A government regulation and a dinner plate are separated by a specific type of distance that most people never consider. The last thing you think about when you take a piece of salmon or catfish out of the pan and place it for the children is what went upstream in the food chain to get there. That distance only became slightly more hazy.
A 2024 update to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which had tightened pollution controls on coal-fired power plants and mandated that they continuously monitor specific emissions in real time, was recently repealed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Citing estimated savings of about $670 million and maintaining that the older 2012 mercury standards are still adequate, federal officials present the rollback as a cost-saving measure. Advocates for public health are unsure. Those who keep a close eye on these matters feel that something more than a revision to the paperwork has just occurred.
When coal is burned, mercury is released, but it doesn’t just fly into the sky and disappear. Before settling in rivers, lakes, and soil, it can drift for dozens of miles. Once there, it changes into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that builds up in fish tissue and gets stronger as it goes up the food chain. The heaviest load is carried by the fish at the top. Those who frequently eat them also do. Chris Frey, a former assistant administrator at the EPA and professor of environmental engineering at North Carolina State University, has been considering this specific sequence of events for years. To put it simply, the goal of the 2024 rule was to reduce mercury pollution by about 1,000 pounds annually. He claims that eliminating it would be expected to undo that advancement.
According to the EPA’s own data, coal-fired power plants are the single biggest human-caused source of mercury emissions in the US, accounting for over 40% of the total. It’s easy to read past the weight associated with that number. It makes a substantial contribution. This is not a secondary source. In a way that policy documents seldom convey, the issue is immediate and intimate for subsistence fishers, or those who catch and consume fish locally because that’s how their families eat. Due to mercury contamination, North Carolina currently has statewide fish consumption advisories. When considering the potential consequences of even a slight increase in emissions, that context is important.
The elimination of continuous emissions monitoring requirements is what distinguishes this specific rollback from standard regulatory housekeeping. Real-time data, which compels accountability, was generated by those systems. “Things get measured, things get managed” is a quote from Frey that became popular. Without the measurement, it is much more difficult to determine what is truly being released from a particular plant from the outside. Without that infrastructure, it’s still unclear how utilities will self-report and whether state regulators can step in to fill the void.
Many utilities had not yet been forced to upgrade their equipment because the 2024 standards were not even supposed to go into effect until July 2027. Two coal units at Duke Energy’s Mayo facility in North Carolina were among the plants that had been determined to require upgrades in order to comply. According to Duke, those upgrades are still in the works. It remains to be seen if that voluntary commitment is sustained in the absence of a federal mandate. Individual businesses might decide to follow through. It’s also possible that some won’t in the absence of enforcement pressure.
It’s difficult to ignore the total impact of what’s being undone as this larger wave of environmental deregulation develops. Dozens of standards were rolled back in a period that felt compressed even by political standards, according to Frey, who called it unusual. The mercury rollback is likely to face legal challenges, which could take years to settle. Meanwhile, whatever settles in American waterways is being absorbed by the fish. Litigation does not halt that process.
