Illness is hidden cost of pollution

The recent EPA regulations that require coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other heavy metals are called excessive because additional costs will be added to clean up power generation. This is a lethal misstatement. The costs measured at the generating plants are not the costs to the U.S. For every dollar it will cost to clean up these plants, the U.S. will save $9 in medical expenses, lost wages due to illness and cleanup costs directly caused by the pollution coming from these plants.

Pollution is a pseudonym for poisoning. The EPA has calculated the true, hard costs of distributing these poisons. The power companies want to discount the costs outside their plant boundaries. They claim that if on the first whiff of power plant emission a person doesn’t fly out of his chair, grab his throat and fall to the ground cold dead, power plants are not involved. They want a government license to poison and kill 10,000 Americans per year. They also want to be allowed to cause 130,000 new cases of asthma in children each year. And they want to be allowed, at no cost, to poison miles of rivers and streams and hundreds of lakes every year so that fishermen are at risk from eating their catches.

If the EPA numbers are wrong it is because they are drastically low. We’ve tried getting marketplace solutions for pollution. They fail completely because our marketplace is incomplete. If the power companies want a marketplace solution, they will have to agree to find, treat and fully compensate the people they now kill and maim and to completely clean up after themselves. Since the technology for that does not yet exist, they’d better start some research. Until then, this poisoning must be forbidden.

Mark Muehlhausen

Schaumburg