Utilities, environmentalists dispute timing of mercury standards

By SAODAT ASANOVA-TAYLOR
Capital News Service
LANSING – Environmental protection advocates are urging legislators to support the federal mercury and air toxic standards in the Clean Air Act, but the electric utility industry say, that would create a huge burden. The standards proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would require coal-and oil-fired electric power plants to reduce mercury and other emissions by more than 90 percent. Congressional opponents of the proposal say the standards are too costly and would force the premature closing of power plants, eliminate hundreds of jobs and threaten the supply of electricity. Hugh McDiarmid Jr, communications director of the Michigan Environmental Council, said mercury is dangerous. “Michigan’s Great Lakes are polluted with mercury.

Birds back from the brink in the U.P., Lower Michigan

By BRIAN BIENKOWSKI
Capital News Service
LANSING — Thirty years after vanishing from the Midwest, peregrine falcons are thriving in smokestacks, skyscrapers and cliffs. The numbers not only rebounded, but quadrupled from the 1950s and 1960s when pesticides, mostly DDT, destroyed peregrine falcon populations. DDT caused thin, easily broken eggs. “Historically, we didn’t have that much habitat or birds in Michigan,” said Ray Rustem, assistant to the chief of marketing outreach at the Department of Natural Resources. “They were pretty much only in the Upper Peninsula.”
And while the U.P. population has bounced back, there are also peregrine falcons in the Lower Peninsula, Rustem said.

Drive on to curb power plant emissions

By PATRICK LYONS
Capital News Service
LANSING– Coal-fired power plants in seven counties the state have been linked to hundreds of premature deaths in Michigan. And the Environmental Protection Agency has adopted tougher regulations intended to lessen the health risks of coal-fired power plants. A report from Environmental Health and Engineering Inc. in Needham, Mass., commissioned by the Michigan Environmental Council, linked 180 cases of premature death to emissions from the nine oldest coal-fired plants in the state. Emissions from those plants, built between 1949 and 1968, are also responsible for 660 premature deaths in surrounding states, according to the report. The report shows that in addition to causing deaths plants are damaging cardiovascular and respiratory health in Michigan and surrounding states, resulting in health care costs of $1.5 billion and $5.4 billion respectively.