CRITICS WARN NEW EPA CRITERIA WILL STOP DETECTION OF MERCURY HOT SPOTS

A shift in the agency's criteria for defining mercury "hot spots" in its recent power plant rule is raising concerns among some EPA staff, who say the new approach is unlikely to detect the hotspots and ignores levels of the contaminants 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 plants' mercury emissions could create "hot spots" around facilities that purchase emissions credits...