Mercury plan shot down

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday effectively snuffed an industry-backed effort to allow the buying and selling of mercury emission credits, a plan critics derided as a multimillion-dollar giveaway to polluters.

The high court decided not to hear a Bush-era appeal, letting stand a lower court's ruling against the mercury trading concept. Public health and conservation groups said the Supreme Court's decision is important to South Carolina and other states with significant mercury contamination problems.

"This is the final repudiation of an unlawfully lax Bush administration mercury rule that we warned (the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control) not to adopt in part or in full," said Blan Holman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charleston. "State regulators need to stop settling for weak standards and start reducing mercury contamination from South Carolina coal-fired power plants."

Utilities had favored the so-called mercury cap-and-trade program, saying it would spur innovation while reducing overall emissions. But critics said trading in mercury would allow some plants to release more mercury than others, creating hot spots that could harm people's health.

A federal appeals court struck down the Bush plan last year, and the Bush administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The Obama administration recently said it would drop the appeal, and the Supreme Court's decision Monday not to hear the case formally ended the matter.

Coal-burning utilities said the cap-and-trade program gave them more flexibility to install pollution-control equipment. In response to the Obama administration's move earlier this month, Laura Varn, Santee Cooper corporate communications director, said the utility would comply with "any and all future regulations, whatever they are."

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin linked to brain damage and other health problems. Man-made mercury pollution generally comes from the stacks of coal-fired power plants, factories, cement kilns and incinerators. It drops from the air into rivers and lakes, where it collects in the tissues of fish and other animals.

South Carolina has a severe mercury problem, with warnings to avoid eating certain fish from more than 1,700 miles of rivers, mostly on the coastal plain. A Post and Courier investigation found that people who eat fish from some of these rivers have high levels of mercury in their bodies.

Members of the DHEC board recently cited concerns about mercury in their deliberations over Santee Cooper's plan to build a new coal-fired power plant on the Great Pee Dee River, which has high levels of mercury in fish.

In a split vote, the board eventually decided to give Santee Cooper a permit, though some board members said they felt state pollution laws gave them no choice despite their concerns.

Under the Bush plan, South Carolina would have been allotted 18,560 mercury credits every year until 2018, worth an estimated $40.8 million a year. One DHEC plan called for 80 percent of these credits to be given to power companies free of charge, a move one conservation group lawyer described as a "Christmas club account" for polluters.