Power Plant Mercury Emissions Poisoning the Great Lakes. By Climate Guest Contributor on June 8, 2012 at 11:17 am "Power Plant Mercury Emissions Poisoning the Great Lakes" Swanksalot, via Flickr by Thom Cmar, via NRDC’s Switchboard This week we released a report, Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal Fired Power Plants in the Great Lakes Region, which highlights the impacts of mercury emissions from Great Lakes power plants on the people, fish, birds, and wildlife of our region. Our report focuses on the 144 coal-fired power plants in the Great Lakes region, and names the 25 worst emitters, which were responsible for putting over 7,000 pounds of mercury into the air in 2010. Mercury is a dangerous brain poison that doesn’t belong in our Great Lakes. EPA’s authority to adopt these critical safeguards goes back to 1990, when the first President Bush signed amendments to the Clean Air Act that were passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress and directed EPA to set standards on major sources such as power plants.
Dirty Business. The Dark Lord of Coal Country | Politics News. After a Strong Counterattack, Big Coal Makes a Comeback by Jeff Goodell. 09 Nov 2010: Opinion by jeff goodell The coal industry — perhaps the least entrepreneurial, most politically-connected business in America — likes to present itself as a hapless collection of hard-working guys just trying to keep the lights on. In the run-up to last week’s election, the industry skillfully played up the idea that it was under siege by out-of-control federal bureaucrats, including a president unsympathetic to the idea that burning more coal is the surest route to a healthy economy. In the weeks before the election, I saw banners in several West Virginia towns that said “Stop the War on Coal” and, my favorite, “Legalize Coal.”
Of course, the idea that the Obama administration is on a mission to kill coal would strike many energy and environmental activists as something like the inverse of the truth. From the point of view of the Earth’s atmosphere, the war on coal has been a spectacular failure. You can see this simply by looking at the numbers. Photo Credit: ACCCE.