EPA right to propose repeal of 2024 power plant mercury rule

The Obama EPA’s 2012 rule for mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants may have been the agency’s least defensible measure ever under the Clean Air Act, and that is saying a lot. But Biden’s 2024 rule tightening these provisions made things considerably worse. Thankfully, the Trump EPA has proposed repealing the Biden rule, and CEI has submitted comments supporting this sensible deregulatory move. Next, the administration should go after the original 2012 rule as well.

The traces of mercury in coal that are released upon its combustion pose virtually no measurable public health threat, and the EPA even admitted as much when it finalized the 2012 rule. The EPA’s claimed mercury reduction benefits were a mere $4 to $6 million annually, and that was based on farfetched 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 cost impacts on coal-fired utilities (and ultimately on ratepayers), putting them at as much as $9.6 billion annually. Thus, by the agency’s own reckoning, the estimated costs of this rule outweighed the 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 costs.

In 2015, the US Supreme Court held in Michigan v. EPA that the EPA was required to take costs into account and remanded the rule back to the agency. In response, EPA 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. 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 administration doubled down by significantly tightening the mercury requirements for coal-fired facilities. And there is not even $4 to $6 million in hypothetical monetized benefits from reducing mercury emissions, as there was in the 2012 rule. For this 2024 rule, the agency declined to quantify any mercury benefits. In other words, the agency tightened a rule that, if anything, should have been repealed.            

Along with the fine particulate matter co-benefits, EPA also claims equally-questionable climate change benefits to justify a putative mercury rule that no longer includes any quantifiable mercury benefits.

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

For these reasons, our comment strongly supports the Trump EPA’s proposed repeal of the 2024 provisions. And, for the same reasons, we believe the agency should take a look at the 2012 rule and take steps to bring this ill-advised mercury program to an end.