EPA repeals another costly rule targeting affordable and reliable coal

Though not nearly as far-reaching as the recently announced end to the Endangerment Finding, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) February 20 final rule repealing its 2024 mercury regulations for coal-fired power plants is an important step for affordable energy, as well as the rule of law.

The only real reason to target the minute traces of mercury emitted from power plants is to pursue an extra-legal war on coal. That is exactly what the Obama EPA initiated in 2012. Such emissions pose virtually no measurable public health threat. The EPA even admitted as much when it finalized its 2012 rule pursuant to the Clean Air Act. 

The agency’s claimed mercury reduction benefits were a mere $4 to $6 million annually, compared to $9.6 billion in costs. Moreover, those benefits were based on far-fetched assumptions of a hypothetical population of pregnant women eating vast quantities of freshwater fish contaminated with methyl mercury levels rarely if ever seen in reality. Even then, the only harm the agency could come up with was a hypothetical drop in IQ of 0.00209 points among the children of these fish-loving young women.

The EPA was much more realistic about the rule’s $9.6 billion annual cost on coal-fired utilities, and ultimately on ratepayers. By the EPA’s own reckoning, the estimated costs of this rule outweighits direct benefits by more than a thousand-fold. Yet this didn’t matter to the EPA. The agency didn’t think it had to consider its costs.

But in 2015, the US Supreme Court held in Michigan v. EPA that the agency was required to take costs into account and remanded the rule back to the agency. In response, the agency revised its legal justification by relying on a claimed $33 to $89 billion in indirect benefits from reductions in fine particulate matter emissions.

Thus, the mercury rule joins many other Obama and Biden EPA measures justified by highly dubious co-benefits from fine particulate matter reductions, rather than the emissions reductions that are the ostensible purpose for the rule. Even worse, fine particulate matter is the subject of direct regulation elsewhere in the Clean Air Act, further undercutting any rationale for indirectly doing so via mercury regulations. The EPA’s misuse of fine particulate matter co-benefits as a regulatory justification is covered extensively in CEI’s recent book, Modernizing the EPA: A Blueprint for Congress.

Fast forward to 2024, and the Biden EPA doubled down on this bad policy by significantly tightening the mercury requirements for coal-fired facilities. As CEI noted in our comments favoring repeal of this action, the EPA did not even claim the $4 to $6 million in hypothetical monetized benefits from further reducing mercury emissions, as there was in the 2012 rule. For the 2024 rule, the agency declined to quantify any mercury benefits whatsoever.             

Along with the dubious fine particulate matter co-benefits papering over the lack of quantifiable mercury benefits, EPA also claimed equally-questionable climate change benefits. Thankfully, the Trump administration has directed all agencies not to include these highly problematic estimates in rulemakings and other actions.

As with the original 2012 rule, the 2024 rule that would have imposed costs far in excess of benefits, especially now that the American economy needs reliable sources of electricity like coal.

This is why the final rule is good news. Granted, the 2024 mercury rule is only one of a long list of anti-coal measures that need reform or repeal; the EPA may want to reconsider the original 2012 mercury rule as well. Nonetheless, repealling the EPA’s 2024 mercury rule is an important step in the direction of unraveling the anti-coal regulatory agenda and moving back to energy choices made by people rather than government mandates.