Joint comments from CPR's Dan Farber, Catherine O'Neill, Rena Steinzor, and James Goodwin on the EPA's effort to undercut the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard (MATS rule), by eliminating consideration of "co-benefits," and with it, to lay groundwork for eliminating consideration of co-benefits from cost-benefit analyses for future environmental regulation, April 17, 2019.

Tuna, with a side of mercury

Mercury, Risk, & Justice, by Catherine A. O'Neill. White Paper 405, October 2004.

Thrown back: Judges stand up for our health, the rule of law by rejecting Bush mercury stance, op-ed by Rena Steinzor

Catherine O'Neill's comments on EPA's proposed mercury pollution credit-trading scheme.

Catherine O'Neill Testimony on the Mercury Pollution Reduction Act, May 12, 2009

Mercury and the DEQ: trading our health for economic gain, by Daniel Rohlf

CPR Perspective: Preventing Mercury Pollution: Protecting Mothers and Babies, by Catherine O'Neill and Rena Steinzor. CPR's Perspectives Series is a set of monographs by CPR Member Scholars on timely and important health, safety, and environmental topics. Each Perspective provides a thumbnail sketch of the competing arguments concerning a substantive or procedural principle for developing appropriate health, safety and environmental policies, and closes with the Member Scholar-author's proposed approach to the issue.

For the Bush administration, mercury contamination is the regulatory equivalent of the perfect storm. Four separate fields - science, law, economics, and justice - have combined to demand strict and timely controls on the intolerable hazards mercury poses for public health and the environment. While many expected the Bush administration to search for escape routes that favor its friends in the chemical and energy industries - which produce the lion's share of mercury - none were prepared for its headlong plunge into the tallest waves. Just as the doomed fishermen of the Andrea Gail sailed into the storm despite clear warnings, the administration is likewise proceeding with business as usual. This means no requirements for industrial plants to reduce pollution at the smokestack and no expectation that the oldest, dirtiest plants install modern pollution controls. Meanwhile, the clear and present danger posed by mercury is being ignored.

Materials on the Environmental Protection Agency's Web site – buried deep inside hundreds of pages of internal documents – reveal the extent to which the White House was willing to override expert scientific conclusions to justify a weak proposal to control mercury emissions from power plants. Federal agencies are required to obtain approval for all major regulatory proposals from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (led by the president's regulatory czar John Graham) within the White House Office of Management and Budget. In flyspecking EPA's mercury proposal, OMB economists and White House officials systematically downplayed scientific conclusions that methyl-mercury exposure causes brain damage in children.

Writing on AlterNet, Catherine O'Neill observes that " Scant attention has been given to the Bush administration's embrace of risk avoidance as the supposed 'solution' to public health hazards and environmental contamination." She makes the case that the burden to avoid unhealthy exposure to pollution should not fall on individuals, but rather on polluters -- but someone needs to explain that to the Bush administration.