Mercury: Billions for What Safety?

If you follow the news at all, you probably heard of the President's plan to reduce mercury emissions from power plants and the, expected, response from the enviros that this plan does nothing and we will be faced with impending doom. If you think I'm kidding, go read any enviro web site to get your fill of impending doom from this terrible, evil chemical. Never mind the minor fact, that only about 0.6% of the mercury in the environment comes from power plants and that only about 20% of the mercury in the environment comes from human activities and almost all of that comes from outside the United States. If we have an environmental regulation that will ultimately cost us billions (we pay for the electricity, don't we?), then we must have significant cases of mercury poisoning, right? Wrong: the CDC eight cases of mercury poisoning in the last 16 years and none from methyl mercury. All were from overexposure to elemental mercury in extreme cases. So, why are we spending billions to prevent a hazard that doesn't exist.

Note that all the pronouncements from the EPA and the CDC talk in terms of potential "might", "can", etc. The enviro's are not constrained by letting the honest facts get in the way of their agenda.

Check out the CDC web site for "mercury", "mercury poisoning", and "methyl mercury poisoning." You find that the CDC discusses two cases in Michigan from recovering mercury from dental amalgam in the basement here, one case in North Carolina from occupying a house that had large amounts of elemental mercury stored by a previous occupant here, and, shades of Erin Brockovich, discussion of contamination of ground water in Hinckley, CA, witht the conclusion of "no potential harm" here. We can also find the potential for harm in Chicago from the removal of natural gas meters that contained mercury, but no real harm reported.

There a loads of CDC reports where they responded to finding elemental mercury. Why not just cap it and clean it up as a local hazmat issue? No, we are now so fearful of the chemical that it takes the CDC to respond to the finding of elemental mercury in glass containers. This is all simply environmental hype by the EPA and enviro's that is fed to the media who are either too lazy or stupid to investigate the story, in bed with the enviro's or just simply willing to use any scare to sell more advertising. They believe that the American Public is too dumb to recognize the hype.

One of these days, we are going to have an actual crisis and these yoyo's will have cried wolf enough that we really won't respond. It will be just another scare.