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8 February 2008 -- A U.S. court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency must reconsider a decision to allow coal-fired power plants to swap rights to emit toxic mercury. Reuters said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the EPA violated the Clean Air Act in 2005 when it exempted coal plants from the strictest emission controls.
The EPA's "Clean Air Mercury Rule" would have created a "cap-and-trade" program that would allow utilities to swap rights to emit mercury to comply with overall limits that would reduce nationwide emissions by 70 percent by 2018.
The court ruling means that big coal-burning utilities will likely have to install mercury-reduction equipment at more of their power plants rather than rely on a fleet-wide trading program.
The nation's 1,100 coal-burning units emit about 48 tons of mercury each year, the largest unregulated U.S. source. The EPA rule vacated by the court would have set the cap at 38 tons per year by 2010 and 15 tons per year in 2018.
Fourteen states, including New York and California, had sued the EPA over the rules, along with environmental and public health groups.
Petitioners said actual emissions under the EPA plan would have been higher than promised for many more years because of emissions credits that the EPA will let utilities "bank" from previous years, and create "hot spots" where utilities decided to buy credits for emitting mercury rather than making actual reductions.
Utilities had said the cap-and-trade system gives them flexibility to reduce emissions without spurring a switch to natural gas, which is cleaner but more expensive than coal.
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