While Americans were quietly preparing to ring in the New Year, the EPA gave families a deadly present to start the year off wrong.<\/p>\n
On December 28, the Environmental Protection Agency announced <\/span>a proposal<\/a> <\/span>that would effectively weaken the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which <\/span>protect American families<\/a> <\/span>from mercury and other harmful air pollutants emitted by power plants.<\/p>\n The EPA “proposes to determine that it is not ‘appropriate and necessary’ to regulate” these emissions, the EPA wrote in a statement. This means that the regulations will lose the necessary <\/span>legal mechanism<\/a> <\/span>that actually enables them to actually be enforced.<\/p>\n These regulations save a lot of lives — 11,000 every year, according to the EPA’s own data — and they prevent 130,000 asthma attacks annually. Stripping this regulatory power virtually guarantees more asthma attacks and more preventable deaths.<\/p>\n For families, those aren’t just numbers.<\/p>\n At any age, exposure to even <\/span>small amounts of mercury<\/a> <\/span>can lead to serious health problems. The worst health impacts include irreparable brain development defects in babies and young children, and cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and premature death among <\/span>people of all ages<\/a>.<\/p>\n Infants, young children, and pregnant mothers are particularly vulnerable to mercury — as well as to arsenic, lead, dioxin, and acid gases, which are also regulated by MATS.<\/p>\n Before MATS, coal-fired power plants were the largest source of these pollutants. American families paid the price for lack of federal regulations.<\/p>\n I’m a fairly young person — I grew up with dire warnings about exposure to these chemicals. Yet despite overwhelming evidence of their health effects — and the longstanding availability of proven control technologies — it took over 20 years after the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments to establish federal regulations on power plant emissions of these harmful substances.<\/p>\n Through the MATS program, Congress <\/span>identified<\/a> <\/span>approximately 180 hazardous air pollutants, including mercury, and…<\/p>\n