EPA's Revised Approach To Detecting Mercury 'Hot Spots' Prompts Criticism

A shift in EPA's approach to detecting localized increases in mercury emissions resulting from the administration's cap-and-trade rule for power plant pollutants is raising concern among some agency staff that the new approach is unlikely to identify the so-called "hot spots" and ignores levels of the contaminant that may already be present in humans. "They've basically defined the problem away," one EPA source says. Critics have long raised concerns that the Bush administration's cap-and-trade approach to regulating power plant mercury...