Mercury is Threatening Our Health

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. Even small amounts of mercury can affect the way children learn, think, remember, and behave. If you've ever heard the expression "mad as a hatter," it comes from a time when mercury was routinely handled by hatmakers as a stiffening agent.

Nowadays, people are exposed to mercury primarily through eating fish-- especially big predator fish like tuna and swordfish. Did you ever think a pregnant or nursing mom would have to worry about eating a tunafish sandwich? Well, it turns out that one in six women of childbearing age in the U.S. have been exposed to mercury in amounts that threaten the health of their children, according to EPA. And forty-four states and territories have posted mercury advisories warning people to limit or avoid consumption of fish from more than 12 million acres of lakes and 400,000 miles of rivers.

So where is all this mercury coming from? The primary culprit is power plant smokestacks, which spew nearly 50 tons of mercury into our air each year.

Enforce Our Clean Air Laws

In the long term, we could completely eliminate these emissions by shifting our nation's energy production from coal-burning power plants to renewables like wind and solar.

But there's also a short-term solution that gets us 90 percent of the way there - enforcing the Clean Air Act that Environmental Action and other activists helped pass more than 30 years ago. Under the Clean Air Act, facilities emitting hazardous substances--like mercury--are required to adopt available pollution controls within three years. Under this standard, power plants should be using existing technologies to reduce their mercury emissions by at least 90 percent by 2008. But they're not.