oil, and heavy oil resources, which are gigantic.  We have 30% of the world's technically recoverable conventional natural gas resources.  We have the largest coal reserves in the world.  The oil and gas industries are already adding nearly a billion dollars a day to the economy and this is all that has keep us from falling back into a state of contracting GDP.  American households have saved about $566 million a day in natural gas expenses due to the drop in natural gas prices due to hydraulic fracturing.  All of this the Obama team wants to make useless and take away from Americans because they are foolish enough to buy into the unproven, and indeed failed, claim that CO2 emissions by man are catastrophically warming the planet.

What are the slew of new regulations intended to strangle Americans use of energy?

Greenhouse Gas Regulations:  Intended to be worse than the Cap and Trade legislation that could not make even through the totally Democrat House and Senate of 2009 and 2010.  The rules will cost $300 to $400 billion a year.  Gasoline and home energy bills will go up greatly.  Energy use in power plants, schools, restaurants, hospitals, churches, and farms will all be regulated, though they will be phased in so the frog will not jump out of the pot.  The first restrictions implemented will kill most coal-fired electric power plants in keeping with Obama's promise to do that.  At least 175 coal-fired power plants are on the chopping block.  At least 37,000 farms and ranches will require greenhouse gas permits at an average cost of $23,000 a year.  This will cause the cost of meat and dairy prices to rise.

Ozone Rule:  The EPA places a low-ball cost on this rule of $90 billion a year.  Others say it will cost $1 trillion a year and obliterate 7.4 million jobs.  Why so much destruction?  Because 650 additional counties will likely be placed in the non-attainment category for ozone limits.  These counties will be prohibited from further development, so no new jobs can be created in them and existing plants will be forced to close.

Hydraulic Fracturing Regulations:  14 Obama administration agencies are trying to wrest control of hydraulic fracturing regulations from the states.  These include the EPA, the Energy Dept., the Bureau of Land Management, the Center for Disease Control, the Dept. of Agriculture, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.  The cost for new permits and well workovers to bring them into compliance will cost from $1.50 to $1.62 billion.  Added costs per well of $253,800 are estimated and bringing a well back into use to re-stimulate fracture will cost $233,100.  Obama has efforts underway to apply the Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Effluent Limitations Guidelines to shale gas extraction and to coal-bed methane gas.

Florida Numeric Nutrient Criteria:  In 2009, the Obama EPA determined that it would set federal numeric nutrient water standards under the Clean Water Act for the state of Florida.  The standard the EPA said it was going to set in 2010 was widely criticized as infeasible both technologically and economically.  The state of Florida set its own standard and was upheld in doing so by a Florida administrative judge in June 2012.  The state submitted its standard to the EPA and the EPA had to approve it in 60 days or disapprove it in 90 days by law.  The EPA has done neither, once again demonstrating the lawlessness so common in the Obama administration.  It appears that the EPA is just waiting until after the election in the important state of Florida before asserting its arbitrary will.

EPA Control of Water Sites:  The EPA has proposed a new guidance document of April 2011 under the Clean Water Act that allows it to govern almost every body of water in the U.S., no matter how small.  This is based on their reinterpretation of recent Supreme Court decisions.  The EPA estimates that 17% of the non-jurisdictional determinations will be reversed under the new guidance.  This new guidance was unable to pass the heavily Democrat House and Senate when it came up for approval.  The new guidance would force state and local governments to perform many new duties many of them do not want to do.

Storm-Water Regulation:  As part of the Chesapeake Bay Settlement Agreement in 2009, the EPA announced setting new nationwide storm-water rules.  The proposed rule will establish a post-construction storm-water run-off standard and massive changes to storm-water systems.  Green infrastructure techniques such as green roofs, rain gardens, and permeable pavement will be required.  States, municipalities, and property owners will incur huge costs.  This may be the most expensive rule in the EPA's history.

Tier III Gasoline Regulations:  The current limit on sulfur in gasoline is 30 ppm and the new limit will become 10 ppm.  The initial cost to achieve this in refineries will be $10 billion and the annual cost thereafter will be $2.4 billion.  Gasoline cost may be increased by 9 cents a gallon.

Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Rule:  This rule would apply to about 200,000 boilers and their emissions of mercury, dioxin, particulate matter, hydrogen chloride, and carbon monoxide.  They burn natural gas, coal, fuel oil, biomass, refinery gas, or other gas to produce steam used to heat buildings, produce heat for manufacturing purposes, or to produce electricity.  The EPA claims the capital cost will be $9.5 billion, though IHS Global Insight did a study that concluded it will cost $20 billion.  The Small Business Administration says it will cause a major increase in regulatory costs for businesses, institutions, and municipalities.  The Department of Commerce says it would cause job losses of 40,000 to 60,000, which is much higher than EPA estimates.  The Senate Minority Report says it will reduce GDP by $1.2 billion and destroy nearly 800,000 jobs, but that combination of costs and jobs lost does not make sense to me.

The methodology for producing the requirements of this ruling is terrible.  The initial ruling had 5,800 comments citing technical and statutory errors.  21 governors and more than 100 Congressmen had objections.  EPA officials finally admitted they had failed to "calculate standards that fully reflected operational reality."  The most current version of the proposed standard says that a boiler already in existence must have an average emission limit achieved by the best performing 12% of boilers in the given boiler category.  A new boiler must have emissions equal to or better than the best existing boiler.  There is a terrible catch here as well.  The best is defined for each of the controlled substances.  The best fuel and design to reduce mercury emissions may be very different than the best to reduce particulate matter, for instance.  In fact, the best boiler for each of the six substances does not meet the new MACT standard for this reason.  The standard is not technologically and economically feasible.  What is more, four of the regulated substances meet the statutory requirements for health-based standards and were so treated in previous versions of boiler MACT rules.  The proposed rule now establishes no threshold beyond which the emissions are thought to have no significant consequences.  The EPA argues that they cannot set such a threshold, but this negates their argument that they can calculate the health benefits of their new proposed ruling.  Furthermore, the EPA misstated the health benefits by assuming that all particulates, no matter their composition, have the same harmful health consequences.  I have already discussed the issues relating to mercury emissions extensively here and here.

Cement MACT Rule:  This EPA rule is expected to shut down 18 cement plants and cost up to 80,000 jobs.  This will increase our importation of cement from China and increase the cement cost of construction of roads, bridges, and buildings by 22 to 36%.

316(b) Cooling Tower Rules:  Provides for stricter protection of fish in cooling tower reservoirs.  The costs are estimated to be between 384 and 460 million dollars a year.  The value of the benefit is thought to be $17 million.

Coal Ash Ruling:  The proposed EPA coal ash rule declaring coal ash a hazardous substance will cost from $79 to $110 billion over 20 years.  It will destroy between 184,000 and 316,000 jobs with especially bad consequences for Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Missouri.

Farm Dust Regulations:  The EPA is considering tightening its controls on farm dust under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for coarse particulate matter (PM10).  The new standard may require farmers and ranchers to stop many common practices and activities.  Many businesses may have to decrease their output drastically and many may go out of operation.

Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasures Rule:  Farmers and ranchers will be required to develop and implement costly oil and gasoline spill prevention plans.

The overall impact of these EPA rulings on the economy and on employment will be huge.  If implemented at all in their present proposed or EPA-favored form, the economy will go into a recession of the GDP reduction kind.  There is a pattern of EPA lack of concern for any rational weighing of the value of health or environmental consequences with economic and human consequences.  Whether people are allowed to earn a living is of little concern to the EPA under Obama.  Being responsive to radical environmental groups and to global warming alarmist groups is their top priority, aside from Obama's re-election.  Since Obama will have much more flexibility after his last election, as he famously told the Russian Medvedev, many of these rulings by the out-of-control and radical EPA will haunt American consumers, workers, and producers under a second Obama term.

Coal-Fired Power Plants Produce Insignificant Mercury

Back in December, I wrote about the absurdity of the EPA claim that coal-fired power plants produced significant mercury which necessitated drastic reductions at any cost.  I was then puzzled that the EPA did not produce maps of the mercury concentrations that would show the mercury was found in higher concentrations downwind of coal-fired power plants.  It turns out that maps of the concentrations of mercury do exist and can be examined.  The National Atmospheric Deposition Program produces annual maps of the mercury concentrations across the USA here.  Note that the mercury high concentration areas changed somewhat between 2009 and 2010, but coal-fired power plants do not have giant chicken legs to rise up and walk to a new location.  But, the highest mercury concentrations are in the Southern Rocky Mountains and in the plains states just to the west of those southern Rocky Mountains.

The hottest areas for mercury are the states of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and other states near them.  Florida is a bit warm also.  So one would conclude that most of our coal-fired power plants are in southern California and the Southwest in general.  I do not know how one would explain the high concentrations in Florida.  But let us look at where the coal-fired power plants are then.

Of course, as you already knew, most of them are in the eastern half of the United States.  There are only a few dinky coal-fired power plants in southern California and most of those in Arizona are in northeastern Arizona.  There is a large concentration of coal-fired power plants in the Ohio River Valley and no lack of them in Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.  Despite this huge concentration of coal-fired power plants, the East Coast Mid-Atlantic states are relatively green, which means they have lower mercury concentrations than the western part of the USA.  Being downwind of a coal-fired power plant does not appear to be anything like as important a factor as natural geographic sources of mercury are.  The mercury concentration maps give no hint of a mercury plume to the east of a power plant or even to the east of a concentration of large coal-fired power plants.  We should see such a plume due to the prevailing wind direction.

Update: I noted in my earlier post referred to above that coal-fired power plants produce about 41 to 48 tons of mercury a year. That post observed that forest fires in the US were estimated to release about 48 tons of mercury a year. Most of the big forest fires occur in the West, especially in many areas consistent with high concentrations in this map due to dry climates and low population densities drawing fewer fire-fighters. If these were the only sources of mercury, then the distribution of mercury across the US would still not differ much East to West since the forest fires of the West would be balanced by the higher concentration of coal-fired power plants in the East.

So what is the likely cause of the high mercury concentrations that are observed in the Southern Rockies and in the plains states to the west, especially the northwest, of them?  In comparison to these puny sources of mercury, volcanoes, subsea vents, and geysers are thought to produce 9 to 10K tons of mercury a year. The areas of high mercury concentrations do not correlate very well with the newer and more active volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest in the US, however. But, it turns out that they correlate well with the old volcanoes of the Rocky Mountains shown in white in the map here and shown below:

It is well-known to geologists that the southern Rocky Mountains are much richer in minerals and precious metals than the northern Rockies because volcanoes and rising magma played a much greater role in their formation.  I expect the high mercury concentration areas are due to the erosion of mercury mineral deposits, commonly cinnabar, in these old volcanoes and from their environs. The mercury released by forest fires is clear evidence that there is substantial mercury in the ground in the West already distributed about. The Rockies have been eroding for a very long time now and mercury is distributed over long distances from these old volcanoes by winds and eastward flowing rivers. The rivers flow into the Mississippi, so none of the mercury they transport goes east of the Mississippi River.  This is my best guess about the source in any case. Update End.

Once again we see that the EPA does not use rational science to govern its actions, even when those actions will have drastic negative consequences for the economy and put many people out of jobs.  Hauling coal by train to power plants, operating the power plants, and extracting coal from the ground all provide many hard-working Americans with jobs.  We also have huge coal reserves, which it makes more sense to burn to create electricity than it does to use natural gas which is better for making plastics and other products.  Of course, now natural gas is inexpensive and it is being used to generate electricity.  I am happy to leave how it will be used to the free market, but I do not want the EPA under the guidance of the ever-foolish Obama pushing and shoving the free market to influence such decisions.