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_______________________________________________________

REPORTER'S TRANSCRIPT

_______________________________________________________

PUBLIC HEARING

FOR

PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO NATIONAL EMISSION STANDARDS FOR

HAZARDOUS AIR POLLUTANTS FROM COAL AND OIL-FIRED

ELECTRIC UTILITY STEAM GENERATING UNITS AND STANDARDS

OF PERFORMANCE FOR FOSSIL-FUEL-FIRED ELECTRIC UTILITY,

INDUSTRIAL-COMMERCIAL-INSTITUTIONAL, AND SMALL

INDUSTRIAL-COMMERCIAL-INSTITUTIONAL STEAM GENERATING

UNITS

EPA REGION IV OFFICE

SAM NUNN ATLANTA FEDERAL CENTER (AFC)

61 FORSYTH STREET SW

ATLANTA, GEORGIA 30303

26 MAY 2011
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1 MR. CLARK: We'll go ahead and start the

2 hearing on time if we could just because we've got so

3 many speakers today. Excuse me.

4 Good morning. Thank you all for attending

5 this public hearing. It's one of three that the

6 Environmental Protection Agency is holding to take

7 comment on our proposed emission standards to control

8 mercury and other air toxics from coal and oil-fired

9 power plants.

10 We've held hearings already two days ago in

11 Chicago and Philadelphia and this is our third hearing

12 on the matter.

13 My name is Jeff Clark. I'm the Associate

14 Director for the EPA's Office of Air Quality Planning

15 and Standards, located in Research Triangle Park, North

16 Carolina.

17 And joining me for this hearing is Kevin

18 Culligan. Kevin is an Associate Director for the

19 Division that is responsible for developing this

20 regulation, Bill Maxwell, who's the primary author of

21 the regulation, and Beverly Banister, who's the

22 Director of the Pesticides, Toxics, and Air Division

23 for EPA Region Four, which includes the surrounding

24 eight states.

25 As many of you know, on March the sixteenth,
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1 the Environmental Protection Agency proposed these,

2 these air toxic standards for coal and oil-fired power

3 plants.

4 The Clean Air Act Standards, these standards

5 proposed would reduce significantly emissions of toxic

6 air pollutants, also known as hazardous air pollutants.

7 These are pollutants that are known to or suspected of

8 causing cancer or other serious health effects.

9 In addition, in addition, EPA has proposed to

10 revise standards that are known as new source

11 performance standards that would reduce emissions of

12 particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides

13 from new coal and oil-fired plants.

14 Power plants emit mercury, arsenic, chromium,

15 nickel, organic air toxics, acid gasses, and other

16 harmful pollutants. The power plants are the largest

17 domestic source of mercury emissions into the air.

18 Once mercury from the air reaches the water,

19 microorganisms can change it into methyl mercury, a

20 highly toxic form of the pollutant, which works its way

21 into fish and people are primarily exposed to mercury

22 by eating contaminated fish.

23 Children's developing brains are especially

24 susceptible to damage from this exposure and the

25 effects include reductions in their IQ and ability to
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1 learn.

2 We estimate that by the year 2016, our

3 proposed power plant Mercury and Air Toxic Standards

4 would prevent between six thousand, eight hundred to

5 seventeen thousand premature deaths annually, as well

6 as provide many other health and environmental

7 benefits.

8 The portion of these benefits that can be

9 quantified total more than fifty-nine to a hundred and

10 forty billion dollars annually in 2016. These benefits

11 far outweigh the costs, which are estimated to be ten

12 point nine billion dollars.

13 Implementing these standards would also

14 create jobs for American workers building, installing,

15 and operating equipment to reduce these emissions.

16 One thing we wanted to note was that since

17 proposing the rule, in response to a comment, we've

18 updated some of the mercury emissions data that we've

19 used to develop the proposed standards. We do not

20 expect the update, which corrects a calculation error

21 with a small amount of the data to change the types of

22 pollution controls necessary to comply with the rule

23 for its tremendous benefits to public health.

24 We have made the corrected data available for

25 public review on our website and in the docket assigned
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1 to this rulemaking.

2 Currently, there are no existing federal

3 requirements for power plants to limit their emissions

4 of toxic air pollutants like mercury, arsenic, and

5 other, and metals.

6 The prior -- EPA, in our previous

7 administration finalized a rule to cut mercury

8 pollution from power plants, but the DC Circuit Court

9 struck that rule down as illegal and required EPA to

10 develop standards that follow the law in order to

11 protect human health and the environment.

12 So today, we are accepting oral comments on

13 all aspects of our proposal. Written transcripts for

14 all three of these hearings will be available as part

15 of the official record for the rule and EPA will

16 consider them as we move forward to complete a final

17 rule in November of this year.

18 We are also accepting written comments for

19 the proposed rule until July the fifth of, of this

20 year.

21 There's a handout available in the

22 registration area with detailed information for

23 submitting written comments by mail, fax, or

24 electronically.

25 So now, what I'd like to do is talk about how
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1 we're going to run the hearing. I'm going to call the,

2 the speakers up in pairs and ask the two of you to come

3 up and sit down here at the, at this table across from

4 us. When it's your turn to speak, we'll ask you to

5 state your name and actually spell it for the Court

6 Reporter who I, I want to mention over here, Rich, is

7 the most important guy in the room. As long as he's

8 happy, we're happy, so I'll be reminding folks

9 throughout the course of the morning and afternoon and

10 evening to, to spell the name for, for Rich and, and to

11 speak into the microphone for your statement as clearly

12 as you can.

13 In order to be fair to everyone, we're, we're

14 hoping -- we're asking that folks limit their testimony

15 to five minutes and we have a, a -- if, if in addition

16 to your written -- your oral statement, if you've got

17 written comments that you want to submit to the, to the

18 record, we're happy to take them and you can leave them

19 either with us here or preferably with the folks out at

20 the desk outside. And we'll, we'll include those in

21 the docket as well.

22 We've got a little time keeping system here

23 that will essentially -- you'll have a green light for

24 four minutes and then when you've got a minute to go,

25 it will turn yellow and then goes red at five, five
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1 minutes. It's much more subtle than we had in Chicago,

2 where we had a big sign like this -- a bit thing set up

3 like this. It was fairly offensive to people, but,

4 but -- so you'll, you'll just watch this light here in

5 front of you. When it turns red, your, your five

6 minutes are up and we would ask you to wrap up at that

7 point.

8 Again, we've got speakers scheduled all day

9 and all night as far as I know and so, we want to be

10 able to be fair and get as many people in as possible.

11 This hearing is scheduled to go from nine

12 this morning and will continue until eight, but we'll

13 go as late as it takes tonight, depending on the number

14 of speakers. We're going to go into recess during

15 scheduled lunch break from twelve thirty to two and

16 we'll shorten that break, that break if necessary

17 depending on speakers, so if -- it, it might actually

18 end up being a bit shorter than, like maybe sort of

19 like twelve thirty-ish to one thirty-ish, but we'll,

20 we'll, we'll, we'll kind of play that by ear as we go

21 along and there's also a dinner break from five to six

22 thirty, which we also have a little bit of flexibility

23 there, depending on number of speakers, to, to shorten

24 if necessary.

25 We intend to stay, as I said, into the
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1 evening. If you would like to testify, but have not

2 yet registered to do so, please sign up at the table

3 outside. A lot of people signed up beforehand and

4 think they have a rough time, but they -- if you, if

5 you missed these folks outside, they're -- the name's

6 not going to come to me, so just be sure that you check

7 in with them.

8 And we ask you for your patience as we

9 proceed through the list of speakers and we will

10 definitely be making adjustments as the day progresses.

11 We want to thank you all very much for taking

12 time out of your busy schedules to, to come and speak

13 today.

14 So with that that, I'd like to go ahead and

15 call up the first two speakers, Josh Galperin and

16 Jennifer Rennicks please. And Mr. Galperin, if you

17 could start, you know again, by spelling your last

18 name; stating your name and spelling it and then.

19 MR. GALPERIN: Good morning.

20 MR. CLARK: Actually let me just say one

21 other thing too, when you guys finish up, if you could,

22 if you could -- both of you stay at the table until

23 both of you have finished because it's very possible we

24 could have a question for one or the other of you. So

25 okay? Thanks.
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1 MR. GALPERIN: Great. My name is Josh

2 Galperin, it's G-A-L-P-E-R-I-N and I'm a Policy Analyst

3 and Research Attorney with the Southern Alliance for

4 Clean Energy and conveniently, I get to be up here as

5 one of the first two speakers with my colleague, Jen,

6 who's also with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

7 So, while I think we'll have distinctly different

8 substance to our testimonies, I think it's safe to say

9 that I -- that the next thing I say about our

10 organization will apply to both of us.

11 The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy is a

12 regional, non-profit conservation and energy consumer

13 organization with members throughout Georgia and the

14 southeast. We are focused on energy policy, including

15 pollution from coal-fired power plants since 1985.

16 The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy

17 strongly supports EPA's proposed Mercury and Air Toxics

18 Standards and we are grateful that EPA has finally

19 acted on these legally mandated pollution limits.

20 On the other hand, our support of this

21 proposal comes with some trepidation. As I'm sure each

22 of you are keenly aware, the Office of Air and

23 Radiation has made a habit lately of proposing

24 compelling, composing compelling rules and then

25 delaying time and again rather than implementing and
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1 enforcing these rules. And of course, I'm speaking

2 about the updated ozone NAAQS and the boiler MACT rule

3 and then there's also the coal ash rule out of another

4 EPA division.

5 All of these rules are necessary to protect

6 human health and the environment and to promote a clean

7 energy future. Whether it's political pressure or the

8 weight of so many rules that have fallen to this EPA

9 after lying dormant under the previous administration,

10 the delays are a troublesome sign and we implore you to

11 please follow through on your obligations with

12 deliberate urgency.

13 Swift action on this proposed mercury rule is

14 uniquely important in the southeast. This region is

15 home to approximately two hundred and sixty-seven coal

16 units at eighty-seven plants. In a single year, these

17 plants can emit over twenty thousand pounds of mercury

18 into the air, so it's no surprise that every single

19 state in this region has mercury-based fish advisories.

20 Considering that it takes only a very small

21 amount of mercury to poison an entire lake, these

22 advisories must be particularly worrisome, not only to

23 environmentalists or mothers and their young children,

24 but to the six point seven million anglers who recreate

25 in southeastern waters, particularly the subsistence
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1 anglers who rely on the bounty of these waters to

2 survive.

3 Within fewer than seventy-five miles from

4 Atlanta, there are seven coal plants with twenty-seven

5 units. Some of these units were built over sixty years

6 ago and in all that time, have not gotten significant

7 environmental upgrades.

8 Five of these seven plants are among the top

9 mercury emitters in the entire region. One is inside

10 the perimeter, and for those who aren't from the

11 region, I'm speaking of I-285, which is a perimeter

12 around the City. One plant Scherer with

13 nearly nine hundred pounds of mercury in 2009 was the

14 second largest mercury emitter in the southeast.

15 In total, these plants released over four

16 thousand pounds of mercury and this is just the seven

17 plants within seventy-five miles of Atlanta. Four

18 thousand pounds of mercury, right here, within seventy19 five miles of this city.

20 Critics, some especially loudly right here in

21 Atlanta, are begging for the utility MACT rule to go

22 the way of ozone and boiler MACT. Hopefully these

23 numbers show that delay would have serious

24 implications.

25 Moreover, given the history of this rule,
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1 there is simply no excuse for delay. This proposal has

2 roots going back over twenty years to the 1990 Clean

3 Air Act Amendments. Over the previous two decades, it

4 has become obvious that mercury regulations were

5 approaching. From the 2000 necessary and proper

6 determination to the 2005 Clean Air Mercury Rule. Over

7 twenty years ago, utilities got their wish and delayed

8 any mercury regulations on coal-fired power plants by

9 adding special hurdles to the Clean Air Act.

10 Since then, the writing is on the wall and

11 it's become even clearer, but still critics are

12 pleading for more time. If you take these pleas at

13 face value, then we have to infer utility managers are

14 simply not capable of preparing for the inevitable and

15 if you look deeper, we maybe can presume that coal

16 plant operators simply don't want to spend money, more

17 than the bare minimum, to protect human health and the

18 environment.

19 Is spending money pleasant? Of course it's

20 not, but it's necessary. Not only to comply with the

21 rules that have been a long time coming, but to protect

22 our health and to lower our cost of living.

23 When coal plants continue to pollute, the

24 dollars come out of our pockets in the form of doctor

25 and hospital visits, missed work, and lower
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1 productivity.

2 As I already mentioned, coal has an

3 especially strong and significant foothold here in the

4 southeast. One seminal study from Steubenville, Ohio,

5 demonstrated that locally emitted mercury was

6 locally -- was primarily locally deposited, so this

7 means that the neurological impacts of mercury or

8 respiratory impacts of other -- of particulate matter,

9 all of this pollution is falling on us right here. This

10 is Atlanta's water, it's Atlanta's air, it's Atlanta's

11 children, and it's Atlanta's health and it obviously

12 isn't just happening here, which is why this nationwide

13 standard is so desperately needed.

14 Thank you.

15 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much, Josh.

16 Ms. Rennicks.

17 MS. RENNICKS: Good morning. Thank you. My

18 name is Jennifer Rennicks, that's spelled

19 R-E-N-N-I-C-K-S and as Josh said, I am also a Policy

20 Advocate with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

21 I am based in Ashville, North Carolina.

22 And I come today to offer my strong support

23 for the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed

24 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards to regulate this

25 harmful pollution under the Clean Air Act.
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1 This rule, as I see it for the first time

2 ever, will establish national standards for mercury

3 emissions from coal plants requiring that even the

4 oldest, the dirtiest, and the least efficient plants to

5 clean up operations to comply with these new standards.

6 Establishing national standards for mercury

7 and other toxic pollutants is long overdue. The

8 original Clean Air Act was passed when I was born and

9 the amendments were passed some twenty years ago.

10 Public health and environmental communities

11 alike support this rule knowing that coal-fired utility

12 power plants produce more hazardous air pollution in

13 the United States than any other industrial pollution

14 source. This accounts for ninety-nine percent of all

15 U.S. mercury emissions from the power sector and it

16 results in upwards of thirteen thousand deaths per

17 year.

18 By your own agency's estimates, the proposed

19 rule would require coal-fired power plants to prevent

20 ninety-one percent of the mercury burned in coal from

21 being released and reduce emissions of hydrochloric

22 acid by ninety-one percent, and particulate matter by

23 fifty-five percent.

24 I believe some people will take comfort in

25 the economic benefits that result from such reductions
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1 and emissions as asthma attacks, heart attacks, and

2 hospitalizations may be prevented. I, personally, will

3 take comfort in the possibility that my asthmatic child

4 may be one of the twelve thousand who avoids emergency

5 room visit, or one of the one hundred and twenty

6 thousand who avoid an asthma attack.

7 I brought with me today my daughter's

8 Albuterol spacer because what I want to do is, in a

9 very personal way, I want to illustrate how very sad

10 and how very scary a pollution induced disease like

11 asthma can be for a child.

12 Some children, like my daughter, for example,

13 are so very young when they are first diagnosed that

14 the standard medical procedures and equipment are very

15 scary. And we try to make treatments friendlier by

16 putting a silly face; there's a duck face on this, but

17 a happy face does not change the fact that coping with

18 asthma is scary for a child, it is expensive for a

19 family, and it's worrisome for a parent and I will say,

20 it's beyond worrisome. I've, I've held my child and

21 rocked her at night and hoped she wouldn't stop

22 breathing. I hope no parent ever has to go through

23 that.

24 Some critics will loudly protest and complain

25 that these health-based standards will have to be met
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1 in what I call an "unreasonably short time frame" and

2 this is hyperbole at its best.

3 Twenty years have elapsed since Congress

4 passed the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments directing EPA

5 to consider whether it was appropriate and necessary to

6 regulate these toxic air pollutants. Utilities could

7 have begun preparing their coal fleets at that time.

8 Then another decade -- decade -- passed

9 before EPA first confirmed that mercury would be

10 regulated as a hazardous air pollutant setting into

11 motion this proposal we have before us today.

12 If the skeptics or utilities were waiting for

13 a court-backed directive, then that came three years

14 ago in 2008 when a Federal Appeals Court agreed that

15 the so-called Clean Air Mercury Rule issued in 2005

16 violated the Clean Air Act by not requiring the maximum

17 available control technology to reduce these harmful

18 and very toxic pollutants.

19 I believe it is possible that my daughter and

20 hundreds of thousands of children like her may have

21 been spared a decade of illness if utilities had

22 started reducing their toxic air emissions twenty years

23 ago instead of stalling for time.

24 I do applaud you. I applaud the EPA for the

25 substantial research and analysis that has gone in to
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1 setting these strong evidence based pollution limits

2 that provide flexibility, but also ensure enormous

3 health, economic, and environmental benefits.

4 I thank you for your efforts and I urge you

5 to finalize this rule as quickly as you can. These

6 benefits cannot come soon enough for our children and

7 for our communities and I thank you.

8 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. I'll

9 see if anyone has any questions? I did just want to

10 ask -- it's all right. Are you submitting -- is

11 Alliance for Clean Energy going to submit written

12 comments for the record, do you know?

13 MS. RENNICKS: Yes.

14 MR. GALPERIN: Yes.

15 MS. RENNICKS: We are.

16 MR. GALPERIN: We'll be sending two

17 different comments, sets of comments.

18 MR. CLARK: Okay. Any, anybody else? Okay.

19 Thank you so much.

20 MS. RENNICKS: Thank you.

21 MR. CLARK: Next two speakers then please.

22 Katy Preston and Colleen Kiernan, Kiernan. Are you --

23 MS. PRESTON: Katy Preston.

24 MR. CLARK: Katy, okay. Is Colleen Kiernan

25 here?
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1 MS. KIERNAN: [Indecipherable].

2 MR. CLARK: Okay. Ms. Preston.

3 MS. PRESTON: Thank you. Katy Preston. I'm

4 with Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, or GIPL. We

5 represent over five hundred congregations across the

6 State of Georgia, as well as over two thousand

7 individuals across the state as well.

8 As a person of faith, I am here today to

9 speak in favor of the proposed mercury and air toxics

10 rule, which significantly cuts toxic air pollution from

11 power plants.

12 In the beginning, God created the heavens and

13 the earth, the land and the sky and called it good. As

14 people of faith, we have been entrusted to care for

15 this creation and to keep it good and the children of

16 God, all people, should be able to breathe clean air

17 and drink clean water without worrying about mercury in

18 their bloodstream, soot in their lungs, or lead in

19 their water.

20 Yet coal-fired power plants spew hundreds of

21 thousands of tons of hazardous air pollutants like

22 these into our air and water every day.

23 These pollutants are linked to cancer, heart

24 disease, neurological damage, birth defects, asthma

25 attacks, and even premature death.
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1 When coal-fired power plants emit mercury

2 from their smoke stacks, rain, snow and dust particles

3 wash it out of the air, onto land, into waterways, and

4 ultimately into our food chain.

5 Mercury pollution poses particular risks to

6 children affecting their ability to walk, talk, read,

7 and write and it is so widespread that as many as one

8 in six women of childbearing age has enough mercury in

9 her blood to put her baby at risk should she become

10 pregnant.

11 Coal-fired power plants are the single

12 largest source of mercury pollution, arsenic, and acid

13 gas and it counts for twenty-five percent of all toxic

14 metal emissions in the United States.

15 Furthermore, coal-fired power plants are

16 responsible for ninety-nine percent of all mercury

17 emissions from the power sector in the United States.

18 Here in Georgia, we have eleven active coal19 fired power plants and three more have been proposed.

20 I feel I must support this rule as a resident of a

21 state that relies on such dirty energy.

22 For decades, the coal industry has used its

23 undue influence on decision makers to delay

24 implementation of strong standards to cut this

25 dangerous toxic air pollutant from its facilities.
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1 However, we can no longer sit idly by and allow these

2 dirty politics to dictate the air quality we breathe.

3 As tillers of the garden, as people of faith,

4 we have been charged with a moral imperative to care

5 for the creation that God has entrusted to us and we

6 are called to keep it good.

7 Therefore, it is vital that we fully support

8 this standard that will, for the first time, cut

9 mercury emissions from power plants nationwide by

10 ninety-one percent, reduce arsenic and acid gasses by

11 ninety-one percent, prevent twelve thousand, two

12 hundred trips to the hospital and save up to seventeen

13 thousand lives each year once it is implemented.

14 I urge the EPA to support and endorse this

15 proposed mercury and air toxic rule as soon as

16 possible.

17 Thank you.

18 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Kiernan.

19 MS. KIERNAN: Thank you. Thank you for

20 having this hearing here today.

21 My name is Colleen Kiernan. I am the Georgia

22 Chapter Director of the Sierra Club and --

23 MR. CLARK: Do you think you could spell your

24 last name for the --

25 MS. KIERNAN: Sure.
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1 MR. CLARK: Thanks.

2 MS. KIERNAN: It's Kiernan, K-I-E-R-N-A-N.

3 The Georgia Chapter of the Sierra Club has over ten

4 thousand members in the State of Georgia. We have at

5 least one member in every county in Georgia. All one

6 hundred and fifty-nine. And as you probably know,

7 Sierra Club was founded by John Muir in 1892

8 and our mission is to explore, enjoy, and protect the

9 planet.

10 And in that spirit, I'm here today to support

11 the rule as it's currently written; it's been a long

12 time coming.

13 My comments today will address both my

14 professional perspective and my personal perspective of

15 why it's important to me that EPA gets this right.

16 To give you a little bit of context of my

17 professional perspective, I was an organizer for the

18 Sierra Club on the National Field Staff from 2001-2006

19 here in Atlanta, Georgia, working on air pollution and

20 energy issues. And I left the Sierra Club in 2006 to

21 get my master's in City and Regional Planning and at

22 that time, as you may recall, we were in the process

23 here in Georgia of muddling through the Bush Era Clean

24 Air Mercury Rule or CAMR and it seems as though coming

25 back to the Sierra Club in August as Chapter Director
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1 that a lot of things have changed, but a lot of things

2 have stayed the same.

3 And in fact, I don't know if you've had a

4 chance to read the paper today. I'm sure everyone's up

5 very early, but you know, there's a piece by Chris

6 Hobson who will testifying later on behalf of the

7 Southern Company and the arguments continue to be the

8 same.

9 You know, the rule is going affect our

10 reliability and the availability of our

11 electricity. They claim that it's going to be

12 extraordinarily expensive and that it's not going to

13 deal with -- and that their mercury -- or mercury from

14 coal-fired power plants only accounts for one percent

15 of all airborne mercury emissions.

16 However, then at the end of the piece, they

17 talk about the work that they've been doing at Plant

18 Scherer where their pollution controls have --

19 will result in a ninety percent reduction of mercury,

20 so we know that it can be done and you know, we're

21 paying more in our electric bills right now for the

22 nuclear power plants, not the pollution controls and we

23 will be paying for those nuclear plants into the

24 future.

25 So anyway, as I was preparing for what I
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1 wanted to say here today, I dug through some boxes and

2 I came up with my -- all my notes from these CAMR

3 negotiations from 2006 and it was sort of instructive

4 of you know, that we're having the exact same

5 conversation all over again and so I pulled out just a

6 couple of things that I will leave with you here today

7 to show you how little has really changed.

8 So, the first document I wanted to talk to

9 about was Southern Company's environmental compliance

10 strategy. This was published in March 2003 and

11 there's a section on hazardous pollutants and mercury

12 and, you know, they're saying the same things that

13 they're saying today; that it's going to be way too

14 expensive and that they don't think that it's, it's

15 appropriate and necessary, but they've known, you know,

16 for the last twenty years and certainly have been

17 thinking about it seriously for the last eight that

18 strong mercury -- that EPA does have the authority to

19 regulate mercury in a strong way on every unit, at

20 every plant across the country. So I'll leave that

21 with you today.

22 When the Bush Era Clean Air Mercury Rule came

23 out, the Georgia Environmental Protection Branch

24 actually submitted great comments. In 2004, June 29,

25 2004, where they [indecipherable -- left microphone)
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1 that mercury deposition from coal-fired power plants is

2 a really big problem in the state. They noted all the

3 rivers that have mercury fish advisories and they noted

4 that based on what EPA does research that twenty

5 thousand babies are born in Georgia every year with

6 high levels of mercury or at risk of mercury

7 contamination.

8 And so, they concluded at the time that

9 trading was a bad idea for Georgia and that we really

10 needed control on every single one of the units and,

11 you know, the result of these negotiations that we had

12 were that Georgia Power agreed to put the best

13 pollution controls on the larger of the units in

14 Georgia and leave the smaller ones uncontrolled.

15 And so, it's my feeling -- it was my feeling

16 at that time that it wasn't fair for the folks who

17 live near Plant Yates, Plant Mitchell, Plant Kraft, and

18 Plant McIntosh the smaller units to bear the brunt of

19 the -- you know, they have the smaller and older units

20 and they don't get controls. And so I'm really pleased

21 that EPA is here and that we're working with section

22 one twelve and that we're actually going to deal with

23 the entire problem.

24 The last document that I'm going to leave

25 with you is this presentation, EPD [phonetic] during
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1 his negotiations brought this guy that does pollution

2 control technologies. This, this presentation was

3 April 8, 2006, so five years ago this guy said that,

4 you know, SCRs and flue gas,

5 desulfurization was going to get us to ninety percent

6 reduction.

7 Georgia Power is already well on their way to

8 doing that to large air units. All we need to do is

9 figure out what's going to happen to the smaller units

10 and, you know, adding activated carbon injection was

11 going to get us the rest of the way and this was all

12 Georgia specific information. This is -- this could

13 have been done five years ago and it's time to get

14 busy.

15 Okay. Shifting my perspective to my personal

16 reasons of why this is important. Okay. So, I put

17 together very short slide show. So that is me and my

18 nephew, Trace. And Trace lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with

19 my little brother and my sister-in-law and now he has a

20 little brother and a little sister and another on the

21 way.

22 So two years ago, in June, 2009, my dad

23 turned sixty and we all went to Omaha to celebrate and

24 in -- to mark the occasion, my dad did sixty can

25 openers off the high dive. You can go to the next
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1 slide.

2 And we all had a really fun day that day,

3 except for Trace who screamed the entire time and no

4 one really understood why and, you know, his parents

5 didn't understand why. They were like, yeah, we must

6 be terrible parents. We take our kid to the pool and

7 try to have a fun day, but he screamed bloody murder

8 the entire time he was there.

9 So about six months later, I was visiting for

10 Christmas and my sister-in-law and I, you know, hit the

11 after Christmas sales and she confided to me that a

12 good friend of hers who watches Trace sometimes told

13 her that, that Trace had all the same signs of autism

14 that her son exhibited at that age.

15 And so, you know, my sister-in-law was

16 distraught and she didn't know how this could have

17 happened to her, but it turns out that Trace has autism

18 and he has echolalia and he repeats things and, you

19 know, he watches movie and he -- he can say the entire

20 say the entire movie. You know, he could count to a

21 hundred at the age -- I mean, he's like rain man. So

22 this was him at Easter and he was organizing his Easter

23 treats in a pattern.

24 And fortunately, they live in Sarpy County,

25 Nebraska, and Social Services there are great and they
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1 send a speech pathologist out there to work with him

2 and they send a bus out to get him to take him to a

3 special preschool, but it -- but knowing Trace and

4 knowing what my brother's family is going through and

5 the fact that they're going to have to deal with this

6 for the rest of Trace's life means that, you know,

7 these twenty thousand babies who have been born in

8 Georgia every year with risk of this kind of thing

9 happening and, you know, this is a disaster.

10 And I -- even -- my brother and sister-in-law

11 are not environmentalists. They are Christian

12 conservatives and I think they would stop at nothing to

13 make sure that this doesn't happen to another family.

14 And in fact, my sister-in-law, for autism

15 month last month, put together this huge event where

16 she was training first responders to deal with a

17 problem -- you know, Trace had to go to the emergency

18 room and the, the EMT's didn't know how to deal with

19 him and she didn't know how to explain it to them and

20 this problem is multiplying everywhere across the

21 country and we need to take immediate steps to reduce

22 mercury and reduce the contamination that's affecting

23 thousands of families.

24 And the last picture is just Trace today.

25 He's good at telling time and he's great with numbers.
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1 Thank you.

2 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Let me just

3 ask if anyone has any questions? I did have just a --

4 Ms. Preston, if you could just say a word or two more

5 about the Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, what --

6 just a little bit more description of them.

7 MS. PRESTON: Sure. Our mission is to engage

8 communities of faith and stewardship of God's creation

9 as a direct reflection of our faithfulness. We do this

10 through worship, education, and a sustainable

11 generation and efficient use of energy.

12 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much.

13 MS. PRESTON: Thank you.

14 MR. CLARK: Thank you both. Next speakers

15 are Peter Bahouth and H. James Gooden please.

16 I will say I was weak with the last speaker

17 on time, so if, if folks could do their best to stay

18 within the five minutes, we'd appreciate that very

19 much.

20 MR. BAHOUTH: Good morning.

21 MR. CLARK: Hi.

22 MR. BAHOUTH: My name is Peter Bahouth,

23 that's B-A-H-O-U-T-H.

24 I am the Executive Director of USCAN, the

25 U.S. Climate Action Network and I am here to express
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1 the support of USCAN, its member groups and allies for

2 the EPA to promulgate strong, maximum, available

3 control technology standards for power plants.

4 With over eighty member groups USCAN is the

5 country's largest network of organizations focused on

6 climate change and energy. Our mission is to support

7 and help coordinate these organizations efforts towards

8 effective, equitable, and sustainable strategies to

9 reduce carbon pollution and promote a clean energy

10 future at all levels of the debate, local, national,

11 and international.

12 And we all agree, Clean Air Act standards to

13 protect our nation's communities from the threats of

14 toxic air pollution from power plants are long overdue.

15 In fact, twenty-one years in the making.

16 Mercury emissions from power plants have been

17 an unresolved issue for too long and we still do not

18 have a national standard to protect communities and the

19 environment from mercury and air toxics.

20 Power plants are the largest source of toxic

21 air emissions in the United States and yet absent these

22 proposed standards, no national standards exist to

23 protect communities from toxic air pollution from these

24 sources.

25 Strong action to reduce harmful pollution
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1 from power plants will improve the air quality and

2 public health of local communities. Fulton County,

3 where we are now, alone has seventy-nine thousand,

4 three hundred and eighty-three documented cases of

5 asthma. Over one quarter of those cases belong to

6 children. Fulton County earned an F from the most

7 recent American Lung Association's state of the air

8 report.

9 Continuing down the path of under regulated

10 air toxics will continue to drive these numbers up,

11 increasing costs to families, communities and tax

12 payers.

13 As one of the leading producers of

14 NOx, SO2, and mercury, the resulting health

15 impacts of Southern Company's reliance on coal are

16 extensive and costly.

17 According to Clean Air Task Force data,

18 Southern Company's coal-fired power plants cause one

19 thousand, two hundred and twenty-four deaths, one

20 thousand, seven hundred and ten heart attacks, twenty

21 thousand, seven hundred and seventy asthma attacks and

22 seven hundred and fifty-two cases of chronic bronchitis

23 per year. The total annual cost of all of this damage

24 is over nine billion dollars.

25 In additions to cost to human health, the
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1 National Academy of Sciences found that sulfur dioxide

2 emissions, nitrous oxide emissions, and particulates

3 from U.S. coal-fired power plants caused sixty-two

4 billion dollars in economic damages in 2005 alone.

5 That averages out to one hundred and fifty-six million

6 in damages per plant in a single year, with the

7 dirtiest five percent of plants creating harm, costing

8 between five hundred and seventy-five million and one

9 point three nine billion, depending largely on their

10 SO2 emissions.

11 There is consensus within our network for

12 robust and meaningful regulation of these air toxics

13 and the support for strong standards goes far beyond

14 those commenting in person here today and from all

15 corners of the country.

16 For example, as of May 24, one hundred and

17 two organizations representing health, environmental,

18 and faith groups have endorsed the comment to EPA

19 stating, "Our families should be able to breathe clean

20 air and drink clean water without worrying about

21 mercury in the bloodstream, soot in their lungs, or

22 lead in their water. We applaud you for this strong

23 standard and urge you to keep it just as strong in the

24 final version of the mercury and air toxics rule."

25 On May 11, the National Latino Coalition on
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1 Climate Change representing fourteen prominent Latino

2 organizations issued a press release announcing the

3 launch of a campaign urging the EPA to mandate

4 reductions in life threatening air pollutions, such as

5 mercury, arsenic, and other air toxics that are

6 currently released by power plants without limits.

7 The EPA's mercury and air toxic rule is

8 critical to protect Latinos and other communities of

9 color from disproportionate exposure to air pollution

10 linked to a litany of health problems from asthma to

11 strokes, cancer, and premature death.

12 On May 10, the American Academy of Pediatrics

13 and five other health organizations sent a letter to

14 Representative Joe Barton stating, "Mercury and other

15 air toxics have serious health affects that compel EPA

16 to act. Some toxic air pollutants, such as lead,

17 mercury and dioxins degrade slowly or not at all.

18 These pollutants bio-accumulate and other animals at

19 the top of the food chain. Children can be exposed to

20 toxic air pollutants through contaminated air, water,

21 soil and food."

22 On January 24, sixty-eight religious groups

23 sent a letter to the House of Representatives stating,

24 "We believe that the United States must take all

25 appropriate and available actions to ensure the health
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1 of its communities. We therefore urge you to oppose

2 any efforts to undermine the authority of the Clean Air

3 Act and allow the EPA to use the full strength of the

4 law to ensure that God's creation and God's children

5 remain healthy."

6 In December --

7 MR. CLARK: Let me ask

8 MR. BAHOUTH: -- more than sixty thousand

9 firms -- I'm finishing up.

10 MR. CLARK: Excellent. Thank you.

11 MR. BAHOUTH: It's the last example.

12 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

13 MR. BAHOUTH: Sixty thousand firms and U.S.

14 business groups sent a letter to Congress and the

15 President stating, "We urge you to support EPA's

16 mission to reject efforts to block, delay, or weaken

17 implementation of the Clean Air Act. Owners of both

18 small and large businesses want real solutions that

19 will create long-term economic growth and ignite a new

20 era of American innovation."

21 These examples show the EPA has the backing

22 of a strong diverse set of voices calling for action

23 under the Clean Air Act to reduce harmful pollution.

24 For these reasons, I applaud the EPA for your

25 proposed mercury and air toxic rule and urge you to
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1 swiftly implement a strong final rule in order to best

2 protect public health, the environment and promote a

3 safer, cleaner energy economy.

4 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you both very much.

5 Beverly, go ahead and ask your question if you want.

6 MS. BANISTER: Just a quick question. On

7 some of the earlier statistics that you gave in regards

8 to the impacts, what was the basis of those statistics?

9 MR. BAHOUTH: They're all footnoted in my

10 comments, which I've inserted. I, I've sent two

11 copies, yeah.

12 MS. BANISTER: Okay.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

14 MR. BAHOUTH: Thank you.

15 MR. CLARK: Mr. Gooden.

16 MR. GOODEN: Good morning. My name is James

17 Gooden, G-O-O-D-E-N and I'm the Chairman of the

18 National Board of Directors of the American Lung

19 Association.

20 The American Lung Association is the leading

21 organization working to save lives by improving lung

22 health and preventing lung disease through education,

23 advocacy and research.

24 We've been fighting for air for over one

25 hundred years. The American Lung Association strongly
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1 supports the action by the U.S. Environmental

2 Protection Agency to finally take action first promised

3 in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. A promise

4 that has languished unfulfilled for far too long.

5 We support the proposed Mercury and Air Toxics

6 Standards and urge EPA to take action immediately to

7 put them in place.

8 The American Lung Association believes it is

9 time to end the toxic loophole that has allowed coal

10 burning power plants to operate without any federal

11 limits on emissions of mercury, arsenic, dioxin, acid

12 gasses such as hydrogen chloride and other dangerous

13 pollutants. Frankly, we think it's long past time for

14 these plants to be cleaned up.

15 Twenty-one years ago, a bi-partisan U.S.

16 Congress and the Republican President joined together

17 to strengthen the Clean Air Act. Even then, the Clean

18 Air Act was already one of the nation's most important

19 public health laws. With strong bi-partisan support,

20 they added provisions to protect Americans from a long

21 list of hazardous air pollutants, including eighty-four

22 that come from coal- and oil-fired power plants.

23 Coal-fired power plants product electricity

24 for the nation's power grid, but they also produce more

25 hazardous air emissions than any other industrial
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1 pollution sources. The quantity is staggering. Over

2 three hundred and eighty-six thousand tons of eighty3 four separate hazardous air pollutants spew from over

4 four hundred plants in forty-six states. Their

5 emissions threaten the health of people who live near

6 these plants, as well as those who live hundreds of

7 miles away.

8 These plants are concentrated largely in the

9 Midwest and southeast, but their toxic emissions

10 threaten the air in communities nationwide. The people

11 of Georgia breathe pollution from power plants not only

12 from those in Georgia, but also from farther west,

13 including Louisiana and Texas.

14 And the pollution from plants in Georgia

15 blows into the rest of the south, including South

16 Carolina, where my wife and I live and further north

17 into the mid-Atlantic and northeast.

18 We, at the American Lung Association issued a

19 report last March called Toxic Air, the Case for

20 Cleaning up Coal-fired Power Plants. In that report,

21 we provided strong reasons for the actions EPA is

22 considering today and I'd like to cover just a few of

23 them now.

24 First, burning coal creates pollutants known

25 or reasonably expected to harm human health or the
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1 environment or both. The process of burning coal

2 releases chemical into the atmosphere that threaten not

3 only the air Americans breathe, but the water they

4 drink, the soil they live on and the food they eat.

5 Just a short list of the harm to human health

6 should be enough to persuade anyone. These emissions

7 can make breathing difficult and can worsen asthma,

8 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchitis, and

9 other lung diseases. They can cause heart attacks and

10 strokes, lung cancer, and other cancers, neurological

11 damage and birth defects. They can kill.

12 Second, people who live nearest the smoke

13 stacks have historically borne the brunt of these

14 hazardous pollutants. For example, acid gasses, such

15 as hydrochloric acid tend to settle out within a day

16 or two posing high risk to neighborhoods and towns

17 nearby. Mercury and sulfur dioxide emissions from

18 power plants also have an immediate impact on the local

19 area. That burden often falls greatest on the poor.

20 Study after study shows that poor people suffer more

21 from the impacts of air pollution.

22 For the southeast, at least, these plants

23 have long been in communities where high percentages of

24 low-income people, both whites and African Americans

25 live.
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1 Attached to my testimony are maps of the

2 southeast that show census tracks where whites and

3 African Americans with incomes below the poverty line

4 are expected to reside in 2016. These are maps that

5 EPA developed in their assessment of risk.

6 The Lung Association added the location of

7 the power plants in the southeast and the results are

8 stunning. The power plants are scattered throughout

9 the southeast following the same pattern as the

10 concentration of poor people.

11 EPA developed these maps because they wanted

12 to show that these people may be at higher risk because

13 they are more likely to depend on fish from nearby

14 rivers and streams, fish that contain mercury.

15 We think the evidence also shows that they

16 face higher risk because of the air they breathe.

17 Finally, cleaning up these toxins save lives.

18 According to the EPA's own analysis, cleaning up these

19 toxic emissions will result in 2016 in multiple annual

20 benefits. Just to name a few, cleaning up these

21 emissions will save seventeen thousand lives each year

22 and eliminate twelve thousand two hundred admissions to

23 the hospital and emergency room visits each year.

24 The American public has waited long enough;

25 more than two decades. We are counting on EPA to
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1 protect all Americans from the health risks imposed by

2 these dangerous pollutants once and for all.

3 Thank you for this opportunity to comment.

4 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Any

5 questions, guys? Thank you. Appreciate it.

6 Our next two speakers please, Robert Capalmin

7 and Ann Mellenger Birdsong. Mr. Capalmin.

8 MR. CAPALMIN: Thank you. My name is Robert

9 Capalmin. I'm here representing the Florida Municipal

10 Electric Association. I'm an Energy and Environmental

11 Policy Consultant for that group.

12 The Florida Municipal Electric Association,

13 sometimes referred to as FMEA, is composed of thirty14 four municipally owned electric utilities serving over

15 two and a half million Floridians.

16 All of these utilities are run by local

17 governments, either City Councils or independent boards

18 appointed by Mayors and so. And consequently are very

19 concerned about air quality as well as low electric

20 rates. And we feel that there's no reason you can't

21 have both. It just takes a little bit more time and

22 thinking to do it right.

23 Our utilities primarily have coal and natural

24 gas generation. Our coal units all have FGD flue-gas

25 desulfurization scrubbers. Most of the units either
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1 have SCR or SCR is being planned. These were made --

2 are being added primarily to comply with the old CAIR

3 rule and the CAMR rule.

4 We have been reviewing the rule, all the

5 technical support documents that we can go through and

6 quite frankly, we're overwhelmed. There is a lot of

7 material in there. We've just gotten over construction

8 programs to meet the CAIR rule and the CAMR rule, which

9 both will have significant reductions in, not only the

10 traditional air pollutants, but the, the toxics, so we

11 think people need to take recognition that there's been

12 a lot of reductions that have already taken place and

13 this rule is to have addition reductions. It is not as

14 if no reductions have been taking place.

15 Right now, we're trying to evaluate what

16 controls are going to be necessary to meet the

17 interstate transport rule that replaces the CAIR rule.

18 Now we've got the utility MACT rule to replace the CAMR

19 rule. We really would respectfully request an

20 additional sixty days to complete our reviews and

21 analysis on this. This is a tremendous amount of

22 material. I, I think you're probably going to get

23 requests from other organizations, but we think that

24 this is important enough that we need to do this right

25 and it may take more time for us to review this and get
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1 helpful comments back to EPA.

2 And I thank you for the opportunity to speak.

3 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Mellenger

4 Birdsong.

5 DR. MELLENGER-BIRDSONG: Hello. I am Dr. Ann

6 Mellenger-Birdsong, a Pediatrician Epidemiologist and

7 parent of two children growing up in Atlanta.

8 I am proud to speak today on behalf of the

9 American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP is a non10 profit professional organization of more than sixty

11 thousand pediatricians, pediatric sub-specialists and

12 pediatric surgeons. We are proud to have a long

13 history of supporting the work of the EPA in cleaning

14 up the air we breathe.

15 Children do not choose where they live, where

16 they go to school, or whether the air their breathe is

17 polluted or not. Adults and their family and community

18 and business leaders make these decisions for them.

19 However, children bear the consequences of decisions

20 adults have made in the form of illness,

21 hospitalization, missed school days, and even their

22 lives. Some of the affects continue into adulthood.

23 Children have a higher minute ventilation,

24 meaning they breathe more air per pound of body weight

25 than do, even at rest. They spend more time outdoors
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1 and they also run more and breathe harder when they are

2 outdoors. For these reasons, at any given level of air

3 pollution, children are more exposed and get a higher

4 amount of air pollution per pound of body weight than

5 adults.

6 Our current federal standards requiring power

7 plants to limit emissions of hazardous air pollutants

8 are weak and outdated. Polluted air makes people sick,

9 particularly infants and children. Toxins in the air

10 which can accumulate in our water and food supply cause

11 numerous health effects, including birth defects,

12 neurological damage, asthma exacerbations, other

13 respiratory problems and heart disease.

14 Some forms of air pollution can also reduce

15 or stunt lung growth. People who grow up in polluted

16 areas have smaller lungs as adults compared to people

17 who grew up in non-polluted areas. Lung growth and

18 remodeling continues through the adolescent years, so

19 this is not just an issue for young children.

20 Coal-fired power plants are the largest

21 source of mercury emissions in the United States. This

22 is of particular concern since mercury can accumulate

23 in the water and food supply. Power plants which burn

24 fossil fuels release mercury into the air, which then

25 deposit in the water where bacteria convert it to
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1 methyl mercury and it is taken up by the fish.

2 Methyl mercury is readily absorbed and

3 readily crosses the placenta and blood-brain barrier.

4 Children can be exposed to methyl mercury by eating

5 contaminated fish. Fetuses are exposed in utero when

6 their mothers eat contaminated fish.

7 Many states have issued advisory warnings

8 about not eating fish from contaminated water. Georgia

9 has issued health advisories for over half of our lakes

10 and rivers and estuary systems.

11 Methyl mercury is most toxic to the

12 developing brain of the fetus and young child. It can

13 also effect the kidneys and immune system. The damage

14 it causes is permanent and irreversible. In the

15 developing brain, methyl mercury causes focal necrosis

16 of neurons, destruction of glial cells, and interferes

17 with neuronal migration.

18 In studies of areas with high exposures,

19 mothers gave birth to infants who appeared normal at

20 first, but they went on to develop problems such as

21 blindness, deafness, and seizures.

22 In utero exposure to lower levels of mercury

23 has been associated with more subtle affects on memory,

24 attention, and language.

25 Fine particulates are very complex
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1 structures, being mixtures of polycyclic hydrocarbons,

2 heavy metals, such as arsenic, chromium, and lead, and

3 other chemicals. Because they are so small, they go

4 deep into the lung carrying all the chemicals and heavy

5 metals with them. They are known to increase

6 respiratory problems and contribute to a range of other

7 disorders.

8 Recent studies showed that children with

9 asthma, increased air pollutions are associated with

10 increased symptoms as well as asthma exacerbations.

11 Even short-term increases to elevated levels of fine

12 particulates were associated with a significant

13 increase in all causes of mortality of one point two

14 one percent, and respiratory related mortality of one

15 point seven eight percent. This may not sound like a

16 lot, but on the population level, it is very

17 significant.

18 Reducing air pollution can have life-saving

19 effects at a population level. A 2009 study found that

20 reducing air pollution by a decrease of ten micrograms

21 per cubic meter in the fine particulate concentration

22 was associated with an estimated increase in life

23 expectancy of over half a year. This is a remarkable

24 impact and reinforces the need to reduce the levels of

25 fine particulates in our air.
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1 The American people have been waiting for

2 many years for this important rule and we cannot afford

3 any further delays. In 1990, the Clean Air Act

4 Amendments raised the need to assess power plant

5 emissions. Ten years later, the EPA determined it was

6 appropriate and necessary that these hazardous air

7 pollutants, particularly mercury, be reduced. Now

8 another eleven years later, we still have yet to take

9 appropriate action.

10 People who were born at the time the

11 amendments were passed in 1990 are now in college and

12 have reached the age of legal majority. Insufficient

13 action by the EPA and pressure from polluters has

14 delayed needed action, allowing levels of mercury and

15 other toxins to continue to accumulate in our water and

16 bodies.

17 The AAP fully supports the EPA's new

18 standards for reducing toxic air pollutants from power

19 plants. The AAP supports using the standard of maximum

20 achievable control technology to obtain these

21 reasonable goals. We also support requiring the

22 implementation of this technology within three years as

23 proposed under the rule.

24 While some may argue that this rule will

25 impose costs upon power companies, the AAP would
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1 respond that the high cost of pollution are currently

2 being borne by our children and other vulnerable

3 populations and by all of us in the form of higher

4 insurance premium and taxes to pay for medical

5 treatment from those suffering from the health affects

6 of pollution.

7 MR. CLARK: Ann, are you pretty close to

8 wrapping up?

9 DR. MELLENGER-BIRDSONG: I have -- yeah, I'm

10 just on my last --

11 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you.

12 DR. MELLENGER-BIRDSON: This rule will lead

13 to cleaner air and better health for millions of

14 American children and families. We ask the EPA to

15 insist on timely implementation without further delay.

16 Each day, children are at risk of being born with

17 preventable birth defects, suffering asthma

18 exacerbation and bearing other health consequences of

19 air pollution.

20 The tools and technology exist. We need to

21 use them to protect our children and families starting

22 today.

23 Thank you.

24 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Thank you.

25 Any questions from guys? Okay. Thank you.
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1 Next two speakers are Janice Nolen please and

2 Charles Jones.

3 FEMALE: Next two --

4 MR. CLARK: Yeah.

5 FEMALE: First and second.

6 MR. CLARK: Okay thank you. Hi.

7 MS. NOLEN: Hi.

8 MR. CLARK: Ms. Nolen.

9 MS. NOLEN: I'm -- my name is Janice Nolen.

10 I'm Assistant Vice President of the American Lung

11 Association.

12 As a Board Chair, Jim Goodin stated earlier,

13 the American Lung Association strongly supports the

14 proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to

15 clean up mercury and air toxics from coal-fired power

16 plants.

17 I appreciate the opportunity to testify

18 today, particularly because today has been so long

19 coming. We at the Lung Association look forward to the

20 day when the air in our communities is free from the

21 plumes of arsenic, mercury, dioxins, lead, cadmium,

22 benzene, formaldehyde, acid gasses, as well as the

23 particulate matter and other hazards they produce.

24 The twenty-one year delay is -- a generation

25 was born, grew up and has reached maturity breathing in
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1 toxic emissions and eating mercury in their fish

2 despite the promise that we, as a nation, made to them

3 in 1990.

4 To put it another way, young adults entering

5 their junior year at Spellman College or Emery

6 University this Fall are still without the protection

7 that Congress voted for them to have in the year they

8 were born. That is wrong.

9 As EPA has noted, cleaning up these emissions

10 will save lives and relieve the burden on the health of

11 millions of people.

12 We are pleased that in 2016, if this rule is

13 put in place and the electric utility companies clean

14 up these plants, seventeen thousand people won't die

15 early. A hundred and twenty thousand people won't have

16 their asthma made worse. Twelve thousand people won't

17 have to be admitted to the hospital or make a fear

18 filled trip to the emergency room.

19 Some opponents have pretended that their

20 electric utilities have not clearly known what was

21 coming for twenty-one years. The industry has known

22 for years what the requirements would be. In fact,

23 many electricity providers have prepared well in

24 advance and made the changes that reduce their

25 emissions in anticipation of this requirement.
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1 Even the Georgia legislature knew because in

2 2005, the state legislature passed a law requiring many

3 power plants to make the same kinds of clean air tools

4 that we're discussing today.

5 EPA has provided nearly three months for

6 comments. Even today, forty days remain until the

7 comments are due. Plenty of time.

8 Further delay, even to extend the comment

9 period is not only unnecessary, but it would extend

10 the burden of breathing toxic pollution on top of the

11 delay -- decades of delay so far.

12 We will be submitting in-depth comments in

13 writing later, but I'd like to call special attention

14 to the role of acid gasses and the absolutely need to

15 include controls to reduce acid gasses in the final

16 rule.

17 Acid gasses make up the bulk of the volume of

18 toxic emissions coming from these power plants. Acid

19 gasses are highly irritating, corrosive gasses,

20 inflaming the eyes, nose, and throat, as well as the

21 delicate tissues of the respiratory system. Because

22 they are highly soluble in water, acid gas vapors can

23 react readily with the moist tissues in the upper

24 airways.

25 Water bound to microscopic particles can act
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1 as a delivery system for acids to the alveolar regions

2 of the lung.

3 Acid gasses have been found to cause asthma

4 attacks.

5 The biggest burden of these acid gasses falls

6 on the people who live closest to the plants, downwind

7 and along the plumes.

8 As our Board Chair, Jim Goodin described

9 earlier, the people exposed most to these gasses, to

10 these acids are those who can bear the harm the least.

11 Research has shown that people who have the lowest

12 income face higher risk from pollution than wealthier

13 people. Part of the reason is that they are also more

14 likely to have diseases, such as asthma and chronic

15 obstructive pulmonary disease, which make them more

16 vulnerable, but a big part is they live closer to these

17 sources of pollution and are more exposed to more

18 concentrated levels.

19 Limiting the acid gasses provides a vital

20 added benefit by cutting down on acid gas not formally

21 listed among the air toxics, sulfur dioxide. Make no

22 mistake, SO2 is hazardous. A trigger of asthma attacks

23 and respiratory inflammation. Sulfur dioxide reacts

24 chemically in the atmosphere to create sulfate

25 particles.
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1 Consequently, one of the most important co2 benefits of reducing acid gasses is that by reducing

3 sulfur dioxide, we can reduce sulfates in the air and

4 save lives.

5 We cannot afford not to clean up these toxic

6 substances. We cannot permit another year to go by

7 when seventeen thousand people die early, when workers

8 miss eight hundred fifty thousand days at work because

9 they, or someone in their family, is sick. When twelve

10 thousand people end up in the hospital, in the

11 emergency room because we failed again to act. These

12 are things we truly cannot afford.

13 The American Lung Association supports this

14 mercury and air toxics rule. We need this to protect

15 our health and the health of our families. After

16 twenty-one years, these utilities will finally be

17 required to follow the law. This rule will hold power

18 plants accountable to the same standards that other

19 industries have been held to nationwide. This is a

20 huge step towards cleaning up the air we depend on and

21 giving us back the air we deserve.

22 Thank you.

23 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. Jones.

24 MR. JONES: Thank you. Good morning. My

25 name is Clay Jones. I'm the Vice President and General
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1 Counsel of the Georgia Traditional Manufacturer's

2 Association or GTMA. We represent the interest of

3 Georgia manufacturers in legislative and regulatory

4 matters. Thank you very much for the opportunity to

5 share our thoughts.

6 Our association was founded in 1900 with its

7 roots in the Georgia textile industry. We recently

8 merged with the Georgia Industry Association and in the

9 coming weeks, we'll be known as the Georgia Association

10 of Manufacturers. That's enough alphabet soup.

11 We are now the voice of all manufacturers in

12 our state, but with members also still from the textile

13 and carpet industry, but also in other industries such

14 as agricultural equipment, steel, and other metals,

15 chemicals, medical sutures, geo-synthetics,

16 refrigeration, and other industrial equipment and a

17 host of others.

18 I want to emphasize the importance of

19 environmental stewardship of our membership. One of

20 our most active committees is the Environmental Quality

21 Committee, with volunteers from member companies who

22 meet regularly to discuss and share information about

23 the latest in environmental compliance and

24 environmental excellence.

25 Many of our companies are nationally
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1 recognized and rewarded for their sustainability

2 efforts including reducing their energy usage,

3 drastically reducing their water usage and water

4 consumption, reduce landfill usage and other, and other

5 pro-environmental achievements.

6 We support a clean environment and

7 responsible policies that promote environmental

8 protection and economic growth.

9 The proposed utility MACT, however, would

10 impose significant costs on utilities that supply

11 energy, electricity in particular, to our members.

12 Although the cost impact of the proposed MACT

13 will initially fall on those utilities, it's not secret

14 who ultimately pays the bill. Ultimately, it is all

15 consumers, including industry.

16 Energy costs are a substantial cost for

17 manufacturers nearing, and sometimes even surpassing,

18 labor costs. These costs have skyrocketed in recent

19 years. Whereas it might have been a lesser factor in

20 prior years, energy costs now are often one of the

21 determining factors in where a manufacturer locates,

22 whether it's in this country or another country or

23 which state, whether it expands to add production and

24 jobs, or indeed, whether it can continue operations at

25 all.
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1 So we urge you to be especially careful, not

2 to adopt rules that impose unreasonable cost burdens on

3 utilities and their customers because those -- we will

4 ultimately be paying for those.

5 You know, the preliminary analysis, this MACT

6 will effect virtually every coal plant and require the

7 operation and construction of scrubbers. It would

8 impact plants responsible for nearly fifty percent of

9 the total electricity generation at a cost that

10 even -- EPA estimates, my understanding, to be over ten

11 billion dollars per year and with a three-year time

12 line for compliance, if there are labor shortages or

13 material shortages that cost will only increase.

14 Georgia Power is a major supplier, a

15 subsidiary of Southern Company and a major supplier to

16 many of our members. They recently spend three point

17 seven billion dollars in environmental controls and

18 expect to spend another two hundred and ten million

19 dollars to comply with existing environmental laws. We

20 didn't oppose that expenditure. It was approved for

21 recovery in the most recent Georgia Power rate case

22 which was last year.

23 But nonetheless, those costs have

24 significantly increased already electric rates for all

25 consumers, including manufacturers and other businesses
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1 key to Georgia's continued economic growth. And if

2 this is adopted, there will be increased costs again,

3 so we ask you just to consider that impact on rate

4 payers, because ultimately the utilities may pay for

5 it, but then we end up paying for what the utilities

6 pay for.

7 So we ask you to take into account the

8 interest of manufacturers and other consumers. We

9 understand and respect your mission to protect the

10 environment, but we also believe you have a

11 responsibility to consider the impact on consumers of

12 utility service and the economy as a whole. We can ill

13 afford to face increased expenses that are burdensome

14 and stifle economic growth. We have to find a balance

15 and we are very skeptical that this proposed rule does

16 that.

17 The public opinion polls that have been

18 published lately and political leaders on both sides of

19 the [indecipherable] in recent years have emphasized

20 the importance of manufacturing to our nation's

21 economic future. A healthy manufacturing base creates

22 wealth, jobs, and opportunities here in our country.

23 This nation has been through an enormous economic shock

24 over the past few years.

25 Manufacturing jobs, which had already been
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1 decreasing over the past decade suffered extensively.

2 I can tell you that in Georgia, ten years ago, there

3 were over six hundred thousand manufacturing jobs.

4 Today, there are about three hundred and forty-five

5 thousand jobs in manufacturing.

6 So we ask you to please consider the fragile

7 nature of the economic recovery, to remember that the

8 costs imposed by this rule will fall upon the backs of

9 consumers, including on industries which are faced

10 already with increasing costs and intense

11 internationally competition.

12 We urge you to reject any rule that will

13 impose unreasonable costs that threaten the health of

14 manufacturers and of our economy in general.

15 Thank you very much for the time to speak.

16 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Any

17 questions guys for? No? Okay. Thank you so much.

18 MR. JONES: Thank you.

19 MR. CLARK: Next speakers please. William

20 P. Brown and Roger Mills. Okay, we have one of our

21 guys here -- you are?

22 MR. BROWN: I am William P. Brown.

23 MR. CLARK: Yeah. So Roger Mills? Is Roger

24 here? I take that as a no, so Representative Scott

25 Holcomb. Thank you, Mr. Brown.
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1 MR. BROWN: Yeah. And my name is spelled as

2 in the color, B-R-O-W-N.

3 I think I'm the first one to appear as an

4 individual on the roster, but that does not mean that

5 I'm isolated or exist in a vacuum. I am an Ordained

6 Minister of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. I'm a

7 founding member of Earth Covenant Ministry and I also

8 have connections with the Evangelical Environmental

9 Network, but I don't represent any of those

10 organizations. I come simply as a person of faith, a

11 Christian, who is greatly concerned about our God given

12 responsibility to care for creation, which would include

13 our care for the health and well-being of future

14 generations and that begins with the health and well

15 being of our children; those already born and those yet

16 to be born.

17 That's why I firmly believe that the EPA's

18 proposed rule to reduce emissions of toxic air

19 pollutants from power plants is critical and vitally

20 so.

21 Coal-fired power plants emit lead, dioxins,

22 acid gasses, mercury, and arsenic to name only a few.

23 They are all known threats to public health. Mercury

24 is particularly harmful. It doesn't go away, but

25 instead builds up in the environment and in the form of
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1 methyl mercury in fish, it is especially dangerous to

2 pregnant women and their unborn children. Exposure, it

3 has been shown, can cause brain damage.

4 Mercury contamination in the United States is

5 so widespread that at least one in twelve and as many

6 as one in six women of child-bearing age has mercury

7 levels high enough to put an unborn child at risk for

8 mercury poisoning.

9 Coal plants are the largest source of

10 unregulated mercury emissions in the United States

11 pumping out forty-eight tons of the toxin every year.

12 Regulations that enforce drastic reductions of air

13 toxics are long overdue. I consider the protection of

14 our children as a nonnegotiable and the great irony is

15 that inaction on this issue now will only get costlier

16 for our society later on.

17 Jesus was and is known for many things and

18 among them, he was known to love and genuinely enjoy

19 children. He once asked rhetorically is there anyone

20 among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give

21 a stone or if a child ask for a fish will give a snake?

22 The answer is, of course, no. That would be

23 unthinkable. Would we give our children food laced with

24 methyl mercury?

25 Jesus once placed a child in front of his
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1 disciples and said, "Whoever welcomes one such child in

2 my name, welcomes me." If any of you put a stumbling

3 block before one of these little ones, it would be

4 better for you if a great large stone were

5 fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the

6 depths of the sea."

7 I suspect that our children and our

8 children's children are going to condemn us after we

9 are gone for having jeopardized their health and their

10 planet on which they will have to live, or try to live,

11 if they are able.

12 Future generations will certainly not look

13 upon us with gratitude or respect for what we are going

14 to -- what we are doing to this planet. And sometimes

15 I think it would be better to be wearing that

16 large stone.

17 To ensure the beauty of this earth and its

18 sufficiency as a habitat for generations to come, that

19 for me is a major part of our responsibility, whether

20 as Christians or simply as good citizens and I believe

21 that our ethical responsibility will ultimately be

22 measured in terms of what kind of earth we are able to

23 leave as a legacy to our children.

24 This is the legacy I hope for and pray for

25 and work for. As one living in Atlanta, specifically
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1 in Decatur, I share God's vision for a safe, secure

2 city as expressed in Zachariah Chapter eight. "Thus

3 says the Lord of hosts. Old men and old women, women

4 shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with

5 staff in hand because of their great age and the

6 streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls

7 playing in the streets." May those boys and girls be

8 secure in their health, as they are safe from violence.

9 Therefore, I urge the proposed EPA rule be

10 implemented swiftly and without delay.

11 Thank you.

12 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much.

13 Representative Holcomb.

14 REPRESENTATIVE HOLCOMB: Thank you very much.

15 My name is Scott Holcomb and I am a State

16 Representative for District eighty-two in the Georgia

17 House of Representatives.

18 I appreciate the opportunity to address some

19 issues that are very important to my constituents in

20 terms of their health and well being, as well as issues

21 that are important to me as a father, a citizen, and a

22 veteran.

23 I support the EPA's proposed standards to

24 limit mercury, acid gasses, and other toxic pollution

25 from coal and oil-fired power plants.
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1 These standards would keep ninety-one percent

2 of the mercury in coal from being released into the

3 air.

4 The benefits of these new standards are

5 obvious and immediate; better health for our citizens

6 and cleaner air and water.

7 I find it difficult to understand why anyone

8 would oppose these goals, although I know the immediate

9 and most common refrain is that change is expensive.

10 This may or may not be true, but operating under the

11 existing standards has been, and will continue to be,

12 far more expensive.

13 Clean air, water, and a safe food supply are

14 the cornerstones of a sustainable future. These should

15 be non-partisan goals for our country and I think it's

16 important to note that the Clean Air Act and the Clean

17 Water Act were enacted during the Nixon administration.

18 I also support the proposed standards for

19 another reason. I believe that these standards will

20 help spur innovation and help lead us away from our

21 dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil.

22 As a U.S. Army veteran who served as a

23 Captain from 1998 to 2004 and deployed overseas three

24 times, I have a firsthand understanding on why it is

25 so important for our country to pursue alternative
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1 fuels and to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

2 We import fossil fuels from nations that are

3 either hostile to our interests or that support our

4 enemies, for example, by supporting terrorists.

5 Our reliance on fossil fuels impacts and

6 impairs our national security.

7 It is for these reasons that I encourage the

8 EPA to adopt these new standards; to limit mercury,

9 acid gasses, and other toxic pollution. I believe

10 doing so will spur innovation and help the United

11 States have a stronger energy infrastructure.

12 It is the right thing to do for our health,

13 for our security and for nation.

14 Thank you.

15 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Let me just

16 ask a quick question. You may have said this at the

17 beginning of your statement, but what -- your District

18 represents is where?

19 REPRESENTATIVE HOLCOMB: I represent

20 northeast Atlanta in DeKalb County.

21 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

22 REPRESENTATIVE HOLCOMB: Thank you.

23 MR. CLARK: Any questions folks? Okay.

24 Thank you both very much.

25 Okay. Is -- let me just try Roger Mills, are
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1 you here? No Roger Mills. Okay. Then if we could do

2 Dale Kemmerick please and Stanley Saunders. Thank you.

3 Yeah. Hi, Mr. Kemmerick.

4 MR. KEMMERICK: Yes. I'm Dale Kemmerick,

5 it's K-E-M-M-E-R-I-C-K. I'm retired from the Georgia

6 Environmental Protection Division and I worked there

7 for thirty-four years.

8 I support the power plant Mercury and Air

9 Toxics Standards proposed by EPA on March 16, 2011.

10 As an Air Pollution Meteorologist working at

11 EPD, I know how vital emission reductions are to a

12 healthy and sustainable atmosphere.

13 As proven by the improvements in the acid

14 rain and ozone problems, it, it shows that emission

15 reductions work and have been successful and should be

16 the first step in any implementation even before the

17 final extent of the problem is known.

18 You can never have enough emission reductions

19 unless you get down to zero, actually.

20 I'm an environmental conservative and

21 concerned that the power plant owners want to burden

22 the air with the waste without any reductions or paying

23 for it.

24 I concur with EPA's fact sheet on, on these

25 standards that it will provide health benefits and save
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1 lives, improve productivity, and increase jobs, and

2 provide regulatory certainty and a fair market for all

3 energy providers. What more can you ask for than that?

4 At this time, power plants are causing health

5 costs that they are not paying for and transferring

6 those health costs to the public. I'm sure that if you

7 ask the CEO of these power plants to ingest a fraction

8 of the mercury or toxic pollutants, they would refuse.

9 I know that there may be a minority of the

10 public that are submissive to the wishes of the power

11 industry, but the majority of the public believe they

12 are right to clean air and object to having toxic smoke

13 blown into their face.

14 EPA, as a regulatory, must be a referee

15 between all the differed groups and not be intimidated

16 by the political considerations, but act on the

17 scientific facts.

18 However the timing of the implementation for

19 these standards is too long. We have proven

20 technology that it has been installed in other industry

21 types and power plants have been aware of the problem

22 for decades. At EPD, we have -- the power plants have

23 submitted toxic emission reports detailing, you know,

24 the problems that they have for decades. They have --

25 let's see. A good CEO would have planned for this
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1 implementation knowing the problem.

2 At the very least, if a power plant asks for

3 the extra year to complete the installation of control

4 equipment, they should be charged a fee equal to one

5 year of the state's estimated health cost due to those

6 emissions.

7 The power companies have said that they don't

8 have -- if they don't have to control these emissions,

9 they will create jobs, but I've never known a company

10 that will hire someone to do nothing. They fail to

11 mention that the only jobs created by these emissions

12 are increased healthcare workers and undertakers.

13 Thank you.

14 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Mr. Saunders.

15 MR. SAUNDERS: I'm Stanley P. Saunders. I'm

16 a person of faith, an Ordained Minister with the

17 Christian Church Disciples of Christ and a founding

18 member of Birth Covenant Ministry.

19 According to the EPA itself, emissions from

20 coal-fired power plants produce some three hundred and

21 eighty-six thousand tons of hazardous air pollutants

22 annually. More than that of any other point source

23 category.

24 These emissions include eighty-four different

25 pollutants that pose threats to human health and the
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1 environment.

2 We are here today primarily to talk about

3 only one of these pollutants, namely mercury. But the

4 implications stretch far beyond that one substance.

5 The risks associated with mercury are well

6 known. In all of its forms, mercury is toxic, but

7 especially damaging to the most vulnerable, to fetuses

8 and to newborns.

9 You will hear many times today, and we

10 already have heard that one in six babies is now born

11 in this country with harmful levels of mercury in their

12 blood stream.

13 Coal-fired power plants constitute the

14 largest single source producer of mercury, but a source

15 that we can control if we so choose. Roughly forty

16 percent of Georgia's total electric energy comes from

17 coal. In fact, we are the most coal dependent state in

18 the country. The Southern Company is the biggest

19 producer of coal energy in the United States.

20 In 2008, coal-fired power plants in Georgia

21 reported emitting three thousand seven hundred and

22 seventy-six pounds of mercury, probably conservative.

23 Six Southern Company plants in Georgia and

24 Alabama rank among the top fifty emitters of mercury in

25 the United States.
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1 Twenty years has passed since Congress

2 revised the Clean Air Act mandated the EPA to clean up

3 toxic substances and to protect Americans from airborne

4 hazards. We are now finally on the verge of enacting

5 policies that would fulfill that mandate and require

6 substantial reductions in the release of the airborne

7 mercury from coal-fired plants.

8 We have had the technology to accomplish

9 these reductions for some time. In fact, many power

10 plants today already have these technologies in place.

11 As far as I can see, there is nothing to prevent us

12 from fulfilling the law and doing what is right.

13 Although the environmental costs of burning

14 coal to produce electricity are enormous from start to

15 finish, we probably need to recognize in this country

16 that we will continue to burn coal into the foreseeable

17 future. But it would be both immoral and suicidal to

18 continue to burn coal without doing the very best we

19 can to put into place the technology that will limit

20 its negative consequences.

21 The energy corporations that burn coal have

22 had twenty years to provide leadership, but have

23 instead persistently drug their feet, usually citing

24 costs and the need for more study.

25 There will always be things to study, but the
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1 facts about the dangers of mercury do not change.

2 There will always be costs to be borne, but the long3 term costs of inaction, whether financial, social, or

4 environmental far outweigh any short-term costs.

5 We need, therefore, the EPA to implement

6 strong new mercury standards and require maximum

7 achievable control technology now.

8 We also need the energy companies themselves

9 who's rights as citizens, the courts have recently

10 dramatically confirmed and expanded to act like good

11 citizens. First by providing consistent concrete

12 evidence of their concern for the common welfare of

13 their fellow citizens and customers and for the

14 creation itself, which is not only the source of all

15 the energy that we consume, but of our life and the

16 life of generations to come.

17 We also need the energy companies to invest

18 their substantial financial human and technological

19 resources in proactively preparing for a new cleaner

20 energy future rather than reactively clinging ever

21 tighter to inadequate and outdated technologies that

22 drag us all ever closer to the edge of the abyss.

23 Thank you.

24 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much.

25 Questions guys? Okay. Thank you.
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1 Our next speakers please, Juliet Coen and

2 Rebecca Watts Hull. Thank you. Ms. Coen.

3 MS. COEN: Good morning. My name is Juliet

4 Coen. I'm the General Counsel for Upper Chattahoochee

5 River Keeper, but I'm also here to voice the concerns

6 of our sister water keeper alliance members from the

7 Flint, Ogeechee, Sabine, Yadkin,

8 Upper Watauga, Waccamaw, and Apalachicola River

9 Keepers.

10 Our organizations support the proposed

11 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants and we

12 strongly encourage EPA to adopt these standards.

13 Power plants have largely avoided emission

14 limits on mercury and other air toxic emissions. Power

15 plants, however, are the single largest source of toxic

16 air pollution, and coal-fired power plants are the

17 largest source of mercury pollution in the nation.

18 Mercury and air toxics released into the air

19 fall into water bodies near and far contaminating

20 water, fish, and plant species within. These

21 pollutants do not break down when introduced. Instead

22 mercury circulates and eventually accumulates into

23 living organisms including fish and humans.

24 Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, which can

25 damage the nervous systems as it is consumed through
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1 the food chain.

2 There is significant mercury contamination in

3 the Chattahoochee River basin, as well as throughout

4 Georgia's other water bodies. State-issued advisories

5 against the consumption of fish due to mercury

6 contamination have been issued for fish in the large

7 lakes in our basin. For example, in Lake Lanier. The

8 state recommends restricting consumption of striped

9 bass, spotted bass, largemouth bass, channel catfish,

10 common carp to only one meal per week.

11 Our rivers and streams also show mercury

12 contamination as almost fifty percent were found to

13 have fish with sufficient contamination levels to

14 warrant a state advisory

15 Our sister river keepers tell us that their

16 water bodies in Georgia, North and South Carolina and

17 Florida also suffer from mercury pollution. In fact,

18 all the rivers in North and South Carolina have fish

19 consumption advisories. In Watauga Lake, which has no

20 point source of pollution and whose shoreline is

21 primarily undeveloped national and state forest, the

22 fish suffer from mercury contamination and are subject

23 to fish consumption advisories.

24 It is thought that the source of the mercury

25 contamination in Watauga is from airborne mercury.
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1 Likewise, EPA has estimated that ninety-nine percent of

2 the mercury in the Ogeechee River basin is due to air

3 pollution as well.

4 The promulgation and implementation of the

5 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants,

6 however, can achieve reduction of mercury contamination

7 in fish tissue quickly and go a long way to protect

8 public health and prosperity in our region.

9 Because power plants are the largest source

10 of air toxics and the current standards do not address

11 these pollutants, we need these strong standards.

12 Without strict emission limits on mercury, particulate

13 matter, and hydrogen chloride, power plants will

14 continue to poison our air and water, reduce our

15 enjoyment of these public resources and harm prosperity

16 in our region.

17 So on behalf of Upper Chattahoochee River

18 Keeper, Flint, Ogeechee, Sabine, Yadkin, Upper

19 Watauga, Waccamaw, and Apalachicola River Keepers, we

20 strongly encourage EPA to adopt these standards to help

21 clean the air around our waterways and protect the

22 public health of our communities from mercury and air

23 toxin pollution.

24 Thank you.

25 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. If, if --
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1 also, Rebecca, if you could spell your name as well.

2 MS. WATTS-HULL: Yes

3 MR. CLARK: Thanks.

4 MS. WATTS-HULL: Good morning. My name is

5 Rebecca Watts-Hull, W-A-T-T-S, second word H-U-L-L. I

6 represent Mothers and Others for Clean Air, a non7 profit partnership of seven leading public health,

8 children's advocacy and environmental organizations in

9 Georgia.

10 I'm here today on behalf of Mothers and

11 Others for Clean Air to support EPA's proposed mercury

12 and air toxics rule, a rule that is badly needed and

13 long overdue.

14 There are many reasons why public health

15 advocates and concerned moms and dads support this

16 rule. The neurotoxicity of mercury and other heavy

17 metals controlled by this rule, as well as the danger

18 of toxics such as arsenic and formaldehyde, especially

19 to unborn and young children are clearly understood.

20 Setting limits on these air toxics from power plants

21 just makes sense and is long overdue as these limits

22 were required by the Clean Air Act Amendment passed

23 twenty years ago.

24 I'm going to let others, however, go into

25 more detail about the importance of mercury and air
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1 toxics today and focus my comments on an additional

2 important benefit of this rule; namely achieving

3 further reductions in fine particulate matter or PM2.5

4 and its precursors from coal-fired power plants.

5 New limits for acid gasses under the proposed

6 rule will provide significant health benefits with by

7 reducing the gasses themselves and also by reducing the

8 secondary fine particulate matter formed in the

9 atmosphere as a result of their presence.

10 Too many Georgia citizens are breathing

11 unhealthy concentrations of PM2.5. Twenty-two metro

12 Atlanta counties, as well as the Macon area in

13 northwest Georgia fail the annual standard for PM and

14 that standard does not yet reflect the most recent

15 science revealing harm at lower concentrations.

16 With Atlanta, Macon, and northwest Georgia

17 still failing an outdated standard, and Columbus and

18 Augusta very close to the old limit, Georgia needs to

19 achieve PM2.5 reductions from every major source it can

20 control, including every single coal-fired power plant

21 in Georgia as well as those in other states who's

22 pollution is carried into Georgia.

23 Fine particulate matter of all kinds is

24 harmful. The respiratory and cardiopulmonary affects

25 of fine PM are well documented by decades of research.
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1 I would like to describe one such study in

2 order to address a claim made repeatedly by industry

3 groups that the type of fine particle pollution from

4 coal plants is not a serious public health concern.

5 A 2008 study led by a team of scientist from

6 Emery University and Georgia Institute of Technology

7 used fine particulate source apportionment methods to

8 link different types of PM2.5 differentiated by source

9 to negative health outcomes. Contrary to industry

10 claims, this study revealed a clear association between

11 respiratory emergency department visits in Atlanta and

12 sulfate rich fine PM, the kind of fine particles formed

13 in the atmosphere as a result of gasses emitted by coal

14 fired power plants.

15 In addition to their role in the formation of

16 harmful fine particulate matter, many of the gasses

17 controlled by this rule are directly associated with

18 negative health outcomes. The proposed rule would

19 result in reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions of

20 fifty-five percent or more.

21 SO2 is a power airway irritant that is

22 particularly dangerous to anyone suffering asthma or

23 COPD. Even very brief spikes in SO2 from a coal-fired

24 power plant can trigger a severe asthma attack.

25 Georgia's 2010 asthma surveillance report
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1 estimates that approximately twelve percent of

2 Georgia's children, almost three hundred thousand, has

3 asthma.

4 Our state needs EPA to use every federal tool

5 at its disposal, including the proposed mercury and air

6 toxics rule to reduce both SO2 and fine particulate

7 pollution so we can all breathe easier.

8 Finally, I would like to support EPA's

9 position that the limits in the proposed rule and the

10 time table for meeting it are very reasonable. The

11 proposed rule is based on careful consideration of what

12 the cleanest twelve percent of plants already have been

13 able to achieve.

14 Many of the units at Georgia's coal-fired

15 power plants have already installed controls for acid

16 gasses and particulates as the result of a state rule

17 prompted by the 2005 Clean Air Mercury and Clean Air

18 Interstate Rules.

19 In neighboring North Carolina, Duke Energy

20 recently announced it expects to achieve a consistent

21 ninety-eight percent removal efficiency for SO2 with

22 wet scrubbers at its Cliffside Coal Plant.

23 Effective controls have been available for

24 quite some time. The proposed rule will force the

25 clean up or conversion of some very old units in
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1 neighboring states whose emissions reach our state. It

2 also will result in a tighter timetable for emission

3 reductions at some of Georgia's coal plant, including

4 Plant Yates right here in metro Atlanta.

5 The flexibility written into the rule enables

6 Georgia Power to decide the best way to meet the

7 emissions limit at each plant, whether it be control

8 technology, plant conversion, or a decision to generate

9 or purchase electricity from cleaner sources.

10 This is good news for Georgia's children who

11 should not have to wait any longer for emissions

12 reductions that have been attainable for decades and

13 I'm going to wrap up.

14 We would like to thank EPA for its efforts to

15 reduce air pollution in Georgia and throughout the U.S.

16 and thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

17 MR. CLARK: Thank you. I had -- Beverly

18 probably knows this, but could you just say something

19 quickly about Mothers and Others for Clean Air, just

20 about, about the organization and then also you

21 mentioned the 2008 Georgia Tech Emery Study, I was

22 wondering if you have a citation for that?

23 MS. WATTS-HULL: Yes I do. The citation is

24 included in my written comments --

25 MR. CLARK: Great.
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1 MS. WATTS-HULL: -- that I left at the desk.

2 MR. CLARK: Okay.

3 MS. WATTS-HULL: And the seven partner

4 organizations of Mothers and Others are American Lung

5 Association in Georgia, Children's Healthcare of

6 Atlanta, Georgia Conservancy, Georgia PTA, Morehouse

7 School of Medicine, Physicians for Social

8 Responsibility and Rawlins School of Public Health at

9 Emery and those are also listed in my written comments.

10 MR. CLARK: Okay great. Thank you. Thank

11 you both.

12 Our next two speakers please, Joe Hudson and

13 Chris Hobson. Excellent, thank you. Thank you.

14 Mr. Hudson, if you could start and if you could spell

15 your, your -- if both of you could spell your last

16 names, appreciate that.

17 MR. HUDSON: Good morning. I'm Joe Hudson,

18 H-U-D-S-O-N. I was born and raised in Eatonton,

19 Georgia, Putnam County, which is a small community

20 about seventy-five miles southeast of Atlanta.

21 I'm not a public speaker, but I'm honored to

22 speak with you because I know how important these

23 hearings are.

24 I've not come here today to promote anyone's

25 political agenda. I don't affiliate with any political
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1 party and none of my children work for Georgia Power

2 Company.

3 I've come here today because I love my

4 community, my state, and my country. I try to keep an

5 open mind about things and I think the best decisions

6 are made when we use a healthy combination of acquired

7 knowledge and common sense.

8 Our community is blessed to have two

9 beautiful manmade lakes in our county, Lake Sinclair

10 and Lake Oconee. These two lakes have caused many

11 wonderful new families to move into our, into our area

12 which has been good for our banks, our churches, our

13 civic clubs and our business people. It's not easy to

14 attract newcomers to rural Georgia. They want a good

15 school system, a good healthcare facility, good

16 recreational facilities, good churches, and other good

17 people.

18 One of the reasons we have been able to have

19 these things is because last year, Georgia Power paid

20 thirteen percent of our county's ad valorem taxes and

21 fourteen percent of our sales tax. This means our

22 county can afford the good hospital, the good school

23 system, and those other things that are so important to

24 any community.

25 I don't know anybody in our community that
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1 has been harmed by anything Georgia Power has done in

2 the last fifty years, but I know of a lot of people

3 whose lives have been extended or saved by Putnam

4 General Hospital.

5 I know of a lot of people who have graduated

6 from Putnam County High School and have gone on to

7 become productive citizens. These young people who

8 grow up in Putnam County need local jobs so that they

9 can stay at home instead of moving to Atlanta or some

10 other metro area to find a good job.

11 I've got two brothers. Two of us remained at

12 home and found good jobs in Eatonton. One brother had

13 to seek employment elsewhere. I've got three children.

14 Unfortunately, only one of the children were able to

15 stay at home and find a good job. The two others had

16 to move to other communities to find a good job.

17 Our community has been hit hard by the

18 recession. Business has -- businesses have closed,

19 people have lost their jobs. The national news says

20 that our graduates are going to have a more difficult

21 time than ever finding good jobs. This isn't good.

22 Georgia Power helped to provide the kind of

23 jobs that our high school and college graduates need;

24 good paying jobs with good benefits. Georgia Power

25 employees like Lynwood Lindsey [phonetic] and Wes Lewis
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1 are leaders in our community. Lynwood serves on the

2 Putnam County Development Authority and Wes serves on

3 the Chamber of Commerce. They make our community a

4 better place to live.

5 Without industries, like Georgia Power, small

6 rural communities like ours will disappear from the

7 landscape of our country. Georgia Power is one of the

8 most important if not the most important economic

9 engines that helps run our county.

10 I'm an avid hunter and runner and I like

11 spending time outdoors. I want clean air and clean

12 water, not only for me and my family, but for all of

13 our children and grandchildren for generations to come.

14 Before the Lake Oconee was constructed, my

15 friends and I canoed the Oconee River numerous times

16 each summer. I had eaten fish out of those rivers and

17 lakes in Putnam County for fifty years and the only

18 negative thing I can tell you is that my waistline has

19 probably gotten a little bit bigger.

20 I was a Boy Scout and I was an Explorer

21 Scout. I realized at an early age what a beautiful

22 creation that God has given us and I want to do my part

23 to make sure it stays that way.

24 I've worked for forty-one years at the

25 Farmers and Merchants Bank in Eatonton, a local
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1 independent community bank. I'm keenly aware of how

2 difficult it is in a rural community to attract new

3 businesses and industries. I loan money to individuals

4 and companies so that they can start a new business or

5 expand an existing business.

6 Energy costs are a big part of any

7 businesses' budget and if energy costs continue to go

8 up because of new rules and regulations, pretty soon,

9 they're going to price themselves right out of

10 business.

11 We need to make it easy for a businessperson

12 to succeed and expand and hire more employees. Believe

13 me that when I say that the Georgia Power Company is

14 the kind of business partner you want to attract

15 because they are good corporate citizens. They

16 compliment every other business in our community and in

17 2010, they were selected citizen of the year by our

18 local Chamber of Commerce. They could just have easily

19 received this award for the last half century in Putnam

20 County.

21 I was fortunate to serve on the Eatonton City

22 Council for ten years. I was in charge of water and

23 waste water systems of the city and parts of the

24 county. We treated our waste water sufficiently so

25 that we could allow the results to flow right back into
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1 the rivers, streams, and lakes in Putnam County.

2 Now if Eatonton in Putnam County can purify

3 its waste water after it has traveled through places

4 that we don't even, won't -- don't even want to think

5 about, I guarantee you that Georgia Power has the

6 affordable technology and equipment to treat the air

7 and water that go through their coal burning plants.

8 I believe that we must be pro-business when

9 that business helps the majority of Americans.

10 I believe that any rule or regulation which

11 hurts business, hurts Americans. It is imperative that

12 you have the facts before you make decisions. If

13 necessary, please visit our Georgia Power plants and

14 see that they are doing what is necessary to keep our

15 environment safe and clean.

16 Please do not pass rules or regulations

17 without knowing the consequences of those rules and

18 regulations especially when it comes to hurting the

19 creation of new good jobs. And please, please, do not

20 allow yourselves to get caught up in a political agenda

21 which disregards the facts and ignores the truth.

22 Please allow these plants to function at

23 their greatest potential and employ the largest number

24 of people possible for the good of our citizens.

25 Come to Putnam County and ask our local
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1 people just how they feel about Georgia Power Company

2 and their employees.

3 We are all keenly aware of the energy costs

4 and energy needs for America. We import so much of our

5 oil from foreign nations that cost us billions of

6 dollars each year. Electricity is still a source of

7 energy that we Americans can control and can afford.

8 MR. CLARK: Mr. Hudson, are you getting close

9 to concluding?

10 MR. HUDSON: Excuse me?

11 MR. CLARK: I'm sorry. Are you getting

12 pretty close to concluding? We are well past the five

13 minutes.

14 MR. HUDSON: Yes sir.

15 MR. CLARK: Okay. Great. Thank you.

16 MR. HUDSON: I'm not a rich person, but I

17 manage to pay all my bills each month. I believe that

18 increased energy and power costs will hurt the poor and

19 less fortunate citizens in America more than anyone

20 else.

21 Ladies and gentlemen, if, if our country is

22 to remain the most envied country in the world because

23 we have the most desirable standard of living, we must

24 be a nation of producers and not just consumers. We

25 must be manufacturers. We must take advantage of the
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1 energy resources we have right here at home, the energy

2 that's affordable to everyone. We must provide jobs.

3 Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle said

4 recently, "A country that makes nothing won't be great

5 for long." U.S. Representative Tom Graves from Georgia

6 believes that over regulation is costing our economy

7 one point three quarters of a trillion dollars, one

8 point seven five trillion dollars a year, over

9 regulation.

10 We're extremely blessed to have Georgia Power

11 in our community and, and they're a great corporate

12 citizen and a great business partner.

13 Thank you.

14 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you. Thank you very

15 much. Mr. Hobson.

16 MR. HOBSON: Thank you for holding this

17 hearing today. My name is Chris Hobson, H-O-B-S-O-N.

18 I'm the Chief Environmental Officer for Southern

19 Company. I am also the Senior Vice President of

20 Research. And in our research portfolio, Southern

21 Company operates the Mercury Research Center. It's the

22 only center in the United States aimed at trying to

23 find technological answers to the control of mercury

24 emissions from power plants. We've operated that

25 facility for about five months -- I mean five years,
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1 I'm sorry.

2 We're also the leading energy supplier in the

3 southeastern United States and one of the largest

4 generators of electricity in the nation.

5 We work hard every day with all of our

6 stakeholders to make sure that we provide reliable and

7 affordable power and at the same time, do the most we

8 can to protect the environment.

9 That's why Southern Company has, in recent

10 years, invested over eight billion dollars in

11 environmental controls and intends to spend, to expend

12 four -- four million dollars over the next three years

13 to comply with existing and revised clean air rules.

14 The proposed utility MACT is one of the most

15 burdensome, far-reaching, and expensive rules that EPA

16 has ever put forward.

17 If adopted, the rule could put the

18 reliability and affordability of electricity supplying

19 our nation at risk. It would impact plants responsible

20 for nearly fifty percent of the electricity generated

21 in this country at a cost that EPA estimates at over

22 ten billion dollars a year.

23 Furthermore, the proposed standards for new

24 power plants would take coal off the table as an energy

25 supply in this country.
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1 Such a profound decision should be a part of

2 a national energy policy, not made by a regulatory

3 agency.

4 While we're concerned about many aspects of

5 this proposed rule, what I'd like to focus on today is

6 timing. At the outset, I would note that there are

7 still substantial questions about EPA's legal authority

8 to promulgate such broad standards.

9 Congress treated the electric utilities

10 uniquely by requiring EPA to follow a utility specific

11 provision in the Clean Air Act, and access the

12 potential public health concerns associated with

13 emissions and only regulate as appropriate and

14 necessary to address those concerns.

15 EPA's December 2000 regulatory determination

16 only identified public health concerns associated with

17 mercury emissions from coal-fired EGU's and nickel

18 emissions from oil-fired units.

19 Despite its previous determination, EPA is

20 now expanding the proposed rule to all hazardous air

21 pollutants. Justifying this erroneous rule based on PM

22 benefits, which are properly addressed under the other

23 provisions of the Clean Air Act is inappropriate.

24 Southern plans to offer more detailed written

25 comments on the scope of EPA's authority during the
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1 comment period.

2 My first point is that the rulemaking time

3 line is unreasonable. Under the consent decree

4 schedule that EPA agreed to, the utility MACT rule must

5 be finalized by November of this year. But that consent

6 decree schedule is severely inhibiting the rulemaking

7 process.

8 To support the rulemaking, EPA issued an

9 information request that required the utility industry

10 to submit extensive information on emissions and

11 required more than one hundred million dollars in stack

12 testing on units around the country.

13 In response to this request, EPA received an

14 overwhelming amount of data at the end of last year.

15 However, the rushed promulgation schedule limited this

16 review to only a few months. Initial assessment of the

17 proposed rule has shown that EPA needed to take more

18 time to evaluate the data before issuing the proposed

19 standards.

20 As I pointed out in a letter to EPA earlier

21 this month, we have identified numerous errors in EPA's

22 technical analysis of the emission data, which are not

23 limited to widespread errors involving EPA's proposed

24 mercury standards.

25 The consent decree should not be an excuse to
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1 deny the public an ample opportunity to understand the

2 proposed rule and provide comments. Sixty days is

3 plainly inadequate for a rule that would cost well over

4 a billion dollars a year.

5 When Judge Collier granted EPA's motion to

6 enter the consent decree, she noted that if the science

7 and the analysis require more time, EPA can obtain it

8 and she added, "If EPA needs more time to get it right,

9 it should seek more time."

10 Given the serious stakes, why would EPA not

11 take such prudent step. We urge EPA to re-propose the

12 rule, provide a one hundred and twenty day comment

13 period and ask the Court for a reasonable amount of

14 time to finalize the rule.

15 EPA should take note of the unintended

16 consequences of the rushed rulemaking schedule for the

17 industrial boiler MACT and not repeat the same mistakes

18 here.

19 My second point is that the three year MACT

20 compliance time frame could put the reliability and

21 affordability of the nation's electric generating

22 system at risk.

23 A study conducted by the Edison Electric

24 Institute for the electric -- Edison Electric Institute

25 by ICF concluded that for the U.S. by 2015, the utility
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1 MACT and other regulations require over eighty thousand

2 megawatts of generation to install scrubbers and over

3 one hundred sixty thousand megawatts of generation to

4 install fabric filter bag houses.

5 Almost eighty thousand megawatts of current

6 coal capacity will retire and require replacement

7 generation.

8 As the Chief Environmental Office of Utility

9 that has installed more pollution controls than any

10 other, I tell you this simply cannot be done in three

11 years.

12 The proposed rule comes at a critical

13 juncture for coal-fired power plants as EPA is

14 currently developing or implementing multiple other

15 environmental regulations which have independent or

16 overlapping requirements.

17 We do not have the luxury of making decisions

18 on these rules in a vacuum. We must consider all the

19 requirements when making technology investments or

20 retirement decisions.

21 A major challenge for complying with these

22 rules is ensuring adequate reserve margins. That is,

23 generating capacity that is available during times of

24 high demand and during interruptions of service.

25 According to Bernstein Research, the impact
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1 of the Utility MACT rule on smaller plants will cause

2 regional capacity margins to plummet by seven to

3 fifteen percent into the single digits in some regions.

4 Other studies have reached similar conclusions. The

5 result will be a greater risk of power outages.

6 Construction of the massive number of

7 controls that I mentioned, plus the cost of replacing

8 the coal plants that will retire will require utilities

9 to spend as much as three hundred billion dollars by

10 2015. Doing this in a compressed three year time frame

11 will result in even higher cost, which will certainly

12 show up in customer's power bills and will threaten

13 jobs and any economic recovery.

14 In conclusion, we believe the, that the

15 utility MACT proposal on its current schedule and in

16 its current form puts the reliability and affordability

17 of power in the United States at risk.

18 IF EPA continues on its present path, the

19 result would be to harm power consumers, which is to

20 say all Americans and threaten jobs and economic

21 growth.

22 EPA should take the necessary time to seek

23 stakeholder input and develop workable standards for

24 all regulations. And let me say finally that having

25 represented Southern Company for thirty-eight years on
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1 environmental issues, I have never before seen a suite

2 of regulations facing one industry that I think could

3 have more profound impact, not only on our ability to

4 provide energy, but also the economy of this country.

5 I would urge EPA to work with utilities.

6 Figure out a way forward. There must certainly be an

7 answer to giving the environmental benefits that we all

8 want, but at the same time not risking our ability to

9 supply energy, the affordability of that energy or our

10 economy.

11 Thank you.

12 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Any

13 questions guys?

14 MR. MAXWELL: Yeah. The two, the two reports

15 you cite, are you going to put those in your comments?

16 MR. HOBSON: I'm sorry.

17 MR. CULLIGAN: The two reports you cite in

18 your -- you're going to have those in your written

19 comments?

20 MR. HOBSON: They will not be in the written

21 comments for this, but they will be in our written

22 comments, yes.

23 MR. CLARK: Right. That's fine.

24 MR. CULLIGAN: On those reports, were they

25 completed before or after the rules were proposed? Do
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1 they, they conclude the assumptions of what was

2 actually in the rules or assumptions about what might

3 go into the rules?

4 MR. HOBSON: I, I'm sorry --

5 MR. CULLIGAN: The Bernstein report and the

6 EEI --

7 MR. HOBSON: Oh yeah, the Bernstein report

8 MR. CULLIGAN: Were those done before or

9 after EPA proposed the rules?

10 MR. HOBSON: Those numbers were probably

11 before the proposed rule.

12 MR. CULLIGAN: Thank you.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much.

14 Let me just remind people that have come in

15 because I haven't done this for a while. We, we do

16 have a five minute limit and because we've got so many

17 speakers today that will be going on over the course of

18 the day. And I'm trying to be a little bit flexible,

19 but, but again the way the timing system works is you

20 got -- the green light is on for four minutes. You

21 have a yellow light that says you've got a minute to

22 sum up and then when the red flashing comes on, if you

23 could finish it up then, we'd appreciate that very

24 much.

25 Next two speakers please, Woody Bartlett and
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1 Robert Bullard.

2 FEMALE: Here's the next round.

3 MR. CLARK: Thank you. And again, if you

4 could -- when you state your name, if you could spell

5 it for the court reporter that would be helpful.

6 Thank you. And Mr. Bartlett, feel free to start.

7 REVEREND BARLETT: I'm the Reverend Woody

8 Bartlett, B-A-R-T-L-E-T-T. Co-founder of Georgia

9 Interfaith Power and Light and a continuing member of

10 its Board of Directors.

11 We, at Georgia Interfaith Power and Light,

12 are pleased to testify about the quality of our air as

13 permitted by federal regulations.

14 Testimony from Georgia IP&L and other

15 advocates of clean air at these hearings will

16 concentrate on the amount of allowable emissions of

17 mercury in the proposed regulations. We would all

18 support at least a ninety percent reduction in

19 allowable mercury emissions.

20 However, Georgia Interfaith Power and Light

21 is a faith, faith-based organization as well as one

22 concerned about the quality of our environmental -- of

23 our environment. So today, I'm going to speak for the

24 faith side of our partner congregations.

25 We represent a wide variety of faiths, many
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1 of whom recognize the sacred nature of water and

2 incorporate it into their central rituals and

3 traditions. For example, many Christian denominations

4 have baptism as one of their main rights. In the

5 Christian tradition, baptism goes way back to John the

6 Baptist and to Jesus. Both were baptized in the Jordan

7 River and John particularly made baptism the central

8 part of his message. Most of Christendom follow this

9 practice. Some baptizing its members as adults and

10 others as infants.

11 In my particular church, the Episcopal

12 Church, we practice infant baptism. Baptism is one of

13 our two principal sacraments.

14 In the last few decades, we have been faced

15 with the dilemma of baptizing our infants in water that

16 has been laced with mercury as a result of the

17 emissions of our coal burning power plants. Our

18 dilemma; how do we symbolize cleansing and a fresh

19 start with water that we know can contain deadly

20 amounts of mercury?

21 Of course, it is not just mercury in the

22 water that is the problem. It is the fish ingest this

23 mercury and become bearers of the poison to women and

24 the children they bear. Mothers, particularly nursing

25 mothers, eat that mercury-infested fish and the mercury
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1 is passed directly into their infant children's brains

2 where it can severely retard brain growth and impair a

3 person for the rest of their lives.

4 Have you seen the brochure put out by the

5 Georgia Department of Natural Resources warning us not

6 to eat fish from certain sections of our State's waters

7 because of mercury contamination? It is frightening.

8 Do you think that John the Baptist ever worried about

9 mercury contamination? Did Jesus ever warn his

10 fishermen disciples not to eat the fish they caught

11 from the Sea of Galilee?

12 Water is life giving to all of us. We cannot

13 do without it. Speaking as a citizen of the world, as

14 well as a person of faith, please do all you can to

15 limit the amount of mercury that comes out of our power

16 plants and goes into the brains of our children.

17 Thank you.

18 MR. CLARK: Thank you, Reverend. Mr. Bullard.

19 MR. BULLARD: Good morning. My name is

20 Robert Bullard, B-U-L-L-A-R-D. I direct Environmental

21 Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University

22 here in Atlanta. I'm also a member of the National

23 Black Environmental Justice Network and the

24 Environmental Justice Climate Change Initiative. Both

25 groups are organizations that are found in -- with
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1 member groups found in thirty-seven states in the U.S.

2 For the last thirty years, I've worked on

3 environment health and justice issues. I've written

4 sixteen books on the issue.

5 I'm here to support and to thank EPA for

6 holding this, this hearing. This hearing is long

7 overdue. Time for the standards long overdue. Two

8 decades is definitely reasonable.

9 Cleaning up pollution from power -- coal

10 fired power plants is good for Georgia, good for this

11 region; the south, and it's good for this country. It

12 makes good economic sense, environmental sense, and

13 health sense.

14 If you look at the issue of the health

15 impacts of coal-fired power plants and the emissions.

16 We've talked about mercury and the other pollutants.

17 These impacts do not fall evenly on all populations.

18 Because of the siting issue of where power plants are

19 located, coal-fired power plants are disproportionately

20 located in or near environmental justice communities;

21 low income and minority communities.

22 If you look at the fact that all of us use

23 electricity, but all of us do not have to bear the

24 burden of where these facilities are located.

25 Over half of the coal-fired power plants in
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1 this country, the dirtiest ones, are located in or near

2 environmental justice communities. As a matter-of3 fact, sixty-eight percent of all African Americans in

4 this country live within thirty miles of a power plant

5 compared to fifty-six percent of whites.

6 If you look at the region that has the

7 largest disproportionate share of dirty power plants,

8 over half of the one hundred dirtiest plants are

9 located in the south, region four. There's something

10 about this region that somehow makes us dirty. Our

11 dirty little secret.

12 If we look at this whole question of

13 remedies, I think what EPA has proposed is reasonable

14 and it goes a long way in addressing the issue of

15 disproportion impact of pollution on vulnerable

16 populations and we've had the executive order one

17 eight -- one, two, eight, nine, eight that was

18 passed -- that was signed by President Clinton in 1994

19 and I think this particular rule standard, improvement

20 will go a long ways in reducing the disproportionate

21 impact of environmental pollution on low income and

22 minority populations.

23 And as I said before, generally low income

24 and minority populations live with more pollution and

25 so when we have stronger standards and we clean up
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1 dirty power plants, the added benefits will accrue

2 greatest to those populations that are

3 disproportionately impacted.

4 If we look at this whole question of the

5 burden and the benefits, it is time for us to basically

6 start to approve more benefits and so at the, the

7 outset of, of these standards -- the onset of these

8 standards, cutting emissions, getting the, the, the

9 pollution down, these are things that I think will fall

10 under this whole issue of fairness, equity, justice,

11 and health and therefore I strongly support, along with

12 the organizations that I represent, Environmental

13 Justice Climate Change Initiative and the National

14 Black Environmental Justice Network, support EPA's

15 proposed standard for mercury and other pollutants from

16 coal-fired power plants.

17 Thank you.

18 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Any

19 questions, folks? Okay. Thank you.

20 Our next speakers please, Yolanda Whyte and

21 Mike Kennedy. Ms. Whyte, feel free to start whenever

22 you like.

23 DR. WHYTE: Yes, hello. My name is Dr. Yolanda

24 White, W-H-Y-T-E. I want to thank you Environmental

25 Protection Agency for this opportunity to speak with
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1 you today. I support your hard work and I'm also an

2 Atlanta-based pediatrician, environmental advocate and

3 I speak on behalf of myself and all those who suffer

4 from or care for someone with a disability.

5 I support the strictest regulation standards

6 for mercury emissions with the most expedient

7 enforcement that is free of loopholes. This proactive

8 approach focused on prevention supports the most

9 effective and fiscally conservative way to reform

10 healthcare and reduce health disparities.

11 In medieval times, mercury was used by

12 Paracelsus and other European healers to treat lice,

13 worms, syphilis, and other ailments. It is no

14 longer -- it no longer has a therapeutic role or health

15 benefit. Mercury, instead, has known toxicities.

16 For every action, there's an equal and

17 opposite reaction. The action of emitting mercury into

18 the air eventually leads to adverse health effects.

19 For this reason, methyl mercury is my focus today

20 because we're more likely to be exposed to this more

21 toxic form.

22 The National Academy of Sciences acknowledges

23 mercury as being toxic to the nervous system, the

24 immune system, reproductive system, the kidney, and

25 cardiovascular systems. It's also a teratogen, causing
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1 birth defects and it's also an endocrine disrupter

2 causing hormonal problems.

3 In addition you, the EPA, as well as the

4 International Agency on Research of Cancer, classified

5 mercury as a Class C possible carcinogen.

6 Mercury also increases oxidant stress by

7 binding to sulfur groups including that of our bodies

8 natural antioxidant glutathione system depleting it of

9 its antioxidant protection. And this latest fact is

10 supported by the article in pharmacological reviews,

11 molecular interactions with mercury in the kidney.

12 Adverse health effects caused by mercury are

13 more common, more severe, and more permanent in

14 children who are disproportionately affected from the

15 time of conception. Mercury crosses the placenta and

16 is found in umbilical cord blood. As a teratogen

17 mentioned earlier, it causes birth defects including

18 cerebral palsy and miscarriages.

19 Toxins of any kind exert their most

20 devastating damage during the first trimester where

21 organs are just developing and many pregnant women may

22 not be aware of their pregnancy.

23 Through the emergent field of gene24 environment interactions, we're learning that even

25 trace exposures, undetectable by laboratory testing,
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1 can affect the integrity of your genes and cause

2 mutations and other genetic alterations.

3 Mercury crosses the blood brain barrier,

4 which is a protective sheath that surrounds the brain

5 and spinal cord, resulting in neurotoxicity and

6 associated neurological, physical, behavioral, speech,

7 and visual signs and symptoms that follow.

8 As mercury is metabolized by the kidneys, it

9 bio-accumulates there and concentrates causing local

10 damage and potential to cause kidney failure.

11 As mentioned earlier, other organs are also

12 effected.

13 Another reason that explains the disparities

14 seen in children is because they receive a higher dose

15 of mercury compared to an adult with the same exposure

16 when adjustments are made on a per body weight basis.

17 I have no children yet, but I do have a dream

18 that one day I will have a healthy child, one that will

19 one day say, "Momma, I love you. Thank you. God bless

20 you." A child that will have all their functions and

21 faculties and be able to feed themselves and use the

22 toilet properly. A daughter or son that will run,

23 play, grow, learn, and one day become president, but

24 that dream may never be realized for some parents who

25 have children affected by toxic emissions of mercury
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1 and other hazardous air pollutants that result in

2 disease and disability including impairments in

3 hearing, vision, intelligence, memory, attention span,

4 visual spatial orientation, as well as physical,

5 neurological and mental development.

6 Setting limits on emissions of mercury and

7 other hazardous air pollutants keep children in school

8 where they're expected to be attentive, focused, and

9 well behaved so they can learn the tools to become

10 productive citizens and it also reduces the need for

11 and expense of special needs services like early

12 intervention programs, which are currently facing

13 severe budget cuts.

14 States like Georgia and recreational anglers

15 are also at higher risk. According to the U.S.

16 Geological Survey, one in four fish contain mercury

17 levels that exceeded recommended EPA criteria. Some of

18 the highest mercury in fish were found in tea-colored

19 or black-water streams in North and South Carolina,

20 Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana.

21 Recreational anglers also have higher hair

22 mercury levels as indicated in the February 2011 issue

23 of Environmental Health Perspectives article entitled

24 Fish Consumption and Mercury Exposure among Louisiana

25 Recreational Anglers.
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1 There are also environmental justice concerns

2 where African Americans are disproportionately affected

3 by mercury emissions due to the greater prevalence of

4 kidney disease and more likely to reside in closer

5 proximity to industries that emit mercury and other air

6 pollutants.

7 Laboratory testing of mercury is not routine.

8 Screening questionnaires are not employed. Exposure

9 levels are not estimated. Nor are mercury levels

10 disclosed on food label packaging and, therefore,

11 citizens are not informed. They are unknowingly

12 consuming this toxin and are not aware of the need to

13 protect themselves. The only way to avoid mercury in

14 air, water, fish, is through prevention by regulating

15 emissions.

16 Setting limits on emissions of mercury and

17 other hazardous air pollutants saves lives and reduces

18 disease and disability.

19 This will require the installation of

20 upgraded pollution controls which will not only prevent

21 mercury pollution, but also the other dangerous

22 pollutants. Together, these pollution reductions may

23 save between forty-two billion dollars and one hundred

24 and thirty billion dollars in 2016 by preventing twelve

25 thousand, two hundred hospital and emergency room
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1 visits, eleven thousand non-fatal heart attacks,

2 forty-five hundred cases of chronic bronchitis, and up

3 to seventeen thousand premature deaths and provide

4 other health benefits.

5 MR. CLARK: Ms. Whyte, are you getting pretty

6 close to concluding?

7 DR. WHYTE: I'm almost done.

8 MR. CLARK: We're pretty much over time.

9 DR. WHITE: It reduces the expense of

10 pharmacal -- pharmaceutical rehabilitative and

11 accommodative therapies as well as side affects

12 associated with some of the pharmaceuticals.

13 And I would also -- in conclusion, I just

14 want to leave you with the image of a cute little baby

15 because if you can imagine a baby right here, right

16 now, you'll see something so precious, tender, and

17 fragile that you just want to cherish it, protect it,

18 and implement all safeguards to preserve the quality of

19 its survival.

20 Thank you.

21 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. Kennedy.

22 MR. KENNEDY: Good morning. Thanks for

23 having this hearing. I know it's a very long day for

24 you folks.

25 My name is Mike Kennedy, M-I-K-E,
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1 K-E-N-N-E-D-Y. I'm an Environmental Specialist and Air

2 Pollution Meteorologist -- excuse me -- working for

3 Progress Energy which is a regional energy company

4 located in the southeast. We have more than twenty-two

5 thousand megawatts of electric generation capacity and

6 we operate regulated utilities in North Carolina, South

7 Carolina, and Florida. It serves more than, more than

8 three point one million retail customers.

9 Just to make it clear, I just want to

10 emphasize that we've been very active over the past ten

11 years in reducing our emissions. Company has spent

12 three billion dollars during the past ten years on

13 emissions reductions and will spend an additional

14 hundreds of millions to perhaps billions on additional

15 controls and re-powering of our coal-fired units.

16 We have over the past ten years reduced our

17 overall mercury emissions by sixty percent, SO2 or

18 sulfur dioxide by approximately seventy percent and

19 since the same technology that reduces SO2 also reduces

20 acid gasses, there's a proportionate amount of

21 reductions in acid gas emissions and our

22 NOx emissions have also been reduced by

23 about seventy percent with additional reductions to

24 come.

25 I wanted to echo some earlier comments
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1 regarding the period provided for comment and it's not

2 just because the MACT and associated documents that

3 were -- have been posted are a lot to review, but

4 there's the -- it's really two rulemakings combined

5 into one because there are the proposed new source

6 performance standard changes, which is another large

7 component of regulation that affects the electric

8 utilities. It also must be reviewed and commented on

9 in the same comment period.

10 EPA posted an additional several thousand

11 pages of data and other documentation to the web page

12 earlier this month, so again, that's just a lot to go

13 through, although there was some delay in posting --

14 in, I'm sorry, in getting the proposal into the Federal

15 Register, the additional materials posted at the

16 beginning of the month, is just a lot to go through in

17 sixty days.

18 You know, we discussed the -- on both sides

19 of the table, discussed the error that occurred in

20 EPA's calculation of the MACT floor for mercury. To

21 me, this illustrates that an ambitious schedule for

22 completion of rule making can, and often does, result

23 in being counter-productive as it was for the

24 industrial boiler MACT which is being reconsidered and

25 has been stayed until the reconsideration is complete.
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1 We think the EPA should take whatever time is

2 necessary to get this rule making right or correct the

3 first time.

4 So that we echo the request of other

5 stakeholders, such as the National Association of

6 Regulatory Utility Commissioners, individual State

7 Utility Commissions, State Air Regulatory Agencies, and

8 members of Congress to provide an additional sixty days

9 for review of, of, of the materials that have been

10 provided for -- in association with the rule making

11 package.

12 Get into a little bit of some of the

13 technical aspects of the rule now. And I want to

14 discuss some perspective on the electric sector's

15 mercury emissions as a component of overall emissions.

16 Emissions of mercury from coal-fired power

17 plants have decreased by nearly fifty percent over the

18 past ten years largely due to the types of controls I,

19 I discussed for our company earlier, to the current

20 level of approximately twenty-nine or thirty tons.

21 Now, this is not to overlook utility mercury

22 emissions, but to put some perspective on the overall

23 global circulation, atmospheric circulation of mercury.

24 These, these emissions of twenty-nine or thirty tons

25 represent about one half of one percent of total
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1 natural mercury emissions that are -- that contribute

2 again to the global circulation that results in

3 atmospheric deposition of mercury and about one percent

4 of worldwide human cause emissions. And again, it's a

5 global circulation, not just here in this country.

6 So this is airborne mercury that is deposited

7 to the, to the environment and the, the, the difference

8 in the, in the amount of, of overall emissions will be

9 actually rather small if we reduce these twenty-nine or

10 thirty tons down to say ten tons or, or five tons,

11 whatever that ninety-one percent represents.

12 So that it's -- the -- in fact, the natural

13 amount of mercury emissions is approximately two thirds

14 of the total.

15 In addition, our sector's emissions will

16 continue to fall even without implementation of the EGU

17 MACT, just so that folks keep in mind that

18 we have other regulatory actions out there; the Clean

19 Air Interstate Rule, the Proposed Transport Rule, and

20 changes to the ambient air quality standards.

21 And I'll be quick here. A couple of items on

22 some of the technical aspects of the rule. We support

23 the proposed use of sulfur dioxide as a surrogate for

24 acid gas emissions. We already monitor SO2 emissions

25 continuously under the acid rain program and the same
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1 control technology that reduces SO2 reduces acid

2 gasses.

3 The proposed mercury limit of one pound per

4 trillion, it will be difficult to meet on a continuous

5 ongoing basis. We reviewed mercury CEM data from two

6 of our well-controlled coal-fired units, which

7 incidentally were in the top twelve percent and the

8 thirty day rolling averages from those monitors often

9 range above the proposed standard. This is because the

10 standard is based on a brief snapshot stack test and

11 that doesn't take into account on a continuous basis,

12 the operational variations that occur when you're

13 monitoring CEM's.

14 And then finally, the particulate matter

15 standard is also of concern because it employs a method

16 of using an additional stack test on an individual unit

17 to set the filterable PM limit and again we have PM

18 CEMS data on several of our units that show

19 that establishing a unit-specific MACT standard in

20 that, in that way will make it difficult to meet on a

21 continuous basis using a snapshot, so instead we think

22 that EPA should establish a single category wide

23 filterable PM standard.

24 Okay. I'm finished.

25 MR. CLARK: All right. Thank you. Thank you
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1 both. Again, I appreciate time wise, the point I'm

2 trying to make is just -- we have a lot of people. And

3 it's not for us, it's for them so that they have an

4 opportunity to speak. But thank you. Any questions

5 for these folks? Do you have anything? No? Okay.

6 Thank you both so much.

7 Brian Burrows and Allison Amyx please. Okay.

8 Mr. Burrows.

9 MR. BURROWS: Hello. My name is Byron

10 Burrows, last name is B-U-R-R-O-W-S. I'm Manager of

11 Air Programs at Tampa Electric Company in Tampa,

12 Florida. The company's a regulated utility with

13 approximately forty-four hundred megawatts of

14 generating capacity. We have a two thousand square

15 mile service territory in west central Florida and more

16 than six hundred and seventy-two thousand residential,

17 commercial, and industrial customers that depend on, on

18 us for reliable power.

19 Tampa Electric Company is a leader installing

20 reasonable emission controls, having completed in, in

21 2010 the final phase of a ten year, one point two

22 billion dollar emission reduction initiative.

23 The result is a ninety percent reduction in

24 SO2, NOx, and mercury pollution, as well as

25 substantial reductions in other emissions from 1998
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1 levels.

2 We believe the ten-year period that it took

3 to implement and achieve these reductions was critical

4 to minimizing the economic impact to our customers, as

5 well as allowing for proper control optimization and

6 during the deliberate, but measured implementation

7 schedule.

8 EPA has proposed aggressive new standards

9 that will likely require further optimization and/or

10 operational adjustments at Tampa Electric and we're

11 concerned about the unreasonable time frame allotted to

12 evaluate EPA's proposed rule and we, we want to provide

13 thoughtful and practical feedback.

14 Therefore, we request EPA extend the comment

15 period at least sixty days to allow for a productive

16 rule making process.

17 I'll give you some specific comments that we

18 want to emphasize here to augment our forthcoming

19 written comments.

20 With regard to fuel diversity and electric

21 reliability, although we applaud EPA's objective

22 providing compliance flexibility, the rules proposed

23 would limit our ability to purchase coal that properly

24 balances, impacts our customers' bills, as well as

25 operational optimization opportunities and
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1 environmental impacts.

2 We understand EPA's conducted modeling and

3 concluded that modest impacts to price and availability

4 are expected on average, however Tampa Electric is

5 concerned that our service territory could experience

6 substantial cost impacts, which are passed through to

7 our customers with questionable environmental benefits.

8 More specifically, compliance with the acid

9 gas limits may preclude the use of coal from certain

10 regions due to its chloride content. Therefore

11 additional sub-categorization may be appropriate, but

12 to provide meaningful comments and to help guide EPA

13 and determine the best approach to achieving the clean

14 air act goals, we need more time to evaluate the impact

15 this could have on, not only our industry, but the, but

16 the coal market.

17 Fuel diversity is critical for electricity

18 reliability in Florida, particularly during emergency

19 situations, particularly during extreme weather events,

20 like the recent period of historic cold snaps and, and

21 hurricanes when adequate supply of natural gas may not

22 be available for sustained periods of time.

23 Proposed rule may have an unintended,

24 unanticipated impact on electrical reliability.

25 The proposed emission standards will be
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1 difficult to meet on a continuous basis, despite the

2 company's one point two billion dollar project to

3 install and upgrade environmental controls. As stated

4 before, the standard is based on a snapshot from the

5 most stringent data and doesn't accurately represent

6 the continuous operation on a daily basis. In essence,

7 EPA's proposed standards are not commensurate with the

8 proposed compliance methods, so EPA should further

9 evaluate the errors in the limit calculations and

10 propose ones that can be reasonably applied on a

11 continuous basis.

12 Another example is the rule requires

13 particulate matter to be performance tested for

14 filterable and condensable and it must meet a point

15 zero three pound per million BTU standard and a well16 controlled power plant using a particulate emission

17 monitoring system could achieve that standard on a

18 filterable basis, but the proposed rule requires that

19 the filterable fraction be established as an operation

20 limit and, and which is unnecessarily restrictive.

21 So we suggest the EPA establish a category22 wide filterable PM emission limit as a surrogate

23 indicator and, and, in lieu of the condensable plus

24 filterable.

25 In addition, the work practice standards are
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1 overly broad and will significantly restrict operation

2 of the wet scrubbers and precipitators making it

3 difficult to achieve the proposed limits. We're

4 evaluating alternatives to propose to EPA that, that

5 would, we believe, may more reasonably allow us to

6 demonstrate compliance in a manner that, that's

7 required, but we need more time to provide productive

8 comments.

9 So Tampa Electric encourages EPA to focus on

10 properly balancing environmental, economic and energy

11 policy considerations. It's important for EPA to

12 refocus the basis of the rule in light of more current

13 scientific findings and we believe that if you do so,

14 you'll be able to exercise discretion allotted by the

15 CAA to achieve those goals while providing the

16 flexibility.

17 Thank you.

18 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Ms. Amyx, is that

19 close?

20 MS. AMYX: Amyx.

21 MR. CLARK: Amyx.

22 MS. AMYX: Yeah. Hi. My name is Allison

23 Amyx and I'm the Communications and Outreach Director

24 of Georgia Interfaith Power and Light.

25 MR. CLARK: And you'll spell Amyx for the
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1 court reporter.

2 MS. AMYX: A-M-Y-X.

3 MR. CLARK: Great. Thanks.

4 MS. AMYX: We are an organization that's

5 dedicated to helping communities of faith care for

6 God's creation. And we have almost five-hundred, member7 Congregations, across the state.

8 I'm here to support the proposed Mercury and

9 Air Toxics Standards for a very simple reason. I know

10 we can't really see it from in here, but we live in a

11 beautiful world. It's an intricate and sustainable

12 ecosystem created by God and we get to be the stewards

13 of this world. We're called to be the caretakers. For

14 better or worse, it's our responsibility to leave the

15 earth cleaner than we found it. We're the ones who

16 have to ensure that future generations can enjoy

17 creation as much as we do.

18 The problem with pollution is that it

19 disturbs the balance of this beautiful world. If

20 they're not regulated, toxins like mercury, they get

21 into our air and into our water and they really start

22 messing things up. The ramifications are clear and

23 we've heard about them all morning. These pollutants

24 are making us sick.

25 They're especially dangerous for vulnerable
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1 populations, for children, for senior citizens, for

2 unborn babies. These are the people who are most

3 effected by exposure to toxins like mercury.

4 We've also heard a lot this morning about how

5 low income communities are also disproportionately

6 effected.

7 That's why for me, and for the members of

8 many of our congregations, this is also a justice

9 issue.

10 Everyone deserves clean air. Everyone

11 deserves a chance to live a healthy life. If

12 finalized, these standards will save lives. They will

13 prevent disease and avoid hospitalizations and they

14 will protect public health.

15 Our congregations -- we have people of all

16 faiths -- are doing all they can to reduce their energy

17 consumption. They're getting energy audits and they're

18 reducing their energy use by up to twenty percent by

19 implementing a number of energy conservation measures.

20 They're -- we -- but we cannot do it alone.

21 We need power plants and industry to cut

22 their emissions if we want to make a significant

23 impact.

24 So that's why I'm here, as a person of faith,

25 in full support of the proposed Mercury and Air Toxics
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1 Standards for power plants which would reduce the

2 amount of mercury and other pollutants in our life

3 sustaining and beautiful ecosystem.

4 Thank you for your consideration.

5 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Did

6 you guys have any questions? No? Okay. Thank you.

7 Next please, Bob Donaghue and Clark Efaw.

8 Okay.

9 MR. DONAGHUE: Good morning.

10 MR. CLARK: Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Donaghue.

11 MR. DONAGHUE: I'm Bob Donaghue,

12 D-O-N-A-G-H-U-E. I am the retired Director of the

13 Sustainability Division for the Department of Natural

14 Resources and currently the Program Director for

15 Georgia Interfaith Power and Light's Power Wise Energy

16 Conservation Program working with churches across the

17 state and other congregations to reduce energy use.

18 The renowned conservationist and writer, Aldo

19 Leopold once wrote, "A thing is right when it tends to

20 preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the

21 biotic community and is wrong when it tends otherwise."

22 The proposed Mercury and Air Toxics Standards

23 would reduce emissions of heavy metals including

24 mercury, arsenic, chromium and others, acid gasses and

25 these are toxics that are known or suspected
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1 carcinogens and are also responsible for a wide range

2 of health ailments.

3 Power plants are responsible for fifty

4 percent of mercury emissions, over fifty percent of

5 acid gas emissions and twenty-five percent of toxic

6 medical, metal emissions throughout the United States.

7 Power plants are the largest source of

8 mercury emissions to the air and its presence is found

9 virtually everywhere as a result of emissions over many

10 years. It is found in waterways throughout the United

11 States and round the world and as an environmental

12 investigator in south Florida in the 1980's, early

13 1980's, we discovered elevated mercury levels in the

14 biggest cypress swamp -- throughout the Big Cypress

15 Swamp in south Florida.

16 Many fish species then and now have elevated

17 mercury levels from bioaccumulation in local rivers,

18 lakes, and streams and as a result have restrictions on

19 a number -- on the number that can be eaten.

20 Additionally, we are all aware of the

21 restrictions on eating canned tuna, particularly for

22 pregnant women due to the potential damage to the

23 fetus' developing nervous system.

24 The proposed rule would reduce these toxic

25 chemicals and many, many pediatricians and doctors have
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1 spoken today about the health benefits of these rules

2 and I won't go into those.

3 Basically therefore, reducing the level of

4 toxic chemicals emitted into the air we breathe and the

5 ecosystems in which all life and we exist is right.

6 Not reducing our exposure to these chemicals is wrong,

7 particularly when the cost -- when cost effective

8 measures such as energy efficiency and technologies are

9 readily available.

10 Thank you for allowing me to offer my

11 thoughts on the proposed standards for power plants,

12 which I support.

13 Thank you.

14 MR. CLARK: Thank you much, Mr. Donaghue.

15 Mr. Efaw.

16 MR. EFAW: Yes, that's correct. My name is

17 Clark Efaw, E-F-A-W. I am here as a private citizen

18 and also as an associate from my church of Georgia

19 Interfaith Power and Light, a faith based organization

20 that promotes the responsible care of all of God's

21 creation.

22 I have come to request that the EPA follow

23 through on strictly enforcing the proposed rule to

24 reduce toxic pollutants from fossil fuel burning power

25 plants.
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1 As a consumer of electric power in Georgia, I

2 understand that strict enforcement of these enhanced

3 rules will likely raise my rates and the price of

4 things I buy that are energy intensive in their

5 production.

6 As a citizen, I also understand that

7 pollution is already a part of the cost of energy

8 production. It is just not accounted for in the price

9 we pay directly for electricity. It is being

10 subsidized by the general public and in particular by

11 the victims who suffer from environmental poisoning.

12 Those least able to afford it and least in a position

13 to control it.

14 It means I have to restrict the amount of

15 fish I eat. It means that some children will be slower

16 learners. It means an added incalculable burden to the

17 healthcare system at both private and public expense.

18 It means we have a less productive economy.

19 It's much cheaper to contain the damage at

20 the source. Reduction of pollutants at the source puts

21 the cost where it belongs. It provides an incentive

22 for cleaning up the mess to those in the best position

23 to do something about it.

24 It also reflects American's social values of

25 taking responsibility for one's own actions and not
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1 putting your cost of business on the backs of the rest

2 of society. It allows us to more accurately account

3 for the real cost of our environmental responsibility

4 and it shows the love and respect we each have for our

5 neighbor by erring on the side of the safety of others

6 and protecting the interest of those who share our

7 environment.

8 And finally, if regulation makes it more

9 expensive to produce dirty power, it gives cleaner

10 alternatives a competitive advantage.

11 In a state like Georgia, which is naturally

12 rich in sunshine, agriculture and technology, but

13 poorer in coal and petroleum, it makes no sense to foul

14 our own water and air in order to keep fossil-fuel

15 based energy production cheap. We need to give as much

16 advantage as possible to clean energy produced by our

17 own natural resources. We need those sustainable jobs

18 here for the future.

19 Thank you.

20 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Any

21 questions folks? Thank you.

22 Next Dr. James Rust and Thomas Pearce please.

23 And just a reminder folks, we're -- as the Chair, I'm

24 just trying to remind folks, we have a timing system

25 that you'll have a green light for four minutes and a
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1 yellow light that will just ask you to sum up and a red

2 light. Thank you. Dr. Rust.

3 DR. RUST: My name is James Rust, R-U-S-T.

4 I'm a retired Engineering Professor from a local

5 school.

6 I was born in 1936 and lived in times that

7 most of you have never experienced. The pollution was

8 unbelievable by way of soot, mercury, and lead. Our

9 homes were heated with coal. All our "choo choo" trains

10 were coal-fired. The power plants did not have

11 electrostatic precipitators. When you have stove

12 [indecipherable], the next day the stove was black. It

13 was ugly. My parents didn't have a dryer, so my mother

14 hung laundry out to dry the clothes. If the wind

15 changed direction from a power plant, all our sheets,

16 everything white, turned gray and we had to do the

17 laundry over again. We finally just dried everything

18 in the basement, out of disgust.

19 We played with mercury as little kids. They

20 made pennies, turned them into silver because mercury

21 was available through thermometers and little gadgets

22 in the home. Lead was around for lead poisoning. We

23 used it in gasoline. It was in paint, all the paint in

24 our house. And we used gasoline as a household

25 cleaner.
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1 So I graduated in 1954 from high school. I

2 was quite good in mathematics, reading, and writing and

3 all my other two hundred and seventy classmates also

4 were quite good as a graduate and could go out and

5 successfully take jobs without going to college. I did

6 go to college.

7 The times have changed. The soot problem has

8 pretty well been eliminated because when you don't use

9 coal in our houses, the trains are diesel electric and

10 all power plants have electrostatic precipitators on

11 them, so you don't see this dirty snow due to burning

12 coal.

13 Lead has been eliminated from paint, about

14 1970 or so and the same thing from gasoline. I was

15 told pollution we have from lead is pretty well

16 disappeared. Mercury would be the only thing, I guess,

17 we might say is still left as a pollutant.

18 But mercury is in gasoline too as a

19 pollutant, with people I don't think are paying much

20 attention to in these proceedings here. All petroleum

21 has the same level of mercury in it as coal does, so

22 when you want to eliminate the mercury from burning

23 coal by using abatement techniques, the next thing

24 would be putting scrubbers on the exhaust pipes from

25 your cars.
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1 Now I look at today's children and those that

2 are going to college, their abilities to read and write

3 and simple mathematics is somewhat impaired compared to

4 my generation and I'm trying to think -- they

5 eliminated pollutants for this group, why had it

6 possibly could eliminate pollutants cause enhanced --

7 less enhanced brain activity? And this, I realize this

8 is convoluted thinking or so, but this is the type of

9 thinking the EPA is proposing to you.

10 The mercury being discharged from our power

11 plants is negligible. It's maybe twenty-five tons per

12 year in the United States, but the worldwide output of

13 mercury is about nine thousand tons. If we eliminate

14 all the mercury from the discharging power plants, you

15 will never detect it.

16 Mercury is a natural pollutant in the world.

17 These volcanoes that blow, have huge amounts. It's in

18 the ground. It comes through the trees and through the

19 leaves. When you burn trees, you're putting mercury

20 out.

21 So we have to have common sense. All -- it's

22 a huge expense to eliminate the mercury. No gain, the

23 poor are going to pay when their electric bills go up.

24 Thanks.

25 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Mr. Pearce.
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1 MR. PEARCE: Well, I had a prepared speech,

2 but my name's Tom Pearce. I'm with the Sierra Club.

3 I'm an Organizer in the State of Kentucky and I work

4 with communities in western Kentucky, in Louisville to

5 try to combat a lot of the things I've heard in the

6 last five minutes.

7 I guess I would like to start off by saying

8 thank you for allowing us to come and speak before you,

9 as you allowed us to come and speak before you in

10 Louisville last year, the EPA hearing on coal ash.

11 I'd like to start off by saying that it was a

12 little disheartening this morning to find out that at

13 the federal building here in Atlanta, when residents

14 and citizens decide to hold a sign in a public plaza,

15 for some reason that's a threat to Homeland Security

16 and officers came out and forced people not hold signs

17 in a public plaza. I'd really like to see the statute

18 that says that you don't have the right to assemble in

19 the State of Georgia.

20 I know that Georgia's had some issues with

21 the right to assemble, going back all the way to the

22 Civil War. I'm also a former resident of Georgia, for

23 ten years. But I just wanted to mention also that

24 having a hearing in a place where parking can run as

25 much as twenty dollars for the day can limit the amount
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1 of accessibility to working class residents that might

2 have wanted to come down and talk to you all. I'm

3 lucky that I have been able to come and talk to you.

4 I'd like to start off by pointing you to your

5 own facts. 2016 these proposed rules would avoid sixty6 eight hundred to seventeen thousand presumed deaths,

7 forty-five hundred cases of chronic bronchitis, twelve

8 thousand, two hundred hospital and emergency room

9 visits. I'm pretty sure you're acquainted with your

10 own facts.

11 You know, if, if -- when the tobacco

12 industry, we decided that tobacco caused cancer, we

13 just went ahead and did what it would take to reign in

14 the tobacco industry and now tobacco's left Kentucky.

15 Those are also a lot of jobs. But we decided that we

16 would choose health -- you know, we try to implement

17 policies that would protect the public good and I don't

18 mean to be overly dramatic, but if a murderer goes out

19 and kills a bunch of people, we throw them in jail.

20 When I sit and listen to -- and I'm really glad that

21 Tampa Electric Company proceeded me, when I sit and

22 listen to people from Tampa Electric Company get up

23 and, and talk and, and Georgia Power talk about being

24 good public citizens, I'd like to invite them to come

25 to eastern Kentucky and, and see what they're doing to
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1 our state.

2 Kentucky is sixth in the nation in mercury

3 production and Indiana, our neighbor, is fifth and we,

4 for some reason, we bear the brunt of everybody else's

5 problems with energy. People in Florida enjoy a life

6 in virtual paradise and in order for them to do that,

7 they have to come to our state and pollute our

8 communities and destroy them. It doesn't just, it just

9 doesn't seem quite right.

10 I'm here with some folks from Cane Run

11 community that I work with. The little gas and

12 electric plant there has a coal ash containment and a

13 power plant that's fifty yards from residents' front

14 doors. We've recently obtained tests from that

15 community that show that there's fly ash on their homes

16 and soot. I hear people say that the soot issue is

17 solved. I, I invite them to come to some of the

18 communities we work with in Kentucky and, and do

19 samples off their houses and it would show positive,

20 obvious positive results for soot, but also mercury in

21 that, and heavy metals in that soot. And I would

22 challenge, I would challenge everyone to consider the

23 fact that most of the health impact assessments that

24 have been done in communities around the country where,

25 where coal-fired power plants exist have shown that
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1 people die. There's one just done in Louisville, show

2 that people that live around coal plants die ten -- an

3 average of ten years before everybody else in the

4 community. Why is that? There's a reason that's

5 happening.

6 So, you know, I would just -- I support the

7 ruling as written. I want to thank you for writing the

8 rule, but I would, I would urge you to please consider

9 turning a blind ear to people who say that they need

10 more time to kill us. They need more time to come to

11 our communities and, and, and, and, and kill our

12 children and create cancer-causing agents in our

13 communities, autism, learning disabilities. If I said

14 to you, could I have, could I have another six months

15 to continue going on a rampage and creating an unsafe

16 condition in your community? I don't think that would

17 be allowed. So I'm asking you to come to Kentucky and,

18 and reign in a, a lawless state when it comes to the

19 environment. Reign in a lawless state that will not

20 regulate any of these things. We need you.

21 And I said this at the coal ash hearing last

22 year. They won't regulate coal ash in Kentucky. Coal

23 ash also contains mercury and so the last thing I want

24 to say is finishing up is that we also want to implore

25 you while we're here today that what we all came down
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1 to the EPA hearing in Louisville to tell you that we

2 wanted you all to regulate coal ash and we thought we

3 put in a pretty good showing in the state of Kentucky.

4 We had over three hundred people march from the EPA

5 building to LG&E. They had -- they all marched in

6 silently and, and, and, and in a peaceful fashion and

7 sat down in the room. I think we pretty much showed

8 that the community was overwhelmingly in support of

9 regulation of coal ash. And, and we're still waiting.

10 Kathy Little, who I'm sure you're going to

11 hear from tomorrow, she was fifty yards from a mercury

12 spewing, lead, arsenic, selenium contamination and --

13 fifty yards from her front door and still we have to

14 listen to the power industry come up and talk about how

15 they gave money to the opera. And that's just really

16 not acceptable to us. It's just really not acceptable.

17 And we really -- we support the rules you're

18 trying to write and I understand you all are under a

19 lot of pressure from industry to back off, but the fact

20 of the matter is, is that I don't see how you can't put

21 these regulations into place.

22 Our economy in the State of Kentucky isn't

23 dependent on coal any more. Our economy and our health

24 is being destroyed by coal.

25 MR. CLARK: Okay.
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1 MR. PEARCE: It's about that long?

2 MR. CLARK: It's up. It sure it, it sure is.

3 Yeah.

4 MR. PEARCE: Thank you very much.

5 MR. CLARK: And thank you very much. Any

6 questions for these folks? Thank you very much. Robin

7 Mann and looks like Jaffer Khimani and you can correct

8 my pronunciation please.

9 FEMALE: [Indecipherable] signed up before we

10 got the people, so this is the last round.

11 MR. CLARK: This is it before --

12 FEMALE: And I'm going to squeeze in a bunch

13 of folks before hopefully, so we'll see.

14 MR. CLARK: Okay. Robin, feel free to.

15 MS. MANN: You were fine on Robin Mann.

16 MR. CLARK: Okay.

17 MS. MANN: Thank you for the opportunity to

18 testify this morning. My name is Robin Mann. I'm

19 president of the Sierra Club. I'm very proud to be

20 here on behalf the club's one point four million

21 members and supporters to speak in strong support of

22 the proposed EPA standards to reduce toxic mercury and

23 other hazardous air pollutants from coal and oil-fired

24 power plants.

25 This long overdue proposal would establish
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1 the first ever, national limits, on power plants

2 emissions of heavy metals including mercury and

3 arsenic, acid gasses, dioxin and other air toxics.

4 As the EPA has recognized and many of the

5 experts here today are testifying, these chemicals are

6 a special class of pollutants that are extremely

7 harmful to human health. Air toxics are linked to

8 cancer, heart disease, neurological damage, birth

9 defects, asthma attacks, immune system damage, eye

10 irritation and even premature death.

11 By an overwhelming bi-partisan majority,

12 Congress passed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990

13 and directed EPA to regulate toxic air pollution from

14 major sources, yet today, more than twenty years later,

15 there are still no national limits on the amount of

16 mercury and other hazardous air pollutants that power

17 plants can spew into the air.

18 And power plants are among the largest

19 sources of toxic air emissions in the United States.

20 In 2009 alone, power plants generated more than a

21 hundred and thirty four thousand pounds of mercury.

22 For decades, however, the power sector has

23 managed to fight off clean air act requirements to

24 reduce the toxic air emissions from their facilities.

25 It was not intended to be so. As EPA recognizes in the
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1 draft rule, older, higher polluting units were exempted

2 from the Clean Air Act at its inception on Congress'

3 assumption that their useful life was near an end, but

4 the power sector has kept many old plants online

5 because it is more profitable to do so, they are

6 cheaper to operate.

7 Even now, while the technology is readily

8 available, the costs are affordable, and the public

9 health benefits are so clear, big coal is mounting an

10 intense campaign to resist cleaning up the oldest and

11 dirtiest power plants, but it has already been too long

12 a wait for these standards and the overwhelming

13 benefits to public health they afford.

14 The health risks associated with mercury

15 emissions have long been known. Mercury is a potent

16 neurotoxin. It washes out of the air into the water

17 bodies, is transformed into toxic methyl mercury, a

18 persistent pollutant that builds up in the food chain,

19 especially in fish tissue. Everyone who eats

20 contaminated fish is at risk for harmful health affects

21 and the mercury problem is pervasive. There are fish

22 advisories against consuming certain types of fish due

23 to mercury contamination in all fifty states.

24 Pregnant women who consume mercury

25 contaminated fish put their children at particular risk
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1 for brain damage and developmental disabilities

2 including learning problems and lower intelligence.

3 EPA's own studies indicate that three hundred

4 thousand to seven hundred thousand babies are born

5 every year with dangerous levels of mercury in their

6 blood.

7 EPA indicates that the proposed Mercury and

8 Air Toxics Standards will, when fully implemented,

9 result in preventing ninety-one percent of the mercury

10 produced by burning coal from being emitted into the

11 air. The rule would also cut emissions of other heavy

12 metals and acid gasses and reduce fine particulates.

13 By EPA's own estimates, the proposed standards --

14 safeguards will result in preventing as many as

15 seventeen thousand premature deaths every year and

16 additional very substantial health benefits, including

17 as EPA indicates eleven thousand non-fatal heart

18 attacks, a hundred and twenty thousand cases of

19 aggravated asthma attacks, as well as eight hundred and

20 fifty thousand additional workdays that would have

21 been lost.

22 To weaken or put off the adoption and

23 implementation of these strong protections would cost

24 thousands of more people harm to their health and

25 shortened lives every year.
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1 Finally, the EPA urges the -- the Sierra Club

2 urges the EPA to follow its own guidance on

3 consideration of environmental justice and cumulative

4 risks. It is incumbent on EPA to give full

5 consideration to the disproportionate exposure to

6 health hazards from power plant emissions among low7 income communities of color and to the disproportionate

8 susceptibility of those populations to toxic air

9 pollutants.

10 The EPA must also give full consideration to

11 the correspondingly greater degree of health benefits

12 that would accrue to these more vulnerable populations.

13 These considerations will add weight to the

14 urgency of adopting the proposed safeguards without

15 delay.

16 Also, we must draw the agency's attention to

17 the fact that none of the three hearings on the

18 proposed standards have been scheduled west of the

19 Mississippi and in Texas, in particular, the state with

20 the highest level of toxic power plant mercury

21 pollutions -- I'm sorry -- toxic power plant mercury

22 emissions. We urge EPA to remedy this oversight.

23 Sierra Club strongly urges EPA to proceed

24 with finalizing and implementing the proposed standards

25 for the benefit of all Americans.
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1 Thank you.

2 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much.

3 MR. KHIMANI: Good morning. My name is

4 Jaffer Khimani, spelled J-A-F-F-E-R, last name Khimani,

5 K-H-I-M-A-N-I.

6 I'm pleased to be here today on behalf of the

7 Clean Air Task Force. Clean Air Task Force is a non8 profit organization dedicated to reducing atmospheric

9 pollution through research, advocacy and private sector

10 collaboration.

11 Since our founding in 1996, Clean Air Task

12 Force has been deeply involved in efforts to reduce

13 toxic and conventional air pollutant emissions from

14 electric generating industry, which includes the

15 largest domestic sources of these emissions.

16 As part of that work, we represent client

17 environmental groups and the deadline case leading to

18 the proposed maximum available controlled technology

19 standards under discussion today, which will be the

20 first national standards for air toxics from this

21 industry.

22 I will confine my remarks today to the larger

23 picture and Clean Air Task Force will provide detailed

24 technical comments on this rule making by the public

25 comment deadline.
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1 First, Clean Air Task Force is pleased that

2 the agency has put forward a MACT standard for this

3 industry, which is applicable to all the air toxics

4 emitted by coal and oil coal-fired electric generating

5 units.

6 These toxic air pollutants include mercury,

7 acid gasses, benzene, dioxins, in addition to lead,

8 nickel, arsenic, and other metal compounds.

9 EPA's analysis shows that if finalized as

10 proposed, the standards will prevent seventeen thousand

11 premature deaths, a hundred and twenty thousand asthma

12 attacks, and over twelve thousand hospitalizations and

13 emergency room visits every year and that the public

14 health benefits of the rules will far outweigh the

15 costs of timely implementation.

16 But that is only part of the benefits,

17 picture for these rules. The EPA has not calculated

18 all or even the majority of the expected benefits of

19 this rule, including benefits to wildlife, the benefits

20 of reducing or even eliminating mercury related fish

21 advisories or benefits to public health and property

22 from acid gas emission control, to name a few.

23 Indeed, a recent study of the overall

24 benefits of the clean air act since 1970 shows that the

25 Act's public health safeguards implemented to date have
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1 contributed two trillion dollars in economic activity

2 to the economy; a thirty to one return on investment.

3 With that in mind, we encourage the agency to

4 stay on track with the schedule for finalizing and

5 implementing this rule.

6 Work done by the Clean Air Task Force and

7 others, which we will provide in our written comments,

8 demonstrates that all the standards proposed can cost

9 effectively be met in a timely fashion by the industry,

10 despite the protestations -- the protests of big -- big

11 utilities, dirty coal companies, and their

12 congressional allies.

13 Indeed, we are concerned that the agency is

14 not going far enough to achieve much needed

15 deep reductions in both toxic and

16 conventional air pollutants from this sector.

17 While we are pleased the agency has taken a

18 multi-pollutant approach here, recognizing the

19 synergies between possible control strategies and

20 considering greenhouse gas emissions, implications of

21 various options still, the proposed standards are

22 disappointing in some respects.

23 For example, the statistical approach EPA has

24 adopted in its MACTs floor setting process results in

25 standards that do not truly represent the best
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1 performers in the industry.

2 We also note that the agency's proposed new

3 source performance standards are disappointing --

4 disappointingly not based on a forward-looking

5 technology-forcing approach. But rest on what can

6 already be achieved.

7 Indeed, EPA's proposal to include commercial

8 demonstration exemptions, in the way it has -- is in

9 waffle and it not only picks technology winners, but

10 oddly holds them to a lower standard than those for

11 existing technologies.

12 Put differently, rather than encouraging

13 innovation, this provision creates disincentives to

14 further innovation by providing an off ramp from the

15 new standards.

16 In summary, we applaud the agency's efforts

17 today in issuing this proposal on time. And in

18 conjunction with the new source performance standards

19 with the industry. We strongly encourage EPA to remain

20 on schedule in both finalizing the rule and

21 implementing it and we urge the agency to ensure that

22 the final rule is consistent with the statute authority

23 and certainly not further weaken it.

24 Thank you very much for the opportunity to

25 speak today.
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1 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Thank you both.

2 Folks, do you have anything? Questions? No. Okay.

3 Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah?

4 MR. MAXWELL: Ms. Mann, were you suggesting

5 that we have another hearing west of the Mississippi or

6 was that?

7 MS. MANN: Yes.

8 MR. MAXWELL: Okay. I couldn't tell if the

9 sentence -- you were hurrying I know to make the --

10 MS. MANN: Yes. No. West of the Mississippi

11 would be great. I flagged Texas in particular.

12 MR. MAXWELL: Okay.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

14 MALE: [Indecipherable] air tester for

15 mercury at fifty-seven [indecipherable] right now and

16 we're going to [indecipherable] walk over to one of

17 the --

18 MR. CLARK: In the meantime, Mark MacLeod and

19 John Hammond please. Mr. Hammond, you can start if you

20 want.

21 MR. HAMMOND: Sure. My name is John Hammond,

22 H-A-M-M-O-N-D and I'm the Southeast Regional Executive

23 Director for the National Wildlife Federation. On

24 behalf of the National Wildlife Federation and our more

25 than four million members and supporters nationwide, I
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1 thank you for the opportunity to comment on proposed

2 mercury and air toxics rule for power plants.

3 For over a decade NWFS pushed for strong

4 regulations to limit mercury pollution from all

5 sources, given the grave threat mercury contamination

6 poses to both people and wildlife.

7 After years of unnecessary and unacceptable

8 delays, we applaud the Environmental Protection Agency

9 for finally moving forward to require coal-fired power

10 plants, the nation's largest source of toxic mercury

11 pollution to cut their emissions.

12 We strongly support EPA's proposed, proposal

13 at issue today.

14 Seven years ago, the Bush administration

15 proposed a very different mercury rule for power

16 plants. NWF strongly opposed that flawed proposal and

17 called on EPA to go back to the drawing board with all

18 the stringent requirements of the clean air act for

19 dealing with hazardous air pollution.

20 After years of legal challenge, I am both

21 personally and professionally relieved to see EPA's

22 strong proposal today. Sadly, readily available

23 technology to control mercury pollution has sat on the

24 shelf collecting dust all these years while massive

25 amounts of preventable toxic pollution has continued
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1 unabated.

2 Decades of delay and inaction to address

3 toxic pollution have resulted in thousands of premature

4 deaths, heart attacks, birth defects, and incidences of

5 disease like childhood asthma.

6 Additionally, while several states have

7 stepped up and set strong toxic pollution limits for

8 power plants within their borders, the lack of a

9 national standard has led to severe contamination of

10 our lakes, rivers, and forests from both acid rain and

11 mercury pollution.

12 Today, every state in the country has some

13 form of mercury advisory warning people to limit or

14 avoid eating certain species of fish because of the

15 dangers of mercury exposure.

16 As a federation founded by hunting and

17 fishing organizations, NWF is particularly concerned

18 about the threat this poses to those of us who fish and

19 to our outdoor heritage.

20 Mercury even in small amounts, is a potent

21 neurotoxin especially dangerous in the early stages of

22 development for both people and wildlife.

23 While people have the benefit of fish

24 consumption advisories to help limit their mercury

25 intake, wildlife do not have the luxury of choosing a
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1 food source that has lower mercury levels. They are

2 not able to avoid the dangers lurking in their

3 contaminated habitats.

4 And it's not just fish. Historically,

5 scientists have believed that mercury only threatened

6 species that live and feed in aquatic, in aquatic

7 habitats, however recent research shows mercury is

8 accumulating at dangerous levels in terrestrial species

9 as well.

10 No longer is the threat of mercury exposed,

11 exposure to fish eating wildlife, such as loons and

12 eagles, scientists are now finding mercury is building

13 up in insect eating species, such as forest songbirds.

14 There is truly no link in the food chain

15 untouched by mercury and as a result, mercury pollution

16 is a far greater threat to bio diversity than

17 previously thought because a wide range of wildlife

18 species beyond fish that accumulate mercury including

19 aquatic birds, forest birds, mammals, reptiles,

20 amphibians, in vertebra and marine wildlife.

21 There are varying health impacts associated

22 with high mercury levels in these different species,

23 but primarily -- but the primary consequence is

24 increased vulnerability due to reproductive and

25 neurological problems and immune system deficiencies.
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1 For example, fish with high mercury levels

2 have difficult schooling and decreased spawning

3 success. Birds lay few eggs and have trouble caring

4 for their chicks. Mammals have impaired motor skills

5 that affect their ability to hunt and find food. All

6 these effects combine to create severe threat to

7 wildlife survival.

8 But there is some good news. Research shows

9 that once sources of mercury pollution are cleaned up,

10 mercury levels in nearly -- in nearby water go down in

11 a matter of years, not decades.

12 Coal-fired power plants play a major role in

13 contaminating local fish and wildlife and once this new

14 role goes into effect that will change.

15 EPA must move forward and finalize this

16 strong mercury air toxics rule in order to protect

17 public health and our treasured wildlife from toxic

18 pollution. It is time for the owners and operators of

19 these facilities to be finally held responsible and

20 accountable for their preventable toxic emissions. Our

21 children, wildlife, and future generations should no

22 longer be sacrificed to satisfy polluters special

23 interest.

24 Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

25 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. MacLeod.
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1 MR. MACLEOD: Thank you. My name is Mark

2 MacLeod, that's M-A-C-L-E-O-D. I'm the Director of

3 Special Projects with Environmental Defense Fund, a

4 non-partisan, environmental organization with more than

5 seven hundred thousand members nationwide.

6 I appreciate the opportunity to testify

7 before you today. EPA's proposed mercury and air

8 toxics rule for power plants will provide long overdue

9 health protections for all Americans.

10 EDF supports EPA's proposed rule, yet given

11 the availability of cost effective, made in America

12 technology solutions, we urge the agency to strengthen

13 the standards for coal-fired power plants to secure

14 even greater health and environmental benefits.

15 Now, many speakers today have already spoken

16 of the years that have passed since the 1990 Clean Air

17 Act Amendments. People have spoken eloquently of the

18 devastating health impacts of mercury and they've

19 spoken of the tremendous benefits that the proposed

20 rule would provide, so I'm going to skip over these in

21 my remarks, but they're in my written remarks and I

22 have additional copies if anyone so desires.

23 So I'd like to take a minute to talk about

24 electric system reliability because unfortunately, many

25 in the electric industry are raising the specter of a
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1 national reliability crisis as it means to weaken or

2 delay EPA's long overdue rules.

3 The first major report in this campaign was

4 the Edison Electric Institute's report, Potential

5 Impacts of Environmental Regulation on the U.S.

6 Generation of Fleet. But just recently, a peer review

7 of the EEI report was conducted by Susan Tierney

8 and Charles Cicchetti. The peer

9 review authors conclude that the EPA -- the EEI report

10 was based upon worse-case assumptions which have not

11 materialized. They continue, "The EEI report does not

12 adequately distinguish between the non-environmental

13 drivers of changes in the electricity industry and

14 various EPA rule makings. There is also inadequate

15 discussion of initiatives underway to strengthen the

16 resiliency and reliability of the electricity network."

17 Similarly, in recent public testimony before

18 the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Tom Fanning

19 , CEO of Southern Company stated, quoting,

20 "The reliability of the nation's electric generating

21 system is at risk because of the number of new rules

22 and regulations applicable to power plants." And,

23 continuing to quote, "EPA appears to not take this

24 problem seriously." Yet, in a more private conference

25 call with investors, when asked what's the penalty for
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1 not reaching the time line and do you need to shut down

2 or are there fines? Mr. Fanning said, and I quote,

3 "Lisa Jackson, she I think recognizes that the EPA,

4 last thing they want us to create a reliability

5 crisis." And, quoting again, "I think what you would

6 do is enter into a set of individual consent decrees

7 with just as company by company." And those are exact

8 quotes.

9 Some utilities often site a 2010 report by

10 the North American Reliability Counsel, Corporation,

11 failing to mention that that report assumes no industry

12 actions in the near term to address compliance issues

13 or market response. Utilities also fail to mention

14 that that 2010 NERC report lists a suite of tools that

15 regulators, system operators, and industry participants

16 should employ to ensure reliability and that list is

17 included as an appendix to my written comments.

18 Well what would cause an electric reliability

19 crisis? What would cause a crisis is if we have the

20 realization of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If

21 utilities fail to order equipment on a timely basis.

22 If they fail to work with planning councils to

23 coordinate outage schedules to install retrofits. If

24 utilities -- some utilities I should say -- continue to

25 spend their time seeking wholesale regulatory relief
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1 rather than identifying the small set of plants in

2 specific geographic locations that may need special

3 treatment. Happily, other utilities are stepping up to

4 the plate, interested in more progress than creating

5 fear -- interested more in progress, than creating

6 fear.

7 Eight utilities wrote a letter to the Wall

8 Street Journal where they say the electric sector has

9 known that these rules were coming. Many companies,

10 including ours, have already invested in modern air

11 pollution control technologies and cleaner, more

12 efficient plants.

13 Our experience, over a decade, -- my

14 apologies -- shows that experience complying with air

15 quality regulations demonstrates that regulations can

16 yield important economic benefits including job

17 creation while maintaining reliability. That's from

18 those other eight electric power companies.

19 So Environmental Defense Fund urges EPA to

20 finalize the proposed rule in a timely manner and we

21 urge utilities in Georgia and across the nation to stop

22 stoking fear of a national reliability crisis and

23 instead, work with the regulators and local citizens to

24 ensure that we provide for reliability and healthy

25 Americans.
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1 Thank you.

2 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Thank you very much.

3 Any questions? Thank you. Appreciate it.

4 Okay, we're going to do six more speakers

5 here, I think, before the lunch break.

6 FEMALE: [Indecipherable] couple more --

7 MR. CLARK: Apparently, they're going to be a

8 couple more.

9 FEMALE: There is going to be a couple more

10 and then we'll do lunch at one.

11 MR. CLARK: And we're going to take lunch at

12 one o'clock, so we'll see if you guys can survive that.

13 Are you okay time wise? Are you? Okay. Well, it's

14 okay Beverly, we can -- if you need to, yeah.

15 Okay. Jack Thirolf please and Dabney Dixon.

16 Actually Carol's here if you need to switch out, so.

17 Oh okay. It, it's okay. Go. Whichever would like to

18 start, please do and if you could spell your name, that

19 would be great.

20 MR. THIROLF: Thank you. I'm Jack Thirolf,

21 it's T as in Tom, H-I-R-O-L-F.

22 Thank you for the opportunity to participate

23 in this public hearing. I'm here today speaking on

24 behalf of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

25 We are a coalition of companies and trade associations
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1 from the energy efficiency, natural gas, and renewable

2 energy sectors. Our coalition also includes

3 independent electric power producers, investor owned

4 utilities, public power, commercial and users and

5 project developers and service providers for

6 environmental markets.

7 The Council was founded in 1992 and advocates for

8 policies that increase the use for commercially

9 available clean energy technologies, products, and

10 services.

11 Our diverse business membership is united

12 around the revitalization of our economy and the

13 creation of a secure and sustainable energy future for

14 America.

15 Before speaking, I'd like to note that as a

16 diverse coalition, not all of our members endorse or

17 take a position on these comments.

18 We wanted to communicate four things to you

19 this morning.

20 Number one. We support EPA's stated time

21 line for finalizing and implementing the proposed

22 mercury and air toxic standards for the electric

23 utility sector.

24 Number two, we commend the agency for

25 offering an output-based compliance option as part of
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1 these standards. This is something the Council, our

2 Council has supported output-based metrics since its

3 founding in 1992 and we feel they encourage and reward

4 energy efficiency.

5 Third, there were two specific points that we

6 wanted to highlight within the rule that we thought

7 were opportunities to incentivize and reward a clean

8 and efficient combined heat and power and I'll speak in

9 more detail on that.

10 And number four is a general point that, in

11 our view, shifting to lower emissions technologies and

12 resources will upgrade our nation's electric generation

13 infrastructure, will help drive economic growth and

14 create jobs.

15 Maintaining the current time line. We

16 support EPA's stated time line for finalizing and

17 implementing the proposed Mercury and Air Toxics

18 Standards for the electric utility sector. As

19 businesses operate in the energy industry, we value

20 predictable, science based rules that provide the

21 certainty needed for sound, long-term capital

22 investments. These proposed standards, as we've heard,

23 have been more than twenty years in the making.

24 Multi-billion dollar investments have been

25 made in control technologies and clean generation in
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1 anticipated -- in anticipation of implementation of the

2 proposed standards.

3 Billions more will be invested as our

4 nation's electric utility sector modernizes and works

5 to comply with the finalized standards.

6 Businesses and investors need certainty on

7 air emissions policy. The lane regulation will keep

8 capital on sidelines and further delay investment in

9 America's energy infrastructure and in innovative

10 technologies.

11 We urge the EPA to continue moving forward.

12 Encouraging energy efficiency. In crafting

13 the standards, we urge EPA to put an emphasis on energy

14 efficiency where possible. We commend the agency for

15 authoring an output based compliance option in the

16 proposed standards and strongly encourage you to

17 maintain this option in the final rule.

18 The Council has long supported the

19 development and use of output-based emissions

20 regulations as effective ways to promote long-term air

21 quality and to encourage cost effective emissions

22 reductions. As EPA itself has noted, output-based

23 regulations better reward and drive energy efficiency

24 improvements than do input-based approaches.

25 We commend EPA's work in recent rule makings
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1 that acknowledge the benefits of using output-based

2 standards and thank the agency for following suit again

3 here in this rule making.

4 Accounting for the benefits of combined heat

5 and power. The Council believes that combined heat and

6 power has an important role to play and we feel that

7 there are two opportunities in these rules where we can

8 incentivize, we can incentivize CHP.

9 The first derives out of the NSPS

10 changes included along with the rule. In accounting

11 for onsite generation's avoidance of line losses from

12 the transmission and distribution of electricity, we

13 feel the proposed five percent benefit is too low and I

14 would encourage you to look at the comments made by one

15 of our members, Recycled Energy Development at

16 Tuesday's hearing in Chicago, for a full account of the

17 studies detailing the appropriate benefit level that

18 should be given to CHP units and I'll be happy to drop

19 that off at the front desk with our comments today.

20 Second, for those facilities seeking to

21 switch to natural gas-fired systems and who want to

22 include combined heat and power, we urge EPA to allow

23 those units an additional year to design, permit, and

24 install a CHP system. Three years may simply not be

25 enough time for this process.
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1 Recognizing the potential for delays and

2 additional time, EPA regulations to allow boiler owners

3 to petition for an additional year to install add-on

4 pollution controls. The Council asks EPA in the final

5 rule to clarify that CHP be deemed controls and be

6 allowed this extra year if needed. Our concern is that

7 absent this option for a fourth year, facilities may

8 forego installing CHP systems and lose out on the

9 associated benefits.

10 Our final point. On electric grid

11 reliability and economic growth. These standards for

12 the electricity sector will, in our view, not imperil

13 the reliability, civility, or strength of our nation's

14 electrical grid. Some recent reports and studies are

15 based on assumptions that, in our view, under estimate

16 the ability of America's electric sector to invest,

17 adapt, and construct new clean generation and to also

18 install control technologies and we also feel that

19 those reports over estimate the severity and rigidity

20 of EPA's regulatory approaches.

21 America has available clean energy resources,

22 including the broad collection of natural gas, energy

23 efficiency and renewable energy technology and services

24 have a major role to play in our nation's energy

25 future. Their continued and expanded deployment from
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1 clean energy -- from clean and efficient combined cycle

2 natural gas units to demand response to distributed

3 renewable energy generation will strengthen the grid's

4 reliability and resiliency.

5 We feel these technologies and fuels will

6 help regulate and city's achieve compliance at lower

7 costs.

8 Again, shifting to lower emissions

9 technologies and resources will upgrade in our nation's

10 electric generation infrastructure, will help drive

11 economic growth and create jobs.

12 Thanks for the opportunity to speak today.

13 We'll be working with our members over the next month

14 to sort out comments that we'll hope to submit before

15 the July 5 deadline.

16 Thank you.

17 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Dixon.

18 MS. DIXON: My name is Dabney Dixon. My

19 first name is D-A-B-N-E-Y; last name Dixon, D-I-X-O-N.

20 I'm a Professor of Chemistry at Georgia State

21 University, but I am, in fact, speaking as an

22 individual here today to support the proposed mercury

23 standards.

24 Mercury has a bio-geochemical cycle such that

25 mercury produced in a variety of ways from burning of
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1 coal and medical waste, from bleaching and cement

2 production, and gold mining, goes up into the

3 atmosphere. It's returned to the earth and often in

4 precipitation and then it makes its way to the edges of

5 rivers and lakes and streams where it's converted by

6 bacteria to a compound called methyl mercury.

7 Methyl mercury is a very potent toxin. It

8 impairs neurological development and the developing

9 children and infants up to elementary school are at

10 most risk. There are impacts on cognitive thinking and

11 memory and attention and language, fine motor and

12 visual spatial skills. These have all been seen in

13 children and including those where the exposure comes

14 through the mother.

15 Incidents of methyl mercury poisoning are

16 also clear in adults and I speak from personal

17 experience because a colleague of mine, at another

18 university, went in -- a professor -- to run some

19 experiments over the end of the year holiday with

20 methyl mercury and a couple weeks later started to have

21 neurological symptoms and in two months, she was dead.

22 And what she had done was to use the wrong gloves and

23 methyl mercury had gone through the gloves. So this is

24 truly a potent neurotoxin.

25 It ends up in us by bioaccumulation, that is
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1 the bacteria are eaten by animals and plankton, then

2 smaller fish and larger fish until we finally get it

3 into the food chain.

4 There's an increasing amount or increasing

5 number of places where one can no longer consume the

6 fish because of mercury pollution all through the

7 United States.

8 The EPA has a cute take off on Dr. Seuss

9 where children and women of childbearing age should not

10 at all eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tile

11 fish and a maximum of two weeks per meal even of things

12 lower in mercury such as canned tuna, catfish, pollock,

13 salmon, and shrimp. This extends to Georgia.

14 On the left, a Georgia aquarium advisory, the

15 southeast seafood guide 2010 and on the right, a 2010

16 update from guidelines for eating fish from Georgia

17 waters. It's a long document. The Georgia waters

18 document. The left shows the river basins of Georgia

19 and the right shows, just to take a single example like

20 tuna, where largemouth bass, spotted

21 bass, and hybrid bass, bass one can only now have one

22 meal a week if they're over sixteen inches, so this

23 mercury pollution is here with us in Georgia.

24 Looking over the years, this is a slide from

25 Ben Gibson's -- a few months ago, you can see that
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1 between 1990 and 2005, the amount of mercury decreased

2 in the United States. In particular, municipal waste

3 combustion decreased mercury and also medical waste

4 incinerators, but the amount of mercury coming from

5 coal-fired power plants continues and that's the

6 subject of the current proposed legislation.

7 In mercury in Georgia, data from 2004, again

8 a majority of it from the coal-fired electrical

9 generating units.

10 When I ask people why are things not

11 happening, why are we hesitating, people tell me three

12 things. One thing they say is we can't be sure of the

13 data. And I would say as a scientist that the data are

14 excellent, particularly the data on neurological

15 efforts -- or neurological affects, we do have good

16 data.

17 People say the situation is so overwhelming

18 that we cannot do anything, but we are here today

19 because we have a clear solution available and we can

20 push to adopt this solution.

21 And then people say, and it was argued this

22 morning, that this will be costly. But I would say

23 that not doing anything is even more costly for us and

24 for the generations to come.

25 Our children are at particular risk. This is
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1 a picture of a current class of children. This is a

2 picture roughly of my son's generation. This is a

3 picture roughly of my generation. This is a picture of

4 my mother's generation. And this is a picture of my

5 grandmother's generation. I show you all those little

6 girls, none of them is actually my grandmother, because

7 my grandmother is about that age at the time that

8 picture was taken. My grandmother had a huge affect on

9 our lives. The kind of decisions she made, the

10 sacrifices that she made reverberated down through the

11 generations and we still tell stories of her power and

12 the wonderful affect that she has.

13 I would say that we need to take the

14 responsibility now for the generations that will come

15 beyond us and we need to support the EPA and its

16 proposed mercury regulations.

17 Thank you.

18 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Any

19 questions guys? I guess not. Thank you. Appreciate

20 it.

21 Okay. Next two speakers please, Lance Brown

22 and Steve Earle. Okay. I thought we were further

23 down. That's all right. I just want to be sure

24 [indecipherable] time. Bless you. I hope you're not

25 getting [indecipherable] sit next to me, Pal. Mr. Brown.
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1 MR. BROWN: I'm Lance Brown, Executive

2 Director of the Partnership for Affordable Clean

3 Energy, or PACE. That's Brown like the color,

4 B-R-O-W-N.

5 Thanks for the opportunity to testify here

6 today on behalf of the electricity consumers,

7 businesses and agricultural interests that PACE

8 represents.

9 Among the various consequences of the

10 regulations being discussed today, we believe none is

11 more important than the affect on electricity

12 customers.

13 The cost estimates are highly various, with

14 the EPA itself claiming the rule will come with a

15 compliance price tag of ten point nine billion dollars

16 making this regulation one of the most expensive in the

17 agency's history. This is twice the cost of current

18 regulations that reduce sulfur and nitrogen oxide

19 emissions.

20 We've seen cost estimates as high as three

21 hundred billion dollars, which would exceed the 2008 GDP

22 of thirty-six of the fifty U.S. States.

23 Who will ultimately pay the toll for this

24 compliance? As always, it will be the families and

25 businesses of America. The electricity, reliability
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1 coordinating council estimates price increases between

2 twenty and twenty-five percent or been four hundred and

3 five hundred dollars in annual buying power for the

4 average family.

5 But the truth is that increases in

6 electricity costs are not felt equally by all

7 Americans. The Affordable Power Alliance released a

8 study showing disparate cost impacts of the EPA's

9 regulations on minority families and of course, there

10 has been discussion today about the effects on

11 minorities.

12 The study showed that these families spend

13 disproportionately more of their income on electricity

14 bills. For the millions of struggling low income

15 families, discussions about higher energy costs are not

16 political rhetoric, they're tough reality.

17 The people PACE has spoken to across the

18 southeast and beyond are sending a clear message if

19 we're willing to listen. Now is not the time to saddle

20 Americans with families, and businesses with higher

21 power bills.

22 In this struggling economy, these regulations

23 also endanger jobs and threaten to stall economic

24 growth. The forced early retirement of coal-fired

25 power will result in tens of thousands in the energy
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1 sector alone losing their jobs, as well as thousands

2 more in supporting industries.

3 Perhaps this is why the IBEW supports a

4 longer window for compliance with these rules. In

5 fact, IBEW President, Edwin Hill states that as many

6 as fifty thousand workers in the utility, mining, and

7 railroad industries could lose their jobs. According

8 to President Hill, reasonable and realistic standards

9 will only be achieved through legislation, a position

10 with which PACE agrees.

11 EPA's response on the topic of jobs has been

12 inadequate, if not flippant. During a recent interview

13 on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Administrator

14 Jackson commented that these new rules will actually

15 create jobs since the economy -- since someone will

16 have to build the required technology. This

17 explanation falls well short of reality. It might have

18 been a good sound bite for the Daily Show, but it's the

19 daily lives of Americans to which we should be paying

20 more attention.

21 NERC states that these rules will impact

22 nearly four hundred thousand megawatts of generation,

23 which is about half of our nation's current generation.

24 NERC also predicts that by 2018, nearly fifty

25 thousand megawatts of generating capacity will be
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1 forced into early retirement by these new regulations.

2 With such swift and sweeping change, there's

3 no doubt that the most severe growing pains will be

4 felt by American consumers. People on fixed incomes

5 and with low incomes. Consumers who are depending on

6 the government and the EPA to get it right.

7 We believe these rules will make American

8 electricity less reliable and less affordable and will

9 render American businesses less competitive.

10 We ask the EPA not to implement this rule, or

11 at the very least to allow a greater period for public

12 comment and a longer time window for compliance.

13 Thanks for the opportunity to share our

14 perspective.

15 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. Earle.

16 MR. EARLE: I'm Mr. Earle.

17 MR. CLARK: Yeah. I'm saying, Mr. Earle

18 please.

19 MR. EARLE: Thank you. I'm Steve Earle, E-A20 R-L-E, District Twelve International Vice President,

21 the United Mine Workers of America and I'm here today

22 to tell you I appreciate the opportunity you give us

23 to, to talk to you.

24 Our members are concerned that EPA's proposed

25 rules for maximum achievable control technology, new
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1 and existing coal based generating units could lead to

2 tens of thousands of job losses at utility plants, coal

3 mines in the real sector.

4 We agree with several aspects of the proposed

5 MACT rule, such as alternative compliance standards for

6 acid gasses.

7 These kinds of flexibility measures will help

8 to minimize adverse impact of the rules on our members.

9 Due to the complexity of the rules, we urge

10 EPA to provide an extension of the current sixty day

11 comment period to ninety or a hundred and twenty days.

12 Their proposed new source emission limits will not

13 allow any new coal plants to be constructed because no

14 single unit can meet all of the proposed emission

15 limits.

16 The new-source limits are based on emission

17 data from many different coal plants with widely

18 varying in fuel and pollution control characteristics.

19 We urge EPA to take coal sulfur content into account in

20 setting the alternative acid gas, SO2 standard.

21 Coals from many Midwestern states cannot meet

22 the alternative SO2 standard even at units equipped

23 with scrubbers removing ninety percent of the sulfur.

24 We do not believe that this rule should

25 require coal switching at scrubbed units.
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1 We do not agree with EPA's estimate of ten

2 gigawatts a coal plant closure do to the rule. Several

3 independent estimates of impact of the proposed rule

4 are in the range of forty to sixty gigawatts reflecting

5 the hundreds of smaller and older coal units that are

6 non-economic to retrofit.

7 We are skeptical about your job analysis. We

8 agree that thousands of construction jobs will be

9 created, but believe that the agency is under

10 estimating the loss of permanent jobs if hundreds of

11 coal plants close and utilities switched to natural

12 gas.

13 The UMWA has estimated that more than fifty

14 thousand direct jobs are at risk in coal transportation

15 and the utility sectors.

16 If three hundred workers lose their jobs at a

17 coal plant, the new jobs created at a natural gas plant

18 would make up only a small fraction of the losses.

19 Community impact such as loss of tax basis

20 and support for local school systems need to be

21 addressed in the EPA's analysis.

22 We support the construction of, of controlled

23 technologies to enable coal to be burned cleanly, but

24 requiring multiple new emission standards for many

25 older plants will drive investments away from these
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1 plants and their workers.

2 A major problem with this rule is its

3 thirty-six month compliance time frame as set by

4 section one twelve of the Clean Air Act. We urge EPA to

5 provide across-the-board extension of at least one year

6 as it did in the marine MACT rule. More plants will be

7 shut down and more jobs lost with a short three-year

8 time table impacting more than one thousand units.

9 Thank you again for the opportunity to speak

10 to this panel.

11 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much.

12 MR. EARLE: Thank you.

13 MR. CULLIGAN: When you submit your comments

14 -- I assume you're both submitting comments. When

15 you're citing -- when you provide the numbers like the

16 three hundred billion dollar cost, it would be really

17 helpful if you could actually include the study. It

18 sounds to me like you're actually comparing apples to

19 oranges and you're looking at an annualized cost versus

20 a total capital cost and without providing that kind of

21 detail, it's really hard for us to evaluate what

22 the -- where the numbers come from, so that would be

23 very helpful.

24 MR. EARLE: We'll have [indecipherable].

25 MR. CULLIGAN: Thank you.
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1 MR. EARLE: Thank you.

2 MR. CLARK: Okay. Next, first of all, I

3 understand I misspoke earlier. We're actually going

4 to have eight more speakers before the break, so the

5 next two are Virginia Galloway and Kevin McGrath.

6 Are you okay? If you need to go, feel free.

7 MS. GALLOWAY: Good afternoon.

8 MR. CLARK: Good afternoon.

9 MS. GALLOWAY: You ready?

10 MR. CLARK: We're ready.

11 MS. GALLOWAY: Okay.

12 MR. CLARK: Fire away.

13 MS. GALLOWAY: I'm Virginia Galloway. I'm

14 the State Director for Americans for Prosperity Georgia

15 and I would like to comment on the proposed utility

16 MACT regulations.

17 I'll start with a question. How much will

18 ten billion dollars cost us? That's the cost, the

19 direct cost that you guys at the EPA say it will cost

20 to implement these MACT regulations. Some in private

21 industry. We've heard all kinds of ranges today, but

22 the one I heard was a hundred billion dollars, may be

23 that. But I don't want to fight about whether it's ten

24 billion or a hundred billion. Either way, you're

25 talking about real money; in my, in my economy anyway.
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1 But let's back up first to the things that we

2 all agree on and what, what do we want -- there we go.

3 Got ahead of myself. Boy this is an excitable clicker.

4 We all want to be like the old childhood

5 rhyme, right? Healthy, wealthy, and wise and obviously

6 clean air is a part of that.

7 There aren't many news stories about good

8 news. You don't see much of that, but people need to

9 know that because of innovations and technology, there

10 is good news. With all of our population growth, with

11 increases in miles traveled by car, with increases in

12 the energy consumption, increases in GDP, over an

13 eighteen-year period, from 1990 to 2008, air pollution

14 in the U.S. went down forty-one percent.

15 The bad news is, every time a reasonable

16 standard of air quality is reached, the EPA changes the

17 standard. That's one of the reasons Georgia highways

18 are in the mess they're in and I hope you were in our

19 traffic this morning to experience that.

20 Kind of like -- well, let's just say that the

21 federal highway funds were denied because we had new

22 tougher air standards as soon as we reached the old air

23 standards. It was kind of like the peanuts cartoon,

24 Lucy and Charlie Brown when she holds the football for

25 him and he runs up to make the kick and what does she
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1 do? She moves it out of the way and he falls flat on

2 his back.

3 And so, in Georgia, we met the standards to

4 get the highway funds back in the `90's, but then the

5 ball was moved.

6 Speaking of funds, we have an estimate of how

7 much this will cost. Ten to a hundred billion. Any

8 chance that the utility stockholders are going to bear

9 this burden alone?

10 With a ten percent unemployment rate and one

11 of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation,

12 Georgians are already struggling financially. When the

13 price of electricity jumps to make up for this ten to

14 one hundred billion dollar regulatory cost, consumers

15 will pay.

16 Let's say they tighten up on their

17 electricity use at home. Many will have to. But then

18 the cost of goods produced goes up also. They adjust

19 again by cutting back on purchases. And more jobs are

20 lost, maybe their own job.

21 Meanwhile, the cost to government at every

22 level continues to rise because governments are also

23 consumers of electric power and the government doesn't

24 have a reputation for efficiency in much of anything.

25 But who ultimately pays for that? We do. We
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1 pay for the government's increased cost as well, either

2 through our taxes or through our debt going up.

3 I travel throughout this state. Many Georgia

4 business people and many individuals are holding on by

5 their fingernails. Holding on to their homes. Holding

6 on to their businesses. Holding on to their financial

7 situation. Holding on to their piece of the American

8 dream. Don't kick them off the ledge, please.

9 Now, let's talk about lives. Wisdom

10 correctly assesses the problem and comes up with a

11 reasonable plan to solve it. On a cost benefit

12 analysis, these regulations are a fail. First of all,

13 the amount of pollution caused by all utilities and

14 manufacturing plants is less than one percent of all

15 air pollution. So if all that went away completely,

16 which is not likely, we'd reduce air pollution by one

17 percent.

18 Realistically, this regulation would reduce

19 air pollution by a small fraction of one percent, so

20 that's what ten to one hundred billion dollars buys us.

21 Americans for Prosperity represents over one

22 point seven million members nationwide. We are for

23 prosperity, therefore we are against more unnecessary

24 regulation. We ask the EPA to listen to the President

25 on this issue. By Executive Order this January, he
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1 laid out the new review process for regulations stating

2 that any agency should and I quote, "tailor its

3 regulations to impose the least burden on society,

4 consistent with obtaining regulatory objectives, taking

5 into account among other things, and to the extent

6 practicable, the cost of cumulative regulations."

7 The EPA should rethink this proposal based on

8 the unreasonably high cost compared to insignificant

9 benefit.

10 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much.

11 MS. GALLOWAY: You're welcome.

12 MR. CLARK: Mr. McGrath.

13 MR. McGRATH: My name is Kevin McGrath and I

14 reside in Roswell, Georgia. My name is spelled

15 K-E-V-I-N, M-C-G-R-A-T-H.

16 I represent Georgia Trout Unlimited as

17 Chairman of its Back the Rookie program. Part of the

18 National Fish Habitat Action Plan, eastern brook trout

19 joint venture. And as President of Upper Chattahoochee

20 Trout Unlimited in Roswell, Georgia, the largest

21 chapter for Trout Unlimited in Georgia.

22 Our mission is to conserve, protect and

23 restore Georgia's cold water fisheries and their

24 watersheds. I thank you for opportunity to offer

25 comments.
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1 Now my, all my comments are short, but I

2 promise to keep them brief as well.

3 Realizing the proposed rules will cause

4 utility rate increases, we believe the mercury, air

5 toxics, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides regulations

6 are reasonable and measured emissions restrictions that

7 will provide tangible benefits, positive benefits for

8 our health and the legacy we pass on to our children.

9 Georgia joins with our national office in

10 support of the proposed rules.

11 Others have offered comments on health

12 issues. We share their concerns, but due to time

13 constraints, I'm going to direct my comments directly

14 to natural resources.

15 The gap in national standards for mercury

16 emissions should and needs to be addressed. Power

17 plants are the largest single source of mercury

18 emissions period.

19 Mercury is a poison that people are primarily

20 exposed to through fish consumption and is the most

21 common fish contaminant in the United States.

22 Every state has at least one waterway that is

23 under a fish consumption advisory and twenty-four

24 states have statewide advisories warning against fish

25 consumption. Here in Georgia, we have forty-five
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1 streams, fifty lakes, six estuaries, the Okefenokee

2 Swamp, and even the Atlantic Ocean with consumption

3 advisories as issued by the Georgia Environmental

4 Protection Division primarily for mercury,

5 overwhelmingly for mercury.

6 Depending on the level of exposure, wildlife

7 and fish exposed to mercury and they die, have reduced

8 fertility or complete reproductive failure as well as

9 slower growth and other vulnerabilities. Research has

10 linked mercury to decreased olfactory senses in trout,

11 negatively effecting feeding, navigation, and spawning.

12 That means less fish in our streams and game for

13 sportsmen who contribute one point eight billion

14 dollars to Georgia's economy annually and one hundred

15 and sixty three billion dollars annually, nationally in

16 revenue, taxes and jobs. Those figures are from the

17 Congressional Sportsman's Foundation.

18 Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are the

19 leading cause of acid rain. Acidified streams damage

20 fish and habitat both directly through acidity and

21 indirectly through increased aluminum toxicity. This

22 is one of the primary causes for reduced brook trout,

23 the native fish in the Appalachian Mountains from Maine

24 to Georgia and part of what the, the joint venture that

25 I chair in Georgia is about.
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1 The technology that controls mercury and

2 other air toxics effectively reduces sulfur dioxide and

3 nitrogen oxides as well. It comes along with the deal.

4 The Great Smoky Mountains National Park

5 receives the highest sulfur and nitrogen deposits of

6 any national park from acid rain, acid fog, and dry

7 particulate fall-out.

8 The average PH of rainfall there is five to

9 ten times higher than average rainfall. Forty percent

10 of the sulfate deposition in the park has been sourced

11 to Georgia. That comes from a Southern Appalachian

12 Mountains Initiative, S-A-M-I, and Visual

13 Improvement State and Tribal Association of Southeast,

14 V-I-S-T-A-S, Reports and directly from Steve Moore

15 [phonetic] who's the fisheries biologist that I spoke

16 with last weekend -- or two weekends ago. He's at the

17 Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

18 The Park receives acid deposition from as far

19 away as Ohio and throughout the Midwest. Nitrogen

20 levels in the park streams are approaching public

21 health standards for drinking waters. And you would

22 think the crown jewel in the east of the National Park

23 system would have water that you could freely drink of.

24 While it will cost money in the future to

25 implement the proposed standards, there is an economic
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1 cost today in healthcare expenses, missed workdays,

2 quality of life, diminished natural resources, and the

3 legacy we will leave our children.

4 According to the EPA, the proposed standard

5 would prevent ninety-one percent of mercury emissions

6 from oil and coal powered plants and reduce acid gas

7 and sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants by

8 nine-one and fifty-five percent. The benefit -- this

9 would benefit everyone, including both neighborhoods

10 near power plants as well as communities, parks, and

11 forests hundreds of miles away from a power plant.

12 Georgia Trout Unlimited supports the proposed

13 rule.

14 Thank you very much.

15 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Any

16 questions guys? No. Carol Kemper, by the way, I

17 should point out, has joined us on the panel, so from

18 EPA Region Four. It's about -- okay. Thank you.

19 The next speakers please, Alan Toney and

20 James Capp. Mr. Toney, please feel free to start.

21 MR. TONEY: Thank you. My name is Alan

22 Toney, T-O-N-E-Y. I am Chairman of the Local Sewer and

23 Water District. We're in -- you're in the Fulton

24 District now and we welcome you.

25 I'm not going to go through all the technical
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1 stuff that everybody -- that has been hashed over ten

2 times already, but as far as I know, at least half of

3 the mercury in the world comes from burning coal and

4 forty-percent comes from power plants and Georgia has

5 more than its share of power plants. I think we still

6 sell power up the east coast.

7 The winds here blow from west to east so all

8 the power plants -- Southern Company's power plants,

9 they all roll across Georgia. The -- and that's the

10 reason for the bad numbers when you look at all the

11 rivers in Georgia and the coast.

12 Recently, my son who is an avid

13 fisherman -- I am too -- caught a thirty-seven pound

14 Cobia in the Savannah Fishing Channel. He called me up

15 proudly to talk about his Cobia and how he had cooked

16 it up for he and his new wife and all their friends in

17 the neighborhood and how proud they were of it, and

18 then he kind of casually said, "And by the way, we're

19 trying to have a baby." I think great, you know. I

20 didn't -- I -- he was totally unaware that Cobia had

21 made the list for toxic mercury and you know, this is

22 sort of an anecdote, but it just seems to me that

23 there's something wrong in this world when you can't

24 have something like that be joyous. You have to go back

25 and say what about the mercury in the fish.
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1 And for those of you who don't know, Cobia is

2 probably one of the best eating fishes on earth. It

3 has great oils for your heart. It should be a

4 wonderful thing, but now it's got mercury in it.

5 And let me just -- I don't want to make this

6 too long because you guys have been through a lot

7 already. But I just want to respond to some of the

8 economic things that have been said here that I found

9 very troubling.

10 I mean, I'm a capitalist and a businessman.

11 I understand the cost of production pretty well, but I

12 also understand that if you take an unfair advantage.

13 If you're a polluter and you're not properly regulated,

14 then you have an unfair advantage over other forms of

15 production. And that's what Southern Company has done

16 very effectively over the years, they have fought this

17 tooth and nail for twenty years. And they've been very

18 successful at it, but they're supposed to clean up

19 their own mess and they're not doing that. And that,

20 that's -- you know, they're a capitalist. That's what

21 capitalist are supposed to do. You're supposed to

22 bring your crony scientists in here and their business

23 numbers that are kind of suspicious and all that kind

24 of stuff and throw them at you, but that's what

25 capitalism is. It's trying to lower the cost of
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1 production.

2 But it's your job, as regulators, you stand

3 for the people to protect us from that sort of thing.

4 And to create a level playing field.

5 The good thing about capitalism is it creates

6 competition; fair competition. And when you have a

7 level playing field because we have all the forms of

8 production and they all get to compete fairly. When

9 you, when you allow a polluter to pollute and when you

10 make people who live downstream pay the price, high

11 medical bills, so on and so forth, to subsidize that

12 pollution, that's not what capitalist are supposed to

13 work.

14 Just as we have regulations, that's the

15 reason we have an EPA. That's the reason we do things

16 in a civilized society to protect our citizens from

17 unwarranted pollution.

18 That's basically all I'm going to say. Thank

19 you.

20 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Mr. Capp.

21 MR. CAPP: James Capp, C-A-P-P. Good

22 afternoon. My name is James Capp. I'm the Chief of

23 the Air Protection Branch of the Georgia Environmental

24 Protection Division.

25 I appreciate the opportunity to present some
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1 preliminary thoughts on this very important proposed

2 rule. I'm also appreciative that EPA is holding this

3 hearing here in Atlanta. We hope that EPA will make a

4 habit of holding hearings in Atlanta for important rule

5 makings.

6 Georgia EPD has a long and successful history

7 in addressing air quality issues in the state and is

8 proud of the improvements that we've made in the

9 quality of life for our citizens.

10 Georgia EPD has already done much to reduce

11 emissions from coal-fired electricity generating units

12 within our state. In an effort to ensure that these

13 EGUs would be proactively reducing their emissions,

14 Georgia EPD negotiated with stakeholders a very

15 successful multi-pollutant rule for coal-fired power

16 plants that requires significant reductions in key air

17 pollutants including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides,

18 mercury, acid gas, hazardous air pollutants and

19 particulate matter.

20 These pollution controls are being phased in

21 between 2008 and 2015. As part of this program, the

22 two coal-fired EGUs at Georgia Power Plant McDonough

23 located just northwest of downtown Atlanta, are being

24 retired within the next year and are being replaced

25 with state of the art natural gas-fired combustion
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1 turbines.

2 The net reduction in emissions resulting from

3 this project alone is approximately twenty-eight

4 thousand tons per year of sulfur dioxide, four thousand

5 tons per year in nitrogen oxides and a hundred pounds

6 of mercury.

7 With regard to EPA's proposed rule, Georgia

8 EPD believes that effective national regulation of

9 hazardous air pollutant emissions from EGUs is number

10 one required by the Clean Air Act.

11 Number two from an environmental and public

12 health perspective.

13 And three, technically feasible and cost

14 effective.

15 The proposed rule will substantially reduce

16 emissions of hazardous air pollutants from EGUs. In

17 addition, the rule will result in significant

18 reductions of sulfur dioxide and particulate matter

19 emissions.

20 Coal-fired power plants are the largest

21 emitters of air toxic and criteria pollutants in the

22 United States. Accordingly the benefits to public

23 health and welfare that will result from a well24 considered rule are substantial.

25 The initial reductions from this rule will
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1 help states meet their obligations under the Clean Air

2 Act for the sulfur dioxide, national ambient air

3 quality standard. The fine particulate matter national

4 ambient air quality standard and regional haze.

5 The final regulation must meet both the

6 letter and the intent of the statute and strike the

7 appropriate balance in protecting public health while

8 avoiding the imposition of unnecessary cost on a

9 regulated community. We sincerely hope that EPA has

10 learned a valuable lesson from its missteps on the

11 industrial boiler MACT regarding the achievability of

12 emission limits.

13 If EPA is unable to adopt the standard in a

14 timely fashion, or if it fails to adhere to the statute

15 and the rule is overturned, the public health benefits

16 will be delayed and states will be at a significant

17 disadvantage to meet their clean air act obligations;

18 most notably for the sulfur dioxide national ambient

19 air quality standard.

20 Again, I would like to thank EPA for holding

21 this hearing in Atlanta, and we will likely be

22 preparing more detailed comments for the docket.

23 MR. CLARK: Great. Great. Thank you very

24 much. Questions guys? Thank you.

25 Joy Kramer and Thelma Heywood please.
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1 Excuse me. Ms. Kramer, feel free to start.

2 MS. KRAMER: Good afternoon. I think it's

3 afternoon now. My name is Joy Kramer, K-R-A-M-E-R and

4 I am the Director of Programs for the Georgia Solar

5 Energy Association. We are membership supported non6 profit that represents over two thousand small

7 businesses, entrepreneurs, and concerned citizens in

8 Georgia who are benefitting from the deployment of

9 renewable energy and who care about clean air and

10 water.

11 Nationally, the renewable industry is growing

12 at twenty-six percent annually, while the overall

13 economy remains at a scant two percent growth rate.

14 Research has shown that the majority of those in

15 Georgia who are employed now full-time in the solar

16 industry come from sectors that were hardest hit with

17 the downturn in the economy; construction, engineering,

18 electrical, and HVAC.

19 These are not just sound bites. These are

20 real jobs.

21 You heard earlier about jobs in Putnam

22 County. While we applaud Georgia Power for creating

23 jobs in one county alone, solar energy produces jobs

24 all over Georgia and it produces more jobs per megawatt

25 than coal and nuclear by far with no environmental
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1 risk.

2 There are no solar spills. There are no

3 solar explosions and no solar leakage, solar leakage

4 into our waterways.

5 Here in Georgia, solar farms are being new

6 revenues to middle and north Georgia farmers. These

7 are dollars that would otherwise have gone to big

8 utilities.

9 The U.S. military has recognized the use of

10 fossil fuels as a national security risk and is

11 deploying solar throughout Afghanistan and Iraq. You

12 don't have to believe in climate change to want clean

13 air and water and to recognize the nationwide economic

14 benefits of energy [indecipherable -- coughing].

15 Whether it's big utilities, big oil, big

16 insurance, or big government, there seems to be a

17 universal belief that big is bad. It inhibits real,

18 true competition. New business opportunities, which

19 are the backbone of our economy and it has a limited

20 social conscience.

21 You've heard people call this a political

22 agenda and are encouraged

23 to look at the facts, yet big utilities have hidden the

24 true cost of coal for decades. The facts are indeed

25 hard to find and this is by design.
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1 We know what mercury and SO2 can do. I too

2 played with mercury as a child. I also developed

3 lymphoma in 2005 and nearly died. Can you relate the

4 two? Who knows. But through tighter and enforceable

5 restrictions, the EPA can take a giant step forward in

6 counting the true cost of coal as an energy generation

7 source and propel the renewable energy industry forward

8 towards a healthier and more vibrant future for our

9 children and grandchildren.

10 One last note about affordability. With big

11 investment comes big rewards. It will be costly to

12 implement these new standards, but with two billion in

13 profits last year, we feel like it's an affordable

14 thing for Southern Company to do.

15 Thank you very much for your time.

16 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Heywood.

17 MS. HEYWOOD: Good afternoon. My name is

18 Thelma, T-H-E-L-M-A Heywood, H-E-Y-W-O-O-D.

19 I'm looking at these lights, these tracks of

20 lights and apparently the message from President Lyndon

21 Johnson -- well, the sticker's missing over the light

22 switch to turn out the lights. There are other ways we

23 can cut, you know? I'm learning all kinds of ways.

24 I'm one of those hangers on by the fingernails. I'm

25 learning all kinds of ways to save.
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1 The room feels like a meat locker in here.

2 We can cut it ten degrees.

3 MR. CLARK: I'm, I'm with you on that.

4 MS. HEYWOOD: Thank you. I am a substitute

5 teacher in five elementary public schools. And I came

6 here -- I was compelled to come here when I learned

7 about this hearing and I thank you for having it.

8 I want to tell you about a scene that I saw

9 in a public elementary school in which there were nine

10 little children sitting on benches outside a school

11 clinic and they were, all of them, using nebulizers, so

12 that they could breathe with less pain. So that they

13 could breathe deeper and I have to tell you that, I've

14 never seen that many children using nebulizers before.

15 For those of you who don't know what a

16 nebulizer is, it's a device that has tubes and it has a

17 hose for you to put to your mouth with a mouth piece so

18 that you can mist air into your lungs with medication.

19 I did not know about nebulizers when I came

20 here. Neither did my daughter. She happens to be a

21 Type I juvenile diabetic. She's also a certified

22 educator in the State of Georgia.

23 After we came here, she started to cough.

24 She coughed and hacked, and coughed and hacked for

25 three months that summer before she started teaching.
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1 She finally cracked a rib.

2 Today, we know about nebulizers. We use

3 them. We know about inhalers. We had to learn to use

4 those too. She can't have the standard, the usual

5 treatment for asthma. She can't have cortisone because

6 of her diabetes so she truly suffers.

7 Along with the other children who miss

8 learning time, sitting outside that clinic on those

9 nebulizers.

10 I, I'm going to be mercifully brief and I'm

11 going to leave you with one thought. You might, if you

12 are a healthy individual, you might survive for a month

13 without food. You might -- well, your kidneys might

14 scream about it, but you might survive for a week

15 without fluids, but you will be brain dead within three

16 to four minutes without air. And that's the message

17 that I really wanted to get across to you.

18 Thank you so much for your time.

19 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much for coming to

20 speak to us and I guess no questions, so thank you.

21 Okay. Then our last two speakers before the

22 break would be Roger Mills and Sean Hutchins, please.

23 Are you Mr. Mills?

24 MR. MILLS: Roger Mills is my name,

25 R-O-G-E-R, M-I-L-L-S. I'm just a living breathing human
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1 being. I don't represent any organization, any

2 industry, any interest group, but only my children and

3 grandchildren.

4 As the EPA has pointed out, the existing

5 coal-fired and oil-fired electric utility plants, at

6 least until now, have been the largest unregulated

7 industrial source of air toxics.

8 You've determined that forty-four percent of

9 all of the coal-fired plants lack adequate pollution

10 control equipment.

11 The proposed toxic rule would, if

12 implemented, reduce emissions of mercury in burned coal

13 by ninety-one percent and therefore methyl mercury as

14 well, and reduce concentrations of fine particles as

15 well.

16 The technology to meet these standards is

17 already widely available and economically feasible to

18 meet on a continuous basis.

19 Please do not allow the standards to be

20 weakened. Do not allow further delay based on flawed

21 EEI reports or based on PR efforts by scare tactics of

22 utility companies and other lobbyists.

23 We've heard today things, for example, like

24 arguments that well this will only regulate a small

25 amount of the things that need to be regulated in the
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1 air. That, that the amount that's an immediately

2 environment compared to the amount in the whole world

3 is minuscule, but that's not a reason not to regulate

4 the amount that's here.

5 We've also heard speakers that have made

6 soul-searching pleas on behalf of low income people, on

7 behalf of consumers, on behalf of the unemployed, and

8 on behalf of persons of color. Who are making these

9 arguments? They're not people who themselves are low

10 income or who are unemployed or who are persons of

11 color. They are instead persons of private industry

12 falsely trying to use these sub-populations to further

13 delay and stop what's going to be good for everybody.

14 I ask you to go ahead, get it done, get it

15 done now and no further delay, no watering down.

16 Thank you.

17 I'd like to also request permission to revise

18 and extend my remarks --

19 MR. CLARK: Absolutely.

20 MR. MILLS: -- in written form subsequent to

21 the proceeding.

22 MR. CLARK: Absolutely.

23 MR. MILLS: Great. Thank you. Mr. Hutchins.

24 MR. HUTCHINS: My name is Sean Hutchins,

25 H-U-T-C-H-I-N-S. I'm from Berea College, well that's
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1 where I drove from, from Kentucky. I was born in

2 Bardstown, Kentucky. I'm majoring in technology and

3 industrial arts and I have a minor in sustainability

4 and environmental studies.

5 I grew up the son of an avid outdoors man and

6 he loved to fish, even if it were the dead of winter,

7 he would go out and cut a hole in the ice and he would

8 still fish. So naturally, we ate fish pretty much year

9 round as I was growing up; me, my mother, and my

10 father.

11 And it disturbs me, being a fisherman myself,

12 that I can't eat many of the fish that comes out of my

13 state's waters because our state ranks sixth among

14 mercury levels in our environment.

15 My mother had another son by my stepfather,

16 and his name is Alex. He has severe autism. He's

17 thirteen years old. She believes that this was caused

18 by mercury contamination from the fish. It could be.

19 It could not be, but it's already known that mercury

20 causes neurological development issues, memory

21 problems, and a slew of other health effects of which

22 you've heard very much of today.

23 She's a single mother of three and she's been

24 a strong advocate for autism awareness in Kentucky and

25 if these regulations were put into place, over ninety
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1 percent of mercury and much other highly toxic

2 chemicals will be removed from industrial output and

3 these regulations will also create a good number of

4 jobs both temporary construction jobs, and more

5 permanent utility jobs.

6 Profits should never take priority over

7 public health, over human lives. Mercury is being

8 pumped into our air and into our water. It affects us

9 all.

10 Thank you very much.

11 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. Any

12 questions guys? Okay. Thank you for your testimony

13 and thank everyone that has testified for taking time

14 out of your busy days to come and, and be with us. We

15 appreciate it very much. Especially those of you that

16 have come long distances and apparently paid high, high

17 amounts of parking, so anyway, we will reconvene the

18 hearing at two p.m. I'm being told. Okay. Two p.m.

19 Thank you.

20 (Lunch break from 1:00 p.m. until 2:05 p.m.)

21 MR. CLARK: All right. As soon as Rich is

22 ready, we'll go. Okay. I'd like to reconvene the

23 hearing and thank you all very much for coming and

24 attending public hearing on our proposed regulations to

25 reduce toxics -- mercury, and other air toxics from
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1 power plants.

2 I have a written statement that I read this

3 morning. I'm not going to go through the whole thing

4 here today. There's a copy of it out, out on the table

5 for those that would like to see it.

6 But I would like to talk a little bit about,

7 just very quickly, about the rule and about how we're

8 going to operate here.

9 This is the third of, of three public

10 hearings that we've been holding around the country.

11 We held one in Chicago and one in Philadelphia on, on

12 Tuesday and, and this is the third of the -- with me.

13 My name is Jeff Clark. I'm the Associate

14 Director for the EPA's Office of Air Quality Planning

15 and Standards which is located in Research Triangle

16 Park, North Carolina and we're the lead office

17 responsible for developing these rules.

18 Kevin Culligan is going to join us in a, in a

19 bit. He's been called away to do a Congressional

20 Briefing so, so he'll be back in a little bit to, to

21 sit with us as well. Bill Maxwell, from my office, is

22 the lead author of, of the rule and has been working on

23 this issue for at least, at least twenty-one years.

24 Certainly since the 1990 amendment. And then Carol

25 Kemper is Deputy Division Director for the, for Air
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1 Toxics and Pesticides here in EPA region four which

2 includes the surrounding eight states.

3 Again, short, short of reading the entire

4 statement, let me just say that currently there are no

5 existing federal requirements for power plants to limit

6 their emissions of toxic air pollutants like mercury

7 and arsenic and metals.

8 And the prior administration, EPA, in the

9 previous, prior administration had finalized a rule to

10 cut mercury pollution from power plants, but the DC

11 Circuit Court struck down that rule as illegal and

12 required us to develop standards that follow the law

13 and the science in order to protect human health and

14 the environment.

15 So we're accepting oral comments here today

16 and certainly if you have written comments that you'd

17 like to include, leave with us as well. We'd be happy

18 to take them either here for preferably leave them with

19 the folks out at the desk.

20 The public comment period for, for additional

21 written comments is -- goes until July the fifth and

22 these transcripts from these hearings will be included

23 in, in the docket for that -- the record for the rule

24 making as well.

25 We're scheduled to, under a consent decree
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1 with the Court, to issue a final rule by November the

2 16 of this year.

3 The way -- just for folks that

4 weren't here this morning, let me just how we're doing

5 this. We have a fairly full schedule of speakers and

6 so we're trying, for fairness to everybody to try to

7 hold folks to, to five minutes if we can and so we have

8 a light system here that you'll have a green light that

9 will last for four minutes while you speak and then it

10 turns to yellow which basically says you've got a

11 minute to sum up, and then it will start flashing red

12 which means if you haven't concluded, if you could

13 conclude then, that -- we appreciate that very much.

14 Most people were pretty good about that this morning, I

15 think.

16 With that, let me say we'll go ahead and

17 start and our first two speakers are already here with

18 us. I'm asking that you come up two at a time and, and

19 that both of you stay through the speak -- through,

20 through the other person's testimony as well, so that

21 way if we have any questions, we can do it in as least

22 disruptive way as possible.

23 Our first two speakers are Seandra Rawls and

24 Eriqah Foreman-Williams and they're here and if you --

25 when you state your name, if you could spell it for the
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1 court reporter, Rich, who as I said this morning is the

2 most important man in the room and if he's happy, we're

3 happy, so thank you. So Ms. Rawls.

4 MS. RAWLS: Sure. Good afternoon again. My

5 name is Seandra Rawls, S-E-A-N-D-R-A, R-A-W-L-S and I'm

6 the Diversity and Community Partnership's Coordinator

7 for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy based here

8 in Atlanta, Georgia.

9 As my colleague stated this morning, we are a

10 regional organization representing citizens across the

11 heavily coal dependent states of the southeast.

12 I am here today in support of EPA's authority

13 and decision to set strong national standards for

14 mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants that

15 will protect public health and environmental health

16 especially for low income families and communities of

17 color who suffer more from mercury impacts than others.

18 Mercury is a potent toxin and exposures can

19 cause a variety of health problems from learning

20 disorders to heart attacks.

21 A research summary by EPA shows that mercury

22 exposure can have even greater impacts on certain

23 groups of recreational and subsistence anglers,

24 including low income southeaster white populations, low

25 income southeastern African Americans, low income women
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1 across the country and Hispanics across the country.

2 Low income southeastern African Americans are

3 particularly at risk losing as many as twelve IQ points

4 due to mercury exposure.

5 Humans are exposed to the most toxic form of

6 mercury pollution when it accumulates in watersheds and

7 enters our bodies through the fish we eat. African

8 Americans are avid fishermen and low income African

9 Americans, in particular, are more likely to eat what

10 they catch, eat more of it and be less aware of health

11 advisories than others.

12 Consequently, African Americans have higher

13 exposure to mercury. According to a report written by

14 a coalition of environmental justice leaders and

15 advocates, titled Air of Injustice, in 1996 there were

16 one point eight million licensed African Americans

17 anglers who spent over eight hundred and thirteen

18 million dollars on fishing trips and equipment and this

19 number doesn't include the millions of African

20 Americans fishermen who may not have registered for

21 fishing licenses nor reported their expenditures.

22 But exposure is not restricted only to those

23 who fish and consume the catch. According to a recent

24 report from the American Lung Association, coal-fired

25 utility power plants produce more hazardous air
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1 pollution in the U.S. than any other industrial

2 pollution sources, accounting for ninety-nine percent

3 of all U.S. mercury emissions from the power sector.

4 People living near coal-fired power plants

5 have an increased risk of exposure and children,

6 seniors, pregnant women and those who have chronic

7 diseases face even higher risks.

8 What's more, African Americans are more likely

9 to live near coal-fired power plants and power plant

10 waste sites.

11 The Air of Injustice Report also states that

12 sixty-eight percent of African Americans live within

13 thirty miles of a coal plant as opposed to fifty-six

14 percent of whites and that African Americans comprise

15 thirteen percent of the U.S. population, they account

16 for seventeen percent of the population living within

17 five miles of power plant waste sites.

18 EPA Administrator Jackson has made

19 environmental justice a priority and current -- and

20 encourages all EPA staff to focus efforts that will

21 help people in underserved and highly vulnerable

22 populations.

23 A quick complete approval of this draft will

24 one of the most significant moves she can make to truly

25 protect at risk individuals from undue environmental
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1 harms.

2 For these reasons and more, we urge EPA to

3 establish a strong rule to set limits on mercury

4 pollution and to ensure the best standards become law

5 to protect all of us from life threatening pollution

6 that power plants currently spew into our air and

7 water.

8 I'd like to thank EPA for convening an open

9 comment process to involve all stakeholders impacted

10 by this rule and for the opportunity to provide input

11 into the rule making for new mercury standards.

12 Thank you.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Williams.

14 MS. WILLIAMS: Thank you very much. My name

15 Eriqah, Foreman-Williams. First Eriqah, E-R-I-Q-A-H,

16 last name Foreman-Williams, F-O-R-E-M-A-N -

17 W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S.

18 I am the Georgia Coal Diversity Organizer for

19 the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. We're an

20 organization that focuses on advocating for clean

21 energy choices that will ensure clean, safe, and

22 healthy communities.

23 The Clean Air Act Amendments, which are

24 almost older than me, are supposed to do just that.

25 Keep me and all other young people safe and healthy.
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1 However, twenty years later, I find myself here today

2 fighting for my right to breathe clean air; a battle

3 seemingly fought and won with the Act and the 1990

4 Amendments, but still up for debate.

5 Now as a woman and looking forward to one day

6 having a family of my own, I have grown more concerned

7 about my well-being and that of future generations.

8 Working for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy has

9 given me a first -- has given me firsthand experience

10 on the impacts that mercury pollution has on public

11 health, especially for lower income families and

12 communities of color.

13 I've learned that African Americans are

14 disproportionately impacted by pollution from coal

15 plants and suffer from many environmental injustices.

16 A study by Energy Justice dot net shows that,

17 as Seandra said, in 1996, one point eight million

18 African Americans were licensed fishermen. When coal

19 plants deposit this dangerous toxin into waterways, not

20 only can it endanger the lives of fishermen, but the

21 lives of their families as well.

22 Mercury pollution also extends beyond the

23 fishermen. When mercury is deposited in the water, it

24 accumulates in fish tissue, so it isn't just fishermen

25 who are in and around the water that are at risk, but
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1 anybody who regularly eats fish, particularly young

2 children and expectant or breast feeding mothers.

3 Just by stopping at a local diner for a fish

4 dinner on a trip from Atlanta to Savannah can increase

5 your exposure and your risk.

6 As a future mother of hopefully a big,

7 healthy family, I support EPA's decision to regulate

8 mercury disposal.

9 I don't want to have to worry about my

10 children's safety or deny them the opportunity to swim

11 in a local lake near our house or eat the fish we catch

12 there. I want to someday be able to breast feed my

13 children and not worry about whether or not the

14 nutrition I think I'm giving them is actually dangerous

15 to their health.

16 This all seems very surreal at times and

17 sometimes I feel hopeless, but being here today reminds

18 me that you, the EPA, has the authority and the power

19 to act in the best interest of my and everyone's

20 health.

21 By putting a cap on mercury emissions, we can

22 all be protected against excessive amount of exposure

23 and therefore have one less environmental issue to

24 worry about.

25 Thank you very much.
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1 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Any

2 questions, folks? Appreciate your testimony very much.

3 Thank you.

4 Next two speakers please, Emily Enderle. I

5 hope that's close, and Danny Schweinhart and you can

6 correct me on the pronunciation, so. Thank you

7 ma'am -- because how would I know? Okay. Ms. Enderle,

8 if you'll feel free when you're ready.

9 MS. ENDERLE: Thank you. My name is Emily

10 Enderle, last name spelled, E-N-D-E-R-L-E and I'm here

11 to express my support for the EPA to finalize a

12 reducing toxic air emissions from power plants standard

13 and ensuring that it's at least as stringent as that

14 has been proposed.

15 On behalf of the two hundred and twenty

16 thousand supporters of Earth Justice, I am here to

17 thank the EPA for hosting a hearing in Atlanta,

18 especially in the heart of EPA region four.

19 The burden of coal combustion and ultimately

20 the threat of diseases and death brought about by air

21 pollution is borne unequally by people of color and low

22 income communities and that can clearly be seen in

23 region four.

24 I'm here as a legislative representative in

25 the Washington D.C. office of Earth Justice, the
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1 nation's largest non-profit environmental law firm, and

2 also as a concerned citizen, that has seen the impacts

3 of poor, poor air quality on the people that I love.

4 I spent much of my formative years in a rural

5 town in Ohio. My two constant companions were my

6 sister and her inhaler.

7 I also spent two years teaching severely

8 behaviorally handicapped students in Loraine, Ohio, and

9 what we've seen is autism, ADHD, and other intellectual

10 and developmental disorders are on the rise and there

11 have been increasing peer reviewed studies that

12 demonstrate the linkage between exposure to toxic

13 chemicals and those particular ailments.

14 My sister and a lot of my students suffered

15 from chronic asthma even though we lived in a rural

16 part of Ohio. Our air quality was definitely

17 negatively impacted everyday from pollution coming from

18 coal-fired power plants throughout the state.

19 As many of you know, and many have mentioned,

20 power plants are the largest source of many and

21 dangerous air pollutants. They are responsible for

22 fifty percent of mercury emissions, over fifty percent

23 of acid gas emissions and about twenty-five percent of

24 toxic metal emissions in the United States.

25 Pollutants like arsenic, chromium and nickel
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1 can cause cancer.

2 Exposure to fine particulate pollution leads

3 to premature death, heart attacks, bronchitis and

4 asthma episodes.

5 Despite the availability of proven control

6 technologies and more than twenty years since the 1990

7 Clean Air Act Amendments were passed, there's still no

8 existing federal standards that require power plants to

9 limit their toxic air emissions for things like

10 mercury, arsenic, and other metals.

11 Watching a loved one suffer through an asthma

12 attack where their life relies on access to an inhaler

13 is harrowing and something I would never wish on

14 anyone.

15 The mercury air toxics rule that has been

16 proposed by the EPA will prevent as many as a hundred

17 and ten thousand asthma attacks every year. That is

18 countless people who will not have to struggle to

19 breathe.

20 Other health benefits include saving

21 seventeen thousand lives each year, preventing up to

22 eleven thousand heart attacks each year, eliminating

23 twelve thousand, two hundred hospitalizations and

24 emergency room visits every year. That's eight hundred

25 and fifty thousand days when people don't have to miss
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1 work every year to either take care of themselves or

2 their family members and it's also five point one

3 million days where people must restrict their

4 activities that will be avoided.

5 These health benefits amount to a savings as

6 large as one hundred and forty billion dollars or

7 thirteen dollars for each dollar invested each year in

8 savings to the public.

9 Additionally, EPA estimates the proposed rule

10 will provide employment for thousands by supporting a

11 thirty-one thousand short-term construction jobs and

12 nine thousand long-term utility jobs. These include

13 jobs, manufacturing, installing, and maintaining the

14 emission control technology.

15 I have particular interest in seeing power

16 plants being cleaned up in region four, as the region

17 is now the home for my asthmatic sister who is pregnant

18 and my nephew.

19 It's also a region where power plants are

20 disproportionately impacting communities of color and

21 low income communities in even higher numbers than the

22 national average.

23 The air pollution from coal-fired power

24 plants pose a considerable threat to many communities,

25 but especially those where they're already over
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1 burdened by pollution.

2 As we've heard today, coal plants are

3 disproportionately located in areas with high

4 percentages of people of color and low income

5 communities. We have sixty-eight percent of the

6 African Americans population living within thirty miles

7 of the power plant.

8 Earth Justice has done a pretty significant

9 environmental justice assessment of where coal-fired

10 power plants are located and the different types of

11 populations that are around them.

12 One of the things I will be submitting with

13 my comments and then also with our more substantive

14 comments are several maps, which show these are

15 specific to Atlanta, where the coal-fired power plants

16 are in the Atlanta area and then also where you see

17 things like hazardous air pollutants and so you can see

18 there's a direct correlation between where those are

19 located, where low-income communities are, where people

20 of color are and where the pollution is.

21 Ultimately, region four, I think is a

22 particularly site to host a hearing like this because

23 it definitely illustrates exactly this point; people

24 that are below income and are communities of color are

25 definitely being disproportionately impacted by this
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1 air pollution and I'm here again to signal the support

2 from Earth Justice, our two hundred thousand plus

3 supporters and ask you guys to finalize a rule that

4 really is health protective.

5 Thank you.

6 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you very much.

7 Mr. Schweinhart.

8 MR. SCHWEINHART: My name is Danny

9 Schweinhart, S-C-H-W-E-I-N-H-A-R-T. I'm from

10 Louisville, Kentucky. I live in a neighborhood called

11 Riverside Gardens. It's adjacent to a power plant,

12 Cane Run Power Plant.

13 The stuff that comes out of the stack, comes

14 over our neighborhood and drops on our, on our cars, in

15 our pools, on snow, everything. That's something our

16 parents told us when we was kids, don't eat that brown

17 snow. Also told us not to eat yellow snow either.

18 But, but we're plagued with problems down

19 there, especially from the plant. We've got enough

20 pollution down there.

21 LG&E -- Kathy Little lives right

22 across the street and they have a sixteen story

23 mountain of that coal ash that they piled up. It's

24 almost full. Now they've applied for a permit to put

25 another coal ash on their property, which is right next
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1 door to our, our neighborhood and you know, we've got

2 enough pollution down there. We've got rubber town to

3 the side of us, nothing but chemical companies.

4 At the end of our neighborhood, we've got

5 Lee's [phonetic] Lane landfill. Way back in the

6 sixties and seventies, illegal dumping was put back

7 there. The owner would charge a hundred dollars to

8 open the gates at twelve o'clock midnight and a hundred

9 dollars, truck after truck, after truck come in and

10 dump barrels.

11 In 1985, they -- the Superfund

12 came in and clean these barrels out. They still find

13 them barrels back there.

14 We used to fish the Ohio River. We used to

15 bring home the fish that we ate. We used to hunt

16 squirrel, I mean shoot squirrels back there and we ate

17 the squirrels. As a kid growing up, I had learning

18 disabilities. I didn't do good in school and a lot of

19 the people in the neighborhood also. My dad, a super

20 smart guy, book smart, common sense smart, made

21 straight A's through school and college. I made

22 nothing but C's, and D's, and F's. In fact, one time

23 he talked--he was helping me with my homework and he

24 got frustrated with me and he said, I can't believe a

25 son of mine is so damn dumb. You know, that's
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1 something that a, that a kid don't want to hear from

2 his parents.

3 There are several deaths in our neighborhood

4 of cancer. My sister just died of lung cancer a year

5 ago. My uncles died of lung cancer. His son died at

6 age of eight of brain cancer. It, it's -- we've just

7 got so much pollution, we don't need any more.

8 And that's about all I got to say.

9 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you. What, what is

10 the power plant that you said that's, that's near you?

11 MR. SCHWEINHART: The nearest one nearest me

12 is Hexion.

13 MR. CLARK: Hexion.

14 MR. SCHWEINHART: That's right next door to

15 our neighborhood to one side.

16 We've already gotten them to clean up some of

17 their problems that we've been having with them. We'd

18 just like to see the other companies do the same thing.

19 MR. CLARK: Okay. Okay thank you. Thank

20 you, thank you both very much for coming.

21 Okay. Alexei Laushkin and Reverend Richard

22 Cizik, Cizik. Cizik, thank you. Both good candidates

23 for spelling, I think.

24 MR. LAUSHKIN: Thank you and good afternoon.

25 MR. CLARK: Sure.
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1 MR. LAUSHKIN: My name is Alexei Laushkin and

2 I'm speaking to you today, today as a citizen of the

3 State of Virginia.

4 MR. CLARK: And you will spell it for, for

5 the court reporter?

6 MR. LAUSHKIN: Sure.

7 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

8 MR. LAUSHKIN: Alexei, A-L-E-X-E-I, Laushkin,

9 L-A-U-S-H-K-I-N.

10 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

11 MR. LAUSHKIN: Again, I'm speaking to you

12 today as a citizen of the State of Virginia and a

13 Senior Director of Communications for the Evangelical

14 Environmental Network, an organization of Christians

15 who advocate care for God's creation.

16 I live in Alexandria, Virginia, with my wife

17 Cassandra.

18 Thank you for giving me the opportunity to

19 testify today in support of EPA's proposed standards on

20 mercury emissions.

21 My home state of Virginia faces

22 disproportionate impacts from mercury deposited from

23 local sources.

24 In some parts of the state, over half of all

25 the mercury is coming from local sources of emission.
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1 Of this number, over fifty percent of domestic

2 anthropogenic mercury emissions come from coal burning

3 power plants making them the largest source.

4 The proposed mercury rule would reduce over

5 eighty percent of mercury from said power plants and

6 over half of the sulfur dioxide from those plants. The

7 good news is that some power plants from around the

8 country already have this sort of technology that would

9 allow them to comply with this proposed rule.

10 The industry working together with local

11 communities can do better, and indeed we all must do

12 better to ensure the health of our children.

13 As a local issue, Virginians have a vested

14 interest in lowering the amount of mercury pollution in

15 our local environments. In fact, our fellow

16 southeastern states would stand to benefit the most,

17 from my perspective, from the EPA's proposed rule.

18 Mercury turns up in the fish we eat. Almost

19 every state in the nation has a mercury catch warning

20 restricting and limiting the amount of fish we can eat

21 from our local streams.

22 In a business as usual approach, can you

23 imagine that the very activity your grandfathers, my

24 grandfather, all of our grandfathers took us out

25 towards, going fishing and then cooking that fish, that
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1 we won't be able to do that with our grandchildren and

2 that our children's children won't be able to do that

3 either in a business as usual approach.

4 Will we, as Francis Schaeffer, famous

5 evangelical apologist, once said in his Pollution and

6 the Death of Man become a society that has killed its

7 very soul in pursuit of things that will never satisfy

8 him? Who are we willing to sacrifice for our own ways?

9 I want to explain for a moment why the

10 evangelical community is here and engaged in this

11 important issue.

12 One of the issues that is very important to

13 the evangelical community is the matter of life. Each

14 year, over one point two million babies are terminated

15 in the United States. As a pro-life evangelical, our

16 community has been epitomized, but also polarized by

17 that issue.

18 We have become disproportionately political

19 in our response to this local issue of life. In turn,

20 we have polarized many communities against our witness.

21 We have not sought to counsel and console as much as

22 lecture others. We ought to have taken stock of our

23 private response before speaking so vehemently in the

24 public square on life issues.

25 I say all of this because it's important for
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1 you to realize that as a pro-life organization, EEN

2 takes an additional approach. For us, our advocacy in

3 speaking out on mercury is outflow of this life

4 perspective.

5 In our perspective, up to one in six

6 children, over seven hundred thousand a year are born

7 with unsafe amounts of mercury toxin in their blood.

8 Even one unborn child being impacted by

9 mercury pollution is enough for us to act as a society.

10 Life is precious. Life is sacred and should be valued.

11 Evangelicals are engaged on this sort of

12 issue because it is a life related issue. Several

13 prominent groups and ministries are, are joining with

14 us and they'll be part of the statements we submit, to

15 ask the EPA to do what it long ago should have done;

16 reduce the amount of mercury toxin in our environment.

17 Mercury is unlike some toxins. Once it is

18 released, it cannot be easily cleaned up in the

19 environment. It is a cumulative toxin, therefore the

20 urgency to act is clear.

21 I want to close with this. Our scriptures

22 often teach us that in His justice, God has a special

23 concern for the poor, for the widow, the orphan, the

24 [indecipherable], the oppressed and for little

25 children. In other words, Christian justice demand
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1 that we give special attention to those whom Jesus

2 calls the least of these brothers of mine. Those least

3 able to protect themselves.

4 In fact, in our tradition, we believe that we

5 do -- what we do unto the least of these, we do unto

6 Jesus himself.

7 We cannot, as a community, pass by while our

8 fellows are harmed. We cannot pass this problem on to

9 another generation. For the sake of our children, we

10 at EEN urge you to act to defend those least able to,

11 to defend themselves.

12 Thank you.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much.

14 REVEREND CIZIK: Good afternoon. My name is

15 Richard Cizik, it's R-I-C-H-A-R-D, C-I-Z-I-K. Thank

16 you. It's a privilege to be here.

17 I'm representing the New Evangelical

18 Partnership for the Common Good, the President of this

19 organization which is a faith-based, non-profit

20 offering of renewed Christian public witness for the

21 sake of the gospel and the common good.

22 As an Evangelical Minister, I began speaking

23 out against mercury poisoning in 2002 when I first

24 became aware of the issue. At the time, I was Vice

25 President for Governmental Affairs of the National
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1 Association of Evangelicals, the largest organization

2 of its kind in the United States.

3 But I was in that role for twenty-eight

4 years. Most of that time, almost all of it, I was

5 completely unaware of the impacts of coal burning

6 utility plants upon the nation's public health and for

7 that I am sorry and I apologize to my constituency.

8 Something changed and I would like to explain

9 why; what changed. In 2007, I was approached by my

10 friends at Rachel's Network, an environmental group of

11 women in leadership, to participate in the Human Toxome

12 Project. It was a study conducted by the Environmental

13 Working Group in collaboration with Common Will, on the

14 toxic chemicals in the human body.

15 In agreeing, in agreeing to participate in

16 the study, according to its final report, I became "one

17 of only a small number of people in the world to know a

18 portion of my personal body burden of industrial

19 chemicals, called the Human Toxome."

20 Using five state of the art laboratories

21 around the globe, the human project performed analysis

22 of my blood and urine, reviewed it, synthesized the

23 data from scientific literature on the toxicity and

24 possible exposure sources for the contaminants studied.

25 Well, the results of the test, as I indicated
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1 changed me and my thinking because it found that of the

2 eighty-four industrial compounds that I was tested for,

3 I was found to have varying levels of thirty-nine of

4 those eighty-nine industrial compounds; pollutants and

5 other chemicals tested, in my body including chemicals

6 linked to reproductive toxicity and fertility problems,

7 brain and nervous system toxicity and hormone activity.

8 For purposes of this hearing, my levels of

9 mercury were in the highest levels possible. According

10 to national studies of the sort, eighty-seven

11 percentile nationally, which means only thirteen

12 percent of the public has higher levels of mercury in

13 their body than I do.

14 Methyl mercury levels were also high, but not

15 as high as that set for pregnant or nursing women and

16 young children to protect against damage, damaging

17 their developing brains, but high enough, according to

18 the National Academy of Scientists, for mercury,

19 "mercury driven risks for immune disorders and

20 cardiovascular diseases."

21 Now as a whole, I had all kinds of chemicals

22 in my body, I found. Almost a human toxic waste dump,

23 if you will. Pretty serious stuff. Low levels of

24 alkylphenols and surfactants, moderate levels of lead,

25 teflons, perfluorochemicals, plasticides, most
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1 importantly high levels of bromide fire retardants,

2 mercury, and methyl mercury.

3 According to the Human Toxome Project, "We

4 know the impacts on unborn babies of mercury poisoning,

5 but we are less aware of the mercury impacts that coal

6 burning utility plants have on non-pregnant adults."

7 And the scientist in the report wrote that, "We are

8 only beginning to study the health effects of chronic

9 exposure to chemical mixtures and while studies

10 strongly demonstrate the role chemicals play and a host

11 of health problems. Risk to an individual are largely

12 unknown. Genetics, timing and dose all play a role.

13 Now for me and my family, when I put together

14 what were the known risk from all of the chemicals and

15 the like in my body and what we ourselves had

16 experienced over these many decades, it all began to

17 add up. Infertility, auditory processing problems,

18 other forms of disability, developmental disability by

19 my children.

20 And so I ask, how many other families are

21 suffering unknowingly because their government has

22 stalled action to protect the public against a known

23 threat to public health? I ask. How many other

24 families are similarly being impacted?

25 And I find it appalling and almost
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1 incomprehensible that it's taken so many years, two

2 decades, to get to this place.

3 And finally, compliments to the environmental

4 leadership of President Obama, a courageous

5 administrator who is the head of EPA. We are now set,

6 I believe, to take action and I urge you to do so

7 because it's not just the unborn that my colleague and

8 friend Alexei Laushkin has witnessed to today that are

9 impacted. It adults such as myself.

10 To repeat, the National Academy of Sciences

11 found that, "Mercury driven risks for immune disorders

12 and cardiovascular disease occurs at even low levels of

13 exposure."

14 In sum, we've waited way too long for EPA

15 action. In fact, it's just astonishing, appalling,

16 we've had to wait so long, so I urge you to rule on the

17 mercury poisoning rule without delay. Implement it

18 without delay.

19 And I thank you for being here.

20 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Thank you both very

21 much. Appreciate it.

22 Our next two speakers please, Glen Hooks and

23 Katherine Cummings. Okay. Mr. Hooks.

24 MR. HOOKS: Good afternoon. Hi. My name is

25 Glen Hooks. It's spelled G-L-E-N, H-O-O-K-S and I work
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1 on coal and clean energy issues for the Sierra Club.

2 I'm not from Georgia, but I hope you'll

3 excuse me because I'm also from the region. I'm from

4 Arkansas and I've driven up here or come up here to

5 express my support for the mercury rule.

6 I don't know how many people in the room have

7 had the opportunity to go to Arkansas. We're known as

8 the natural state, that's home to fifty-two state

9 parks, two national forests, one national river, and

10 four coal-fired power plants.

11 I'm a lifelong southerner and born and

12 raised in Arkansas and we've heard a lot today about

13 statistics that the number of lives that this rule

14 would save. I don't want to repeat that. I want to

15 talk a little bit more personally.

16 I grew up fishing with my grandfather. I

17 grew up fishing on Lake

18 Conway with both my grandparents really, then my

19 father. And now I have two sons and when we go to Lake

20 Conway, we see signs that say be careful about the fish

21 that you eat out of Lake Conway because of the mercury

22 issue. It's unhealthy and dangerous levels of mercury

23 in our fish in Lake Conway and most of it is from power

24 plants.

25 This region, the place I call home, this
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1 region, the south, is home to an astounding amount of

2 dirty coal-fired power plants and because my children

3 and I live in the south where most of the coal-fired

4 power plants like effective mercury controls, we are at

5 risk.

6 And let's just be straight about it. I think

7 frankly that's a ridiculous situation to be in. Why

8 should children in the south be poisoned more than

9 children in other parts of the country? Well, frankly

10 they should not.

11 We need a standard rule to dramatically

12 reduce the amount of mercury pollution from power

13 plants and that's why I'm here supporting this rule

14 today.

15 We do have the technology to reduce this.

16 This is just not something where we're all hoping and

17 praying that we develop it someday. Some mercury --

18 some power plants have it, some don't. They all should

19 have it. We have the technology to make a dramatic

20 improvement in people's lives.

21 It really comes down to a public policy

22 decision. I think everyone in this room agrees that we

23 need energy. The question is how many deaths will we

24 allow in the product of that energy. Stopping or

25 dramatically reducing poisonous mercury pollution is a
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1 no-brainer.

2 Now, I want to respond to some testimony I

3 heard before the break from someone who was sitting at

4 this table, like I am, who made the observation via

5 power point that air quality in this country had

6 improved dramatically over the last fifty years. I

7 agree with that.

8 The speaker credited largely that air

9 improvement, air quality improvement to technological

10 innovation and I think that she left one incredibly

11 important piece out, which is effective regulation.

12 It's kind of a truism or almost a clich, that

13 nobody ever does the right thing just because it's the

14 right thing to do. I think that applies a lot to the

15 power industry. Unless there's effective regulation

16 that forces industry to clean up its act, it doesn't

17 happen in an effective way.

18 Every major environmental law in the history

19 of this country has been fought tooth and nail by

20 industry and when the regulations pass and the power

21 companies are forced to comply, four things happen.

22 One, they are able to comply and do it well.

23 Two, the sky does not fall.

24 Three, public health improves dramatically.

25 And then four, industry pats itself on the
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1 back for how environmentally minded they've been even

2 though they were required to do so, and that's why they

3 acted.

4 I think and I believe that effective

5 regulation is the way to clean up the environment and

6 the air in this country and I applaud the EPA for

7 coming forward with this very courageous rule.

8 The bottom line is the coal industry and the

9 power industry in this country should be forced to

10 everything possible to clean up its, clean up their

11 emissions. This rule will force them to do so and I

12 think we'll all be a lot better off when that happens.

13 I support the rule and I really applaud you for putting

14 it forward.

15 And I thank you for the opportunity to speak

16 today.

17 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Ms. Cummings.

18 MS. HELMS-CUMMINGS: I'm Katherine Helms19 Cummings and it's Katherine, K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, Helms

20 is H-E-L-M-S and Cummings, C-U-M-M-I-N-G-S.

21 I am here -- I was the founding President of

22 an organization in my community called the Fall Line

23 Alliance for Clean Environment and that group will be

24 submitting comments as an organization, but I'm here

25 today just as a citizen.
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1 I appreciate this opportunity. I'm glad

2 you're here in Atlanta and I commend you and thank you

3 for taking this critical step to protect the health of

4 the families in our country.

5 As a grandmother, I think it's wrong to tell

6 a four and a half year old child that the fish that she

7 and her three year old brother, if they're lucky enough

8 that day to catch in the Ogeechee River that runs

9 through our family's farm is so full of pollution that

10 they can't eat any of it? No child should have to be

11 on a catch and release program just because they like

12 to have fun outside with their family.

13 And it's wrong for me to not say that I think

14 it's wrong.

15 As a mother of a child who grew up with

16 asthma, there's nothing more horrifying than being

17 helpless and watching your child struggle for a full

18 breath of air.

19 And about eight weeks post cancer treatment,

20 as a new survivor, I have an obligation to be proactive

21 in my own healthcare and maintaining my health, but the

22 air that I breathe everyday is already laden with

23 mercury and other cancer causing toxins.

24 These national standards to address mercury

25 emissions will reduce twenty thousand pounds of mercury
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1 that are puffed into our airways in the, in the

2 southeast as a result of almost three hundred coal

3 fired power plants that we currently have.

4 We need to bring those existing plants into

5 the fold and, and require them to operate under higher

6 standards for emissions. My friends and my family have

7 everything to gain by having these standards in place.

8 Our home is about eight miles north of a

9 proposed coal-fired power plant. The seventh

10 generation family farm that we have, where a black

11 water river runs through the property, is about eight

12 miles to the east.

13 That plant right now would, would release

14 sixty-three pounds of mercury into the air every year

15 if it's ever built and put online. What doesn't land

16 in our lungs, or on the trees and the plants in our

17 gardens, will end up in our water, in our streams and

18 in our rivers.

19 Our streams are already so polluted, at least

20 the Ogeechee River is so full of mercury now that a

21 woman of childbearing age is advised not to eat any of

22 the fish that come from that river.

23 That's a significant portion of a woman's

24 life. And there are lots of people in rural Georgia

25 who rely on what's in those streams and rivers as part
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1 of their food budget.

2 Cleaner safer air to breathe will also serve

3 as a significant means of cleaning up the mercury laden

4 waterways that we have in the southeast. Cleaner,

5 healthier fish, meaning that every child learning how

6 to fish, can look forward to eating that fish at the

7 end of the day.

8 We cheat our children and we also cheat

9 ourselves from sharing the traditions and the knowledge

10 that we value if our children are unable to do that

11 with us.

12 So without reservation, I urge the adoption

13 and enforcement of strong national clean air standards

14 and I appreciate the opportunity to share my concerns

15 with you.

16 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much. And no

17 questions so thank you.

18 Next two speakers please, Midge Sweet and Lyn

19 Redwood.

20 MS. SWEET: Good afternoon.

21 MR. CLARK: Hi.

22 MS. SWEET: My name is Midge Sweet,

23 M-I-D-G-E, Sweet, S-W-E-E-T.

24 Thank you for holding these important

25 hearings to gather information from people regarding
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1 the proposed rule to limit mercury and other toxic air

2 pollutants from emissions from power plants and thank

3 you to Mr. Maxwell for working on this for so long,

4 Mr. Clark for supporting that work and now it's time to

5 close this project out and get these rules passed.

6 I come here as Director of Georgians for

7 Smart Energy, a Coalition of Community, Business and

8 Environmental Groups and as a mother and recent

9 grandmother, and I support stringent limits on

10 hazardous air pollutants such as mercury.

11 I applaud your efforts and urge you to

12 establish and enforce rigorous mercury limits that are

13 protective of our health as best -- especially the

14 health of our children.

15 Decades ago when my husband John and I became

16 parents, we made sure that our children ate healthy

17 food. We ate fish at least twice a week during most of

18 the year because of its nutritional benefits and at the

19 time, great low cost, and in the summer, John, an avid

20 fisherman, took the kids fishing both in Georgia and in

21 Michigan where he hails from.

22 When they caught fish, we ate them happily at

23 all times of the day. As Katherine pointed out because

24 when you're lucky enough to get some fish, you want to

25 eat it.
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1 In Georgia they caught and ate many fish from

2 the wonderful rivers crisscrossing our state and when

3 they were very young kids, caught fish from the small

4 lakes and rivers in northern Michigan on our annual

5 summertime visit. And as you can see on the attached

6 photos that I was sharing with you, their joy in

7 catching these fish was really stupendous.

8 At that time, I had no idea that mercury

9 posed the danger that I now it does. I am very

10 concerned about mercury in our fish, and it affects on

11 our children's physical and mental health.

12 Working with Georgians for Smart Energy, I

13 have learned about the significant threat posed by

14 mercury, particularly in Georgia's uniquely highly

15 acidic black water systems which convert mercury to the

16 highly toxic methyl mercury which is absorbed aquatic

17 organisms and then accumulates in fish tissues

18 poisoning them and the animals that eat them and

19 causing all sorts of problems including reduced

20 fertility and reproductive failure.

21 The State of Georgia has issued guidelines to

22 limit the consumption of at least one fish species in

23 every section of the Chattahoochee River, right outside

24 our door here, due to mercury contamination and the

25 Flint River where my family paddled very often and
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1 caught fish is contaminated from stem to stern.

2 On the Satilla River, a black water river in

3 south Georgia, catfish over thirty inches are under a

4 do not eat at all advisory regardless of age or gender

5 or reproductive status.

6 It's shameful that here in America, the land

7 of abundance that we find ourselves unable to eat the

8 fish that we catch without worrying about their

9 toxicity of all things. And find ourselves concerned

10 about the fine particulate matter in the very air that

11 our children breathe.

12 It is shameful that this preventable

13 situation, dirty air and toxic water from dirty air,

14 exists.

15 We can and we must change.

16 This summer, you will see on that picture, my

17 deliciously chubby granddaughter of six months will

18 join us on our summer fishing trip and I am counting on

19 you, the Environmental Protection Agency, to set

20 mercury limits so that she may eat fish freely and

21 splash in the waters without concern. I ask you to

22 summon the courage to look beyond the short-term

23 complaints that I'm sure that you will get from

24 industry and to prioritize our health.

25 As I traveled Georgia talking about pollution
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1 free economic opportunities that solar and wind energy

2 can bring to our state, I have sadly wondered at our

3 state's leaders reluctance to set renewable energy

4 standards and to embrace the American ethos when it

5 comes to energy policy.

6 GSE sees answers to our energy problems in

7 the very American values of innovation and creativity

8 and hard work. However, I find that I must rely on

9 independent science-based federal policy and rule

10 making to ensure that families are protected from toxic

11 pollution from the ten current coal plants in Georgia

12 that are causing asthma attacks and that limit the fish

13 we can safely consume.

14 We ask that the U.S. Environmental Protection

15 Agency regulate mercury and issue strong rules to

16 reduce emissions of toxic air pollution, pollutants

17 from power plants.

18 Thank you very much.

19 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Ms. Redwood.

20 MS. REDWOOD: Hi. Thank you. My name is Lyn

21 Redwood, it's spelled L-Y-N, last name is R-E-D-W-O-O-D

22 and I'm here representing the Coalition for Safe Minds,

23 Sensible Action for Ending Mercury Induced Neurological

24 Disorders.

25 Today, America faces a crisis of epidemic
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1 proportions. One that threatens the livelihood of our

2 country and the core of our future and it involves our

3 children.

4 They are sick. I see them every day in the

5 grocery store, in the post office and in my son's

6 school and as the parent of a child who suffered with

7 mercury toxicity and autism, I instinctively recognize

8 their illness and their disability.

9 Autism has increased dramatically from one to

10 two per ten thousand when I was a teenager to one in

11 every one hundred and ten children today.

12 Since autism affects boys more times, more

13 frequently than girls, that equates to approximately

14 one in every seventy U.S. boys today having autism.

15 Better recognition of the disorder or a diagnostic

16 substitution fails to explain this dramatic increase.

17 ADD, ADHD, a completely new entity from when

18 I was a child has also reached epidemic proportions and

19 currently effects approximately three point five

20 million children.

21 Asthma has increased three hundred percent

22 over the past two decades and kills four thousand

23 individuals per year and is the leading cause of school

24 absenteeism.

25 Allergies have increased four hundred
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1 percent.

2 When you add up all these numbers, it comes

3 up to twenty million children, almost one third of all

4 American children being sick.

5 Genetics alone is not capable of causing such

6 a dramatic change in our children's health over the

7 past few decades and scientists today agree that it

8 must be a combination of both genetic susceptibility

9 combined with an environmental trigger that's causing

10 our children to be so sick.

11 Recent research by Dr. Jill James of Arkansas

12 Children's Hospital Research Institute documented that

13 children with autism were more vulnerable to

14 environmental pollutants because they have lower levels

15 of glutathione, which is the body's natural defense for

16 excreting environmental pollutants so they don't cause

17 injury.

18 Research conducted by Dr. Raymond Palmer of

19 the University of Texas Health Science Center in 2006

20 found that for every one thousand pounds of

21 environmentally released mercury, there was a forty22 three percent increase in the rate of special education

23 services and a sixty-one percent increase in the rate

24 of autism in the surrounding communities.

25 Dr. James Adams reported in 2007 that
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1 children with autism were found to have more than

2 double the amount of mercury in their baby teeth

3 compared to normally developing children and another

4 study by Windham in 2006 reports that there

5 was a fifty percent higher risk of autism associated

6 with the upper quartile of exposure to heavy

7 metals like mercury.

8 Environmental exposures like the one I just

9 mentioned are known to be associated with autism and

10 occur from coal burning power plants.

11 These exposures are especially damaging to

12 infants and children because their biological systems

13 like the brain are still developing.

14 During fetal development, even exposures to

15 minute levels of environmental toxins during critical

16 windows of development can cause -- have lifelong

17 adverse neurological and health effects. Therefore,

18 the Coalition for Safe Minds urges the EPA and the

19 Obama administration to protect our nation's most

20 valuable resource; our children, by standing firm in

21 their efforts to reduce toxic mercury pollution from

22 coal burning power plants and other utilities.

23 Thank you.

24 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. The

25 Coalition for Saving Lives, can you just say a little
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1 bit more about that? About the organization?

2 MS. REDWOOD: Our organization was formed in

3 the year 2000 by a handful of parents. We're not a

4 membership organization. You could probably describe

5 us as more a think tank or do tank type organization.

6 I'm sorry. It stands for Sensible Action for

7 Ending Mercury Induced Neurological Disorders.

8 MR. CLARK: Oh thank you.

9 MS. REDWOOD: I'm sorry.

10 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much.

11 Appreciate it.

12 MS. REDWOOD: Thank you.

13 MR. CLARK: Next two speakers please, Jenette

14 Gayer and Dave Muhly.

15 MS. GAYER: Good afternoon.

16 MR. CLARK: Hi.

17 MS. GAYER: Thank you all for being here

18 today. My name is Jenette Gayer, an advocate with

19 Environment Georgia. Environment Georgia is a

20 statewide citizen based environmental advocacy

21 organization and we're part of Environment America

22 which is a federation of twenty-nine state-based

23 environmental advocacy groups that have been very

24 active in advancing state and federal policies to cut

25 mercury and other toxic air emissions from power
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1 plants.

2 I'm here to testify in strong support of

3 EPA's proposed mercury and air toxics rule. Once

4 implemented, this rule will save as many as seventeen

5 thousand lives every year, will prevent tens of

6 thousands of hospitalizations and will significantly

7 cut some of the most hazardous pollutants known to man,

8 such as mercury, lead and arsenic.

9 For decades, power plants have been a

10 significant source of toxic air pollution in the United

11 States, and especially here in the southeast.

12 Coal-fired power plants are the single

13 largest source of mercury pollution, arsenic and acid

14 gasses in the United States. Power plants spew dozens

15 of other toxic pollutants into the water and air

16 including chromium, nickel, lead, and dioxins and these

17 toxins have been linked to cancer, heart disease,

18 neurological damage, birth defects, asthma attacks and

19 even premature death.

20 Georgia's utility companies have likely made

21 the case to you that this rule is unnecessary and

22 perhaps have insisted that Georgia's current multi23 pollutant rule is satisfactory, but this is not so.

24 First, the current Georgia rule is the

25 technology standard. Most, but importantly not all, of
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1 Georgia's power plants are required to install control

2 technologies and I'll add that during the development

3 of this rule, Environment Georgia and many of our

4 allies advocated for an actual emissions cap, similar

5 to the rule that we are considering today.

6 In addition to the current required

7 technology standards -- oops sorry. In addition to the

8 current required technology standards.

9 In testimony back from 2006 which I actually

10 opened up and looked through, we explain that a clearly

11 defined emission cap will make citizen enforcement

12 possible while the existing reporting which is based on

13 technology operation standards will set hurdles that

14 even savvy citizen activists, media, and other

15 interested parties will find daunting.

16 We also thought it was obvious that an

17 enforceable cap would help to assure the reductions

18 that are intended with the proposed technology

19 requirements. And that's one of the reasons I --

20 really strong reasons that I think the rule that we

21 have in Georgia is not sufficient and we need to go

22 even further.

23 And another reason is that we're discovering

24 that our current rule has some potential serious

25 loopholes, so for example, Georgia Power has recently
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1 announced that they will be shutting down units one and

2 two, at Plant Branch, which is a coal-fired power plant

3 in Georgia and they've announced it, so this means that

4 they may delay installing those pollution controls on

5 units three and four.

6 We need a guarantee that all plants will

7 reduce the toxins they're releasing into our air as

8 quickly as possible.

9 And finally, we need a rule that protects us

10 from our neighbors, so it seems obvious to me that

11 mercury -- well, Georgia's multi-pollutant rule does

12 not extend beyond our state line and unfortunately

13 pollution from power plants in Alabama certainly does.

14 I'll add on a personal note that I was

15 diagnosed with cancer in October of 2010. I'm told I

16 have a very nice head and after several surgeries, and

17 multiple rounds of chemotherapy, some really whopping

18 insurance bills which I think really drives home the

19 cost of some of these really important protections and

20 then many missed days of work, my prognosis is good.

21 And I'm the first to admit that this is certainly a

22 genetic issue in my family, so my grandmother was

23 diagnosed with breast cancer in her sixties, my mother

24 was diagnosed in her fifties, and I, now I've been

25 diagnosed in my thirties and I would observe as a new
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1 member of this club, it is certainly strange the

2 increased rates of disease that we're seeing in my

3 family alone and if you could remove carcinogens from

4 our environment, why wouldn't you?

5 The problem is, we've delayed already for two

6 decades. Mercury and other air toxic pollutants were

7 first listed as hazardous under the Clean Air Act in

8 1990 and coal-fired power plants have remained the

9 single largest source of mercury, arsenic, and acid

10 gasses in the United States since then.

11 Coal companies have successfully fought

12 requirements to reduce toxic air emissions from their

13 facilities for more than two decades. In fact, during

14 the Bush administration, polluter lobbyists held the

15 Bush EPA write an illegal and severely flawed standard

16 for mercury pollution from power plants, which was

17 struck down in Court.

18 In EPA's currently proposed Mercury and Air

19 Toxics Standard, we are excited about the strength of

20 reductions and the estimated health benefits from the

21 rule.

22 The rule will cut mercury, arsenic, acid

23 gasses -- acid gasses from power plants by ninety-one

24 percent.

25 Furthermore, EPA submits that the health
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1 benefits associated with this rule will exceed its cost

2 factor by about ten to one.

3 To me, as I mentioned, those numbers have

4 become a lot more than just statistics. And we really

5 applaud the administration for the strength of the

6 proposed standards and urge you to pass the rule as it

7 stands without weakening as soon as possible.

8 Thank you.

9 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. Muhly.

10 MR. MUHLY: Good afternoon. My name is David

11 Muhly, last name M-U-H-L-Y. I want to thank you all

12 for this opportunity to comment on the proposed mercury

13 air toxics rule.

14 I'm a Senior Field Organizing Manager for the

15 Sierra Club, the nation's oldest and largest grassroots

16 environmental organization, a hundred and twenty years

17 old next year with one point one million members and

18 supporters in communities across the U.S.

19 I live in southwest Virginia. Not far from

20 the coalfields of far south West Virginia or those of

21 southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky.

22 Regularly residents in these areas are

23 terrorized by thousands of tons of high explosives

24 detonated to rip the tops off of mountains and push

25 them into adjacent streams, forever turning these once
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1 majestic temperate forests rich in bio-diversity into

2 wastelands in order to get to the coal underneath.

3 In south Georgia, in west Georgia, in

4 Washington, Ben Hill Counties, as you heard, residents

5 were threatened by the prospect of the construction of

6 two new coal-fired power plants in addition to the ten

7 already existing throughout Georgia which will turn

8 your communities into industrial sacrifice zones

9 suffering in the shadow of coal burners belching toxins

10 into the atmosphere above their homes, in kids'

11 playgrounds for the next half century.

12 In Louisville, Kentucky, as you've heard,

13 residents live in the shadow of sixteen story

14 piles of coal ash, which are whipped by the wind

15 to the toxic plume that coats their home with layers of

16 dirt, heavy metals, and mercury and threatens ground

17 water in the Ohio River on which this toxic dump sits.

18 John Muir, a famed American environmentalist

19 wrote in 1911, one hundred years ago,

20 "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it

21 hitched to everything else in the universe." It was

22 true then of nature and it's no less true now. It's

23 also true of trying to unravel and regulate a complex

24 set of environmental and economic impacts that are part

25 of the full cycle of coal.
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1 From the cradle to the grave. From the mine

2 and destruction to the combustion byproducts, to the

3 mountains of toxic ash and tailings left for future

4 generations.

5 I commend the EPA for in many ways attempting

6 to untangle this Gordian knot.

7 Let me be clear for I and we in the

8 environmental community have been accused of it and

9 painted by it, as is by industry so often, I may as

10 well own it. I represent a special interest.

11 For all the families and communities

12 threatened by the full cycle of coal, we have a special

13 interest.

14 For the women of childbearing age, as many as

15 one in six whose unborn babies are at risk for mercury

16 poisoning caused by coal-fired power plant emissions,

17 we are especially interested.

18 For all the Americans, children, and adults

19 who are at elevated risk of brain damage, learning

20 disabilities, birth defects, heart disease, cancer and

21 premature death because of mercury, arsenic, heavy

22 metals, acid gasses, and dioxins emitted by coal-fired

23 power plants, we see a special interest.

24 And for all those Americans who believe its

25 their God-given right to breathe clean air into their
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1 bodies, we represent their special interest in this and

2 other rules that the EPA is currently promulgating to

3 protect American's health and well being from the

4 willful disregard by the coal and electric utility

5 industries.

6 Like a bully on the playground or a tyrant in

7 the neighborhood who spoil it for everyone else, these

8 industries have wantonly and persistently shirked their

9 responsibility to the American commons.

10 To that area, which we all share and which we

11 all should live reasonably assured and comforted that

12 our rights as citizens, and as members of the human

13 family will be respected; our right to clean air and

14 clean water.

15 For decades, these industries have

16 externalized their operating cost by passing along the

17 cost of doing business and maximizing profits as a tax

18 on the health and well being of American families, in

19 affect forcing Americans to make a choice between

20 [indecipherable] of their own health in exchange for a

21 few kilowatts of electric power.

22 And to further dare to challenge, this

23 presumption that God's creation was not the sole domain

24 of the coal and electric utilities to [indecipherable]

25 and desecrate for profit. They're accused of being
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1 dreamers in practical or worse that they were special

2 interest.

3 The MACT standards proposed by this

4 proposed rule are a good first step to holding these

5 industries accountable for the poisons they are

6 releasing daily into our air. That they have for the

7 last twenty years, since the passage of the landmark

8 Clean Air Act Amendments, avoided, evaded, and dodged

9 this responsibility is no justification for abetting or

10 excusing such corporate irresponsibility on into the

11 future.

12 The MACT standards are and will be based on

13 maximum achievable minimum emissions that are practical

14 and achievable based on state of the art plants that

15 have and already do meet these expectations.

16 I suggest the rule as promulgated is a good

17 first step, but it could be better. If this segment of

18 American industry is chosen for a fifth of a century to

19 avoid at any cost cleaning up these emissions, no

20 further extension should be allowed beyond the three

21 year implementation plan. We have compromised our

22 health and our environmental for decade after decade.

23 No further compromise is either warranted or

24 reasonable.

25 We should seize this opportunity to change
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1 direction. To grab one end of the knot and pull it,

2 full knowledge that in unraveling this mountain, we'll

3 emerge with a new, albeit challenging, clean and green

4 energy feature.

5 I commend the EPA for its courage in tackling

6 these issues on behalf of the American people and our

7 environment and support a strong and comprehensive

8 mercury air toxics rule.

9 Thank you.

10 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Thank you both very

11 much. And thank you.

12 Next two speakers please, Eddie Ehlert and

13 Lindsey Moseley.

14 MR. EHLERT: Good afternoon.

15 MR. CLARK: Go ahead. Hi, hi.

16 MR. EHLERT: I'm Eddie Ehlert, last name is

17 spelled E-H-L-E-R-T. I'm here representing the Atlanta

18 Group of the Georgia Chapter of the Sierra Club as well

19 as oddly enough the Automotive Service Association.

20 Twenty years is a long time. An especially

21 long time to know there is a poison in our midst and to

22 pretend it's something we can accept.

23 We've known of the existence of mercury in

24 emissions for coal plants for a long, long time. It

25 was obvious for many years the levels of emissions was
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1 endangering our food web, our children and ourselves.

2 The methods for reducing and eliminating this

3 growing hazard from all that suffer were apparent, yet

4 those methods were deemed too expensive. So we put it

5 off for another twenty years.

6 In that time, our coal burning utilities have

7 demonstrated the importance of their primary goal.

8 Guaranteed profits and investor dividends. The excuses

9 were the same worn and tired homilies; it will kill

10 jobs, it isn't feasible, we're providing a utility at a

11 lower cost than many of our competitors and our

12 customers will not absorb the higher cost. So they've

13 done nothing with the exception of consistently

14 attempting to expand their polluter base.

15 Yet in our state, the coal burning utilities

16 have demonstrated an enormous capability of having any

17 and all additional costs transferred directly to the

18 consumer. They've even been able to do so while

19 bypassing the standard regulatory structure. It must

20 just depend on what they really want to do.

21 Would it be a leap of faith to assume that an

22 industry so powerful they can pass the construction

23 cost of an unneeded nuclear generating plant directly

24 on to the consumer, that they would be unable to

25 accomplish the same magic in providing enhanced safety
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1 of air and water emissions from existing plants?

2 In the time that has passed since the need

3 for regulation became settled, remediation could have

4 occurred at a tiny cost per ratepayer and shareholder.

5 Did we allow the extra time and hope that

6 they would move into safer and more sustainable form of

7 energy generation? If so, those hopes have been

8 broadly dashed.

9 Burning coal and getting paid to do so

10 appears to be the only unyielding goal. This is an

11 understood peril. While listening carefully, I don't

12 hear discussion of safe exposure. Nobody's still

13 pretending the risk is ethereal. I personally like

14 fish. One need look no farther than the over twenty

15 fish species on the generally accepted avoid list to

16 find clear evidence of this poison.

17 The measurable level of contamination in each

18 of us is frightening. This degradation was long ago

19 identified as a probably result and we have dithered

20 while it has come to pass. The need for strong, clear

21 regulation and stiff enforcement for violations is

22 obvious.

23 It has been established that the polluters

24 will abuse any flexibility in interpretation. To solve

25 this problem, a roadmap based on the ample science is
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1 required. Clean it up or shut it down must be the two

2 available options. No other level of tolerance is

3 likely to produce the necessary result.

4 Failure to achieve removal of this poison

5 will result in neurological damage, developmental

6 disorders and permanent organ damage.

7 While being slowly poisoned, the public has

8 been tolerant and patient. We've been subjected to

9 focus group tested public service announcements related

10 to the benevolence of the coal burners and our

11 environment has been negatively impacted while our

12 children have been put at substantial risk.

13 The time for such acquiescence has passed.

14 We American citizens demand and deserve that maximum

15 achievable control technology procedures for removal

16 and remediation of mercury contamination are put in

17 place.

18 The permissible exposure limits are set.

19 There is no reason to quietly allow our population to

20 blithely approach the PEL while going about their daily

21 business.

22 Twenty years is long enough. It's obvious

23 that there's no intention on the part of the polluters

24 to act in good faith. They're not going to stop this

25 poison from spewing daily into our air and falling into
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1 our water and onto our topsoil, without clear orders

2 and substantial penalties.

3 On behalf of those at risk, I implore you to

4 establish a strongly protective final rule and a swift

5 implementation plan for remediation.

6 MR. CLARK: Thank you sir. Ms. Moseley.

7 MS. MOSELEY: Good afternoon. My name is

8 Lindsey Moseley. I work on federal policy for Sierra

9 Club, specifically on toxic air pollution.

10 MR. CLARK: And you'll spell Moseley for us?

11 MS. MOSELEY: Oh, yes I can do that too.

12 MR. CLARK: If you don't mind. Thanks.

13 MS. MOSELEY: Moseley, M-O-S-E-L-E-Y.

14 MR. CLARK: Thanks. Sorry.

15 MS. MOSELEY: No, no problem. So as I

16 mentioned, I work on toxic air pollution for Sierra

17 Club in Washington, D.C. and I want to thank you very

18 much for having this hearing here today in Atlanta,

19 outside the beltway, and having the opportunity to hear

20 from a lot of people who do not have an opportunity to

21 travel to Washington D.C. and elsewhere where a lot of

22 these decisions are made to make their voices heard.

23 So thank you very much for that opportunity.

24 I am here in part because coal-fired power

25 plants are hazardous to our health and I believe you're
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1 beginning to hear this theme again and again from

2 people in this hearing room and around the country and

3 the comments that are being generated and submitted.

4 Coal plants emit, as you are well aware,

5 toxic mercury, arsenic, dioxin, acid gasses. They can

6 travel significant distances, polluting communities far

7 from the source and ultimately end up in our food chain

8 and polluting our bodies. And as, personally as an

9 individual, as a woman of childbearing age, I worry

10 about the potential for mercury contamination in my own

11 body and the possibility of any children that I may

12 want to have in the future.

13 And coal plants are a major source of soot

14 and smog pollution, also. You're well aware of this.

15 Coal plants may bring electricity which is a

16 good thing in our lives, but not without exacting a

17 very high price from our communities in the form of

18 premature death, heart attacks, asthma, learning

19 disabilities, respiratory distress, cancers, just to

20 name a few.

21 These health costs are often particularly

22 borne by children, mothers, the elderly, people with

23 respiratory problems and disproportionately so, as

24 you've heard in low income communities of color located

25 near power plants and low-income communities of all
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1 backgrounds located near power plants.

2 I recently had the opportunity to meet with

3 some people who traveled to Washington, D.C., to raise

4 their concerns with air pollution; a nurse from

5 Missouri came and was pleading with her Senator not to

6 get in the way of the work that you all are trying to

7 do under the Clean Air Act and she was making the case.

8 She said, "I have worked in the emergency room, in the

9 operating room, I watch young adults in their twenties

10 come in with asthma attacks and leave in body bags."

11 She said it's the most terrifying, heart breaking

12 thing.

13 To which her Senator said, "Well, I agree

14 with you. Air needs to be clean, but how clean does it

15 need to be?" How clean does it need to be? That's

16 kind of what we're fighting over here. That's kind of

17 what this issue has been about. It depends on whether

18 you have healthcare. It depends on whether you can

19 afford to pay medical bills if you don't have health

20 insurance. It depends on whether you profit, whether

21 you can afford to live near the coal-fired power plant

22 or not near the coal-fired power plant.

23 It depends. But in my worldview, it should

24 not depend. Across the country, we need strong

25 standards that limit mercury emissions, acid gas
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1 emissions, arsenic, dioxin, from the known sources,

2 from the known threats. It should not depend on

3 whether you have healthcare. It shouldn't -- there

4 should not be someone sitting in Washington, D.C., with

5 the power to interfere with this rule saying from his

6 place of privilege, "How clean does it need to be?"

7 So why is it that despite this compelling

8 evidence we don't have a rule? Why has it taken twenty9 one years? I don't know the answer to that. I have

10 some ideas. You guys probably have a long history that

11 you could share with us about why it's taken this long

12 and we have heard and continue to hear people urging it

13 to take longer.

14 We need a longer comment period. We need

15 more time before you finalize the rule. We need more

16 time to implement this. No we don't. We've seen it.

17 We know it's coming. The problems, the cost of delay

18 are far too high, by your own estimates; seventeen

19 thousand people a year could be saved? Let's do it,

20 let's do it as quickly as you possibly can.

21 Let's bring our friends in the coal industry

22 along with us into a clean future if that's possible.

23 And if it's not, let's keep moving anyway.

24 We deserve clean air and deserve clean water

25 and not to live in fear.
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1 Thank you.

2 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Appreciate

3 both of you.

4 Next two speakers Imran Battla, it looks like

5 Battla. You'll have to help me out. I, I'm sorry. I

6 can't read this and, and David Richardson. So.

7 MR. BATTLA: Battla.

8 MR. CLARK: Battla, okay. Oh it looks like

9 there's an I in there, but I got you. Thank you.

10 MR. BATTLA: Good afternoon.

11 MR. CLARK: Hi.

12 MR. BATTLA: My name is Imran Battla and it's

13 spelled I-M-R-A-N, B as in boy, A-T-T-L-A and I am here

14 today to thank the EPA for having this hearing as well

15 as thank the brave men and women out in the audience

16 today who are here to advocate and to protect and to

17 fight for our rights for a clean and healthy air to

18 protect our pregnant mothers and our children. And to

19 advocate for more just, equitable, and sustainable

20 society.

21 We are here today to ask the EPA to stand

22 firm. To stand firm. To stand firm against industry

23 pressure, as well as a political ideology that seem to

24 suggest to put profit over people and to put profit

25 over our planet. When, in actuality, we should be
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1 advocated for the equitable distribution of our

2 resources in our environment, as well as within one

3 another.

4 And so, there has been pressure on the EPA as

5 well and we ask that the EPA to stand firm against

6 pressure to delay the rulings for ozone rulings, as

7 well as for boilers for MACT, and to advocate and to

8 push forward and implement those rulings as needed--

9 as badly needed, in addition to our mercury rulings.

10 And we ask the EPA to stand firm and to

11 understand that there are local community based

12 organizations fighting for our right for clean air and

13 healthy justice.

14 I happen to work for an organization called

15 Let's Raise a Million and our goal with Let's Raise a

16 Million -- it's an -- it's an environmental justice

17 organization based here in Atlanta, Georgia, and we

18 outreach to communities of modest means because we

19 understand that communities of modest means are those

20 most impacted by toxic environments, yet least likely

21 to have a voice and to have agency and to talk to them

22 about the health, economic, and environmental benefits

23 of energy conservation because no one else is doing it

24 and it's so vital that in order to produce the change

25 that we need, we need to have everyone on board and so
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1 we ask the EPA to stand firm with us.

2 Now, there are industry advocates who will

3 come in and say oh you know, these, these costs, you

4 know, these pollution control mechanisms, they will

5 produce a non-measurable reduction in risk. Well, we

6 will have people out here today to suggest otherwise

7 and studies have been done and we will hear from

8 others who will say that actually these cost reduction

9 measures will actually improve our lives. And there

10 are studies that will show that real cost saving

11 measures to the tune of forty billion to a hundred

12 forty billion by the year 2016 can and will be

13 introduced to our society in regards to healthcare

14 costs.

15 Now I don't know about you, but forty

16 billion, that's, that's a good amount of money. If I

17 had that in my bank account, that's more than just non18 measurable.

19 So I appreciate the EPA for being here and to

20 stand firm and understand that we really cannot put a

21 monetary value on human life.

22 And so therefore, we need to fight and

23 advocate for clean and healthy air.

24 So thank you very much.

25 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. Richardson.
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1 MR. RICHARDSON: Good afternoon. I'm Dave

2 Richardson. I'm associated with nobody. I'm retired.

3 I have been listening to people talk all

4 morning and part of the afternoon and I'm really

5 concerned. The EPA, over history, has done a great

6 job. They are really to be congratulated on what they

7 have accomplished.

8 I'm seventy-five years old. I can remember

9 when it was a lot worse than it was now. I'm one of

10 the few people -- I think I'm probably the only person

11 in this room that has ever seen Sid Richardson's carbon

12 works in Texas when it was in full operation and you

13 could see the plume of carbon going up in the air from

14 probably twenty, thirty, forty miles away and within a

15 mile of the place, the ground was black.

16 The power plants, the industry paid no

17 attention to what they dumped out and it was really

18 bad. And the EPA has done a tremendous job forcing

19 them, because they wouldn't have done it without it, to

20 clean up their act. And they really should be

21 congratulated.

22 They -- what I have heard today about mercury

23 concerns me simply because in ten years, people

24 expect -- will expect that the mercury in the air to be

25 reduced and it won't be. The mercury in the water will
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1 not be reduced simply because human beings can't

2 control it.

3 The studies in Cambridge University have been

4 out. They've been looked at over and over again and

5 basically ignored. They estimate that nine thousand,

6 one hundred tons of mercury are put into the air every

7 year and that's simply from volcanoes.

8 Now, all volcanoes do not dump their

9 pollutants into the air. In fact, most of them dump

10 their pollutants into the water. Just look at the ring

11 of fire. Look at the mid Atlantic ridge. There's a

12 huge amount of volcanic activity under water. All its

13 pollutants are going into the water.

14 So there's no way we can control it. If you

15 take the amount of pollutants from other sources, from

16 all industry sources and look at them, and then compare

17 them to the amount of mercury that goes into the air

18 from forest fires annually -- forty-four thousand

19 tons -- forty-four hundred. Boy I'm getting mixed up.

20 Forty-four tons of mercury per year. That's roughly

21 half a percent of what volcanoes put in the air.

22 Power plants in the south supposedly put in

23 twenty-four tons per year. Maybe throughout the United

24 States, they put out fifty tons per year, so if you

25 combine the power plants and the forest fires, you'd
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1 get maybe one percent of the mercury in the air that

2 could be controlled if we stopped all forest fires and

3 stopped all mercury in all power plants.

4 That means that in twenty years, the

5 detectable amount of mercury in the air will not

6 change. Now this is not to say that I think the power

7 plants should be immune. By the way, that's all power

8 plants, not just coal, all fossil plants, even nuclear

9 power plants. There's no reason why the radiation --

10 they couldn't be responsible for the radioactive stuff

11 that they generate that's going to be around for the

12 next thousand, ten thousand years. Somebody's got to

13 pay for it.

14 What are we going to do to control all that?

15 This is the stuff that the EPA has got to get a handle

16 on and let the people know what they're talking about.

17 There are going to be no changes in health in the

18 United States from mercury contamination in the air for

19 the next twenty years. It will not happen.

20 We cannot detect a change of one percent.

21 Look at -- how many people have seen the plumes of ash

22 going up in the air from that last Icelandic eruption

23 that's going on? How many tons are going up in the air

24 every hour?

25 This is the sort of thing that we've got to
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1 get a handle on and we should know what we're talking

2 about. If we don't, there's going to be people in ten

3 years, in twenty years that are going to be furious at

4 the EPA for not doing their job and they're going to be

5 really upset because nothing was accomplished and we

6 really should get it accomplished.

7 Anyway, I've got a red light.

8 Thank you.

9 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Thank you both very

10 much. Any questions?

11 Next two speakers please, Ron Shipman and

12 Seth Hutchins. Yeah, yeah.

13 MR. SHIPMAN: Hi.

14 MR. CLARK: Mr. Shipman.

15 MR. SHIPMAN: Good afternoon. Good afternoon

16 and thank you for holding this hearing today.

17 My name is Ronald Shipman, S-H-I-P-M-A-N and

18 I'm the Vice President for Environmental Affairs at

19 Georgia Power Company.

20 Georgia Power is the largest operating

21 company of the Southern Company and is the largest

22 electricity supplier in Georgia with over two point

23 three million customers.

24 We are committed to providing reliable and

25 affordable electricity to our customers while
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1 protecting and preserving the environment.

2 Through 2010, Georgia Power has invested over

3 three point seven billion dollars in environmental

4 controls and estimate, we may need to spend another two

5 point six billion to comply with existing environmental

6 rules over the next three years.

7 The proposed utility MACT rule will have a

8 significant impact on our customers and the economy of

9 Georgia. We own and/or operate up to thirty-five

10 boilers affected by this rule. Those units supply two

11 thirds of all the electricity produced in -- by Georgia

12 Power Force customers.

13 We're concerned about many aspects of the

14 proposed rule, but today I will focus -- I'd like to

15 focus on why the three-year MACT compliance time line

16 is unreasonable and can put, and can put the

17 reliability and affordability of Georgia's electric

18 generating system at risk.

19 Based on our experience, this time line is

20 unworkable given the stringency of the proposed rule.

21 Georgia Power has installed scrubbers at

22 eleven units selected catalytic reduction systems at

23 eight coal-fired generating units and fabric filter bag

24 houses at four units.

25 Under our current planned construction
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1 program by 2016, we will have nineteen units with

2 scrubbers and fifteen units with SERs.

3 When it comes to installing emission

4 controls, we have a wealth of experience. Our

5 experience tells us that the installation of multiple

6 controls at multiple facilities cannot occur in three

7 years. Even if we are able to obtain a one-year

8 extension for some units, there is not enough time to

9 design and construct all of the controls.

10 Furthermore, our experience tells us that the

11 more compressed the time schedule, the higher the

12 impact on the feasibility and cost of the projects and

13 greater the impact on electricity rates.

14 Our technology experts believe that the

15 proposed rule would require virtually every coal plant

16 to operate scrubbers and most likely bag houses to meet

17 the proposed emission limits.

18 Georgia Power is currently analyzing planning

19 cases that involve construction of eight to twelve

20 additional bag houses on our largest units in addition

21 to scrubbers that are already planned over the next

22 three to four years.

23 And this aggressive plan does not cover our

24 entire fleet, yet we have concluded that even

25 controlling this subset of our fleet cannot be done in
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1 three years regardless of the cost. Even if we are

2 able to obtain a one-year extension and looking at only

3 this subset of our fleet, compressing the work into a

4 four-year schedule will escalate the required costs

5 significantly and unnecessarily which will directly

6 impact our customers.

7 Plant Scherer near Macon, Georgia, is

8 an example of what can take -- what it can take to

9 install multiple controls at a single facility.

10 This plant is the largest coal-fired

11 electricity producer in the United States. We are in

12 the midst of an ambitious environmental retrofit

13 program that will equip each of the four units with SCR,

14 scrubbers, and bag houses in addition to the existing

15 electrostatic precipitators.

16 Upon completion, this site will be one of the

17 best controlled coal power plants in the country. The

18 baghouses alone for the four Scherer units

19 took approximately five years from start to finish to

20 design, install, and start up. The cost was five

21 hundred and fifty million dollars.

22 Retrofitting an existing facility, that was

23 not designed for equipment, presents unique challenges

24 that puts pressures on costs and schedule.

25 As an example, at Plant Scherer, the unit
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1 three baghouse had to be constructed nearly one

2 thousand two hundred feet from the electrostatic

3 precipitator because there simply wasn't enough space

4 to install the equipment any closer.

5 To span that distance, the duct work alone

6 cost twenty-two thousand dollars per foot, totaling

7 tens of millions of dollars.

8 With the addition of scrubbers and SCRs, the

9 design, engineering, and construction program for all

10 of the retrofit environmental control -- environmental

11 controls at Scherer will take about nine years.

12 We're not taking our time with building these

13 controls. This is a very aggressive schedule that

14 involves nearly two thousand skilled workers, sixty

15 thousand tons of steel, and hits nearly every usable

16 space on site.

17 Throughout all this construction work, the

18 plant also has to operate. Our experience tells us

19 that to complete the multiple control installations

20 requires careful planning and execution and importantly

21 time.

22 Finally, our experience tells us that the --

23 that requiring the entire industry to control -- to

24 install controls within the compressed time frame will

25 result in material and skilled labor shortages and
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1 dramatic -- and dramatically escalating the cost EPA

2 has not accounted for in this proposed rule.

3 Georgia Power is committed to providing

4 reliable, affordable, electricity to our customers

5 while protecting and preserving the environment.

6 We simply ask for reasonable equip --

7 reasonable requirements and the time to meet the

8 requirements at a pace that does not cause undo harm to

9 our customers and put the reliability of Georgia's

10 electric system at risk.

11 Thank you.

12 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much.

13 MR. HUTCHINS: Hi.

14 MR. CLARK: Mr. Hutchins.

15 MR. HUTCHINS: All right. Hi. My name is

16 Seth Hutchins, S-E-T-H and my last name is

17 H-U-T-C-H-I-N-S if you needed that information.

18 And I am an elementary education major from

19 Berea College and I'm originally from Berea --

20 Lexington, Kentucky.

21 The amount of children with learning

22 disabilities have increased exponentially over the past

23 decade. Research shows that this rise in -- that the

24 rise in learning disabilities among children are due in

25 large part to the exposure to mercury and other toxic
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1 chemicals.

2 So as a future educator, this hits really

3 close to home because it effects the students and their

4 developing minds that I will be teaching in the future.

5 When I was in elementary school about ten

6 years ago, I remember maybe being about maybe one or

7 two children with learning disabilities in our class.

8 And now in the work and volunteer work that

9 I've done with other schools in the county and around,

10 and around my state, I've seen as many as six to seven

11 children with learning disabilities in a classroom.

12 And the thing was, the interesting part about

13 this is that each, each child has a different learning

14 disability and they're very unique and they are full of

15 life and full of love. But it takes a lot of love and

16 creativity on my part, as a future educator, to educate

17 these children.

18 And so, we have a very unique opportunity

19 here. One that I find very, very great and I guess and

20 just wonderful is the fact that we have a chance to

21 ensure that my future students and future students from

22 here have clean water to play in and have that, that I

23 guess, that essential, essentialness to be able to do.

24 And so, and so I feel that we can reach our

25 full potential as, you know, citizens of this planet
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1 and help others and help our children and our future

2 fire fighters, and our future children and our future

3 politicians and our future college kids to help them to

4 reach their full potential and help them not have

5 this -- be hindered by a learning disabilities as an

6 affect of the exposure to mercury and other toxins.

7 And so as a result, I support strong mercury

8 regulations.

9 So thank you.

10 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Any

11 questions at all?

12 MR. HUTCHINS: Thank you.

13 MR. CLARK: Appreciate it.

14 MR. HUTCHINS: Thank you.

15 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Next speakers Thomas

16 Hutegger and John Walsh please.

17 MR. HUTEGGER: Could afternoon. My name is

18 Thomas Hutegger, that is spelled H-U-T-E-G-G-E-R.

19 Thank you very much for going through the

20 country and having these hearings so that people all

21 over the U.S. can come and share their thoughts about

22 this thing. Thank you very much also for your hard

23 work and all your efforts. It's really greatly

24 appreciated.

25 The recent law that says one should not beat
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1 up one's wife, husband, or children. This seems pretty

2 obvious to you and me, but there are some people who

3 think that this is appropriate behavior. So we put the

4 law in place to protect basically the general

5 population.

6 Now it is pretty obvious to you and me also

7 that it is not really a good thing to put that much

8 pollutant into the air.

9 Unfortunately -- especially at these high

10 quantities, right? However, I think some wise person

11 once said, it is very difficult for somebody to

12 understand something if their job depends on not

13 understanding it, so I think in order to protect the

14 general population, it seems quite necessary to help

15 the coal burning industry and other polluters to

16 understand that this is not appropriate.

17 And we can probably do that best by putting

18 appropriate regulation in place.

19 We have a -- we put a remote control dune

20 buggy on Mars to collect rock samples and bring it back

21 to this world. I cannot believe that if it is high

22 enough a priority to us, we couldn't find a way to

23 produce electricity without producing all this

24 pollution.

25 Thank you.
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1 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. Walsh.

2 MR. WALSH: Thank you. Yeah. My name is

3 John Walsh, that's W-A-L-S-H and I wanted to thank you

4 also for being here. You are my favorite government

5 agency out there, EPA.

6 MR. CLARK: We, we don't often hear that, so.

7 MR. WALSH: You hear it fully from here and

8 I'll [indecipherable] think that.

9 I became aware of the connection between

10 power generation and the environment while at Georgia

11 State University. It's just a few blocks from here.

12 When I, I wrote a paper called Solar Energy

13 in the Home. And it talked about tapping into the

14 largest source of energy available on our planet.

15 Living here in the sun belt is, is -- as this part of

16 the country was once known -- made me assume that this

17 would be a logical ongoing movement, tapping into the

18 sun, but it was not the case.

19 I found that the combustion of coal was the

20 main procedure of power generation.

21 Then heard about the amount of emissions that

22 were produced by the coal plants and, and that those

23 emissions contained a large amount of mercury.

24 The poisonous affects of mercury present in

25 coal emissions made me see a very simple to understand
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1 process of cleaning up the atmosphere.

2 If we would tap into the solar energy that is

3 available, we could maintain our standard of living

4 that we have grown accustomed to without major changes

5 required. It just takes a small amount of action by a

6 large amount of people to have effect.

7 The burning of coal as a source of energy is

8 a continuation of the process that was widely used

9 before that, which was using firewood to heat homes. I

10 realize that firewood wasn't used to generate

11 electricity, but it helped to raise our standard of

12 living at the time.

13 We must move forward in ways to power our

14 society that does not involve producing steam that

15 turns turbines to generate electricity.

16 There are cleaner ways to turn turbines.

17 Decentralizing power generation is a step in

18 that direction. This must be a gradual and continuous

19 movement that is limitless and makes more economical

20 sense or it is more widely used.

21 Again, this is a gradual, but continuous

22 effort.

23 Using coal to generate electricity was very

24 helpful for progress made in the twentieth century and

25 to expand on its use is a stagnation of the way we
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1 power our society when reliable alternatives are

2 available.

3 Expanding the use of coal reduces a

4 sustainability of our planet and it's a very simple

5 equation. We know the process of generating

6 electricity is a necessary component to make our world

7 healthier and livable for all of us.

8 Most of the life on our planet uses the sun

9 directly to live. We could not live without it and

10 expanding the use of the sun and wind to generate

11 electricity is limitless. Coal and oil fuels used to

12 boil water, to produce steam, to turn turbines that

13 generate electricity is not moving forward. Not when

14 limitless clean ways of generating electricity are out

15 there.

16 Thank you very much.

17 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Thank you both.

18 Okay. Next speakers please, Robert Fletcher

19 and Elizabeth Crowe. Mr. Fletcher, feel free to start.

20 MR. FLETCHER: Good afternoon.

21 MR. CLARK: Hi.

22 MR. FLETCHER: My name is Robert E. Fletcher,

23 that's R-O-B-E-R-T, E., F-L-E-T-C-H-E-R and I've been a

24 member of the Sierra Club for over forty years, but I'm

25 here primarily to speak as a long time citizen of the
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1 State of Georgia.

2 I strongly urge the U.S. EPA to finalize and

3 promulgate the proposed rules for Mercury and Air

4 ToxicStandards.

5 This action is needed to adequately protect

6 the health of the American public, safeguarding the

7 health of children and other vulnerable segments of our

8 population is of paramount importance.

9 Previous speakers have brought to you

10 statistics and facts concerning the health benefits

11 that would arise from the actions that you've proposed.

12 It is entirely appropriate to target fossil fuel-fired

13 electric generating plants for this action since these

14 facilities are responsible for half of all mercury

15 emissions in the U.S. and large percentages of other

16 toxic emissions.

17 Air emissions of mercury change to methyl

18 mercury when they enter waterways. As the EPA has

19 pointed out, "Methyl mercury exposure is of particular

20 concern for women of childbearing age, unborn babies,

21 and young children."

22 Knowledge of the danger of methyl mercury to

23 human health goes back to the 1950's, 1960's and

24 1970's.

25 Mercury pollution of Minamata Bay in Japan
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1 was one of the worst environmental disasters on earth.

2 Many of the local people died or became deaf, blind, or

3 insane.

4 So that first surfaced in the 1950's and was,

5 attempts were being made to resolve the problem by

6 compensating the victims through the 1970's.

7 Mercury contamination of water via air is

8 indirect, but it also will result in significant long9 term adverse consequences.

10 I note that regulations for mercury emissions

11 were proposed by EPA in early 2004, but never

12 finalized.

13 Further delay is not acceptable.

14 The proposed rules also cover other toxic

15 substances that are emitted to the air, such as

16 arsenic, chromium and nickel. These substances also

17 have their own arrays of threats to human health and

18 they should be controlled as well.

19 Revision of new source performance standards

20 for particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen

21 oxides will produce substantial public health benefits.

22 I therefore urge EPA to make these essential regulatory

23 changes.

24 When I consider environmental threats to our

25 nation's health, I think about my grandchildren in
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1 Georgia and Pennsylvania. What kind of future are we

2 leaving to these ongoing generations. Aren't they

3 entitled to an improved, more healthy environment? We

4 should see that they are provided with an enhanced

5 legacy in this regard.

6 Thank you very much for your time.

7 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Crowe.

8 MS. CROWE: Thank you. My name is Elizabeth

9 Crowe, that's C-R-O-W-E and I'm here representing the

10 Kentucky Environmental Foundation and the hundreds of

11 Kentuckians we work with to promote good health through

12 a clean and safe environment.

13 And I'm here today to support the EPA's

14 proposal for more protective standards for mercury and

15 air toxic emissions.

16 KEF promotes the precautionary principle

17 which calls on us to use common sense and a

18 precautionary approach when setting policies and

19 practices that will impact our health and the

20 environment.

21 The damage to our brains and to our

22 developmental systems from mercury has been well

23 established by the scientific and medical research

24 community and the cost of chronic disabilities and

25 lower IQ from this pollutant or exposures to these
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1 pollutants is enormous.

2 The utility, coal industries and

3 manufacturers should show responsibility to protect

4 public health, but when they do not and it's clear from

5 current contamination levels that they are not, it is

6 the responsibility of you, the EPA, to impose these

7 standards that would reduce our exposures to mercury

8 and other toxic chemicals.

9 I've heard earlier today, many times, that

10 the industry feels it can't possibly comply with safety

11 standards in three years. And I really don't know

12 where they've been. An industry performing in the best

13 interest of the public would have realized years ago,

14 like many in the general public, that mercury emissions

15 are unacceptable and they would have already been

16 implementing the best pollution controls realizing that

17 the costs of coal are already being paid by this

18 country with ill health.

19 I suspect that the "difficulty" of the

20 utility to meet these more protective standard is

21 nothing compared to the difficulty of a parent with a

22 child with autism or someone with autism or someone

23 with a lifetime, experiencing a lifetime of learning

24 and developmental disabilities.

25 And I urge you to resist the arguments from
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1 the utilities manipulating the plight of low income

2 communities and people of color paying their utility

3 bills.

4 These utilities are responsible for providing

5 energy efficient solutions to the people they serve and

6 if they are not, then shame on them, but it's not the

7 reason to continue to allow disproportionate impacts of

8 power plant pollution.

9 KEF believes that we not, not -- need not

10 suffer jobs for protection of our health. Protective

11 health standards are not job killers and rather they

12 could generate a lot of jobs. In February, 2011, a

13 report by the Political Economy Research Institute

14 found that clean air act rules could create one point

15 five million jobs in pollution controls, retiring less

16 efficient power plants and the like and some of the

17 people who testified earlier, counting out the number

18 of jobs and the people that are employed and making

19 these types of improvements really helps make that

20 case.

21 This can be our future. No fear mongering

22 from the utilities necessary, just a common sense shift

23 to cleaner production of electricity and more efficient

24 use of what we already have.

25 While I'm here representing my organization,
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1 I'm also the mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter.

2 She's been blessed with good health, and we have, as a

3 family, made a choice to limit our intake of mercury

4 contaminated foods. But too many other children are

5 already suffering from debilitating illnesses linked to

6 mercury and other toxic power plant exposures. This is

7 not the kind of legacy we should be giving our children

8 when we know we can do better.

9 I encourage EPA to stand strong in its

10 position on mercury and air toxics and encourage the

11 industry and legislatures that supports your authority

12 to make and enforce these standards. No more excuses.

13 We need clean air and clean water right now.

14 Thank you.

15 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much, both of

16 you. Assuming we have no questions, we'll move on to

17 the next two speakers; Robert Ukeiley and Kathy Little

18 please. Sure. Thanks. Mr. -- well,

19 MS. LITTLE: Either one?

20 MR. CLARK: Yeah. Kathy, go ahead.

21 MS. LITTLE: Hello. My name is Kathy Little,

22 that's K-A-T-H-Y, L-I-T-T-L-E.

23 I am from Louisville, Kentucky, and I live in

24 the shadows of LG&E Cane Run Power Plant.

25 This power plant is fifty-seven years old.
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1 There is a high hazard pond fifty yards from my home

2 which means most likely if the pond breeches, my family

3 and many others, including children and the elderly,

4 will die.

5 I also live two hundred yards from a mega

6 story coal ash landfill, almost filled to capacity.

7 Fugitive ash full of concentrated heavy

8 metals, including mercury, are on the properties

9 immediately adjacent to this landfill. Three

10 particulate samples taken from my house by the air

11 pollution control district tested positive for fly ash.

12 This power plant has applied for a permit to

13 build another sixty-five acre coal ash landfill on the

14 other side of the property.

15 I have statistical information from a study

16 commissioned by the Clean Air Task Force regarding

17 death and diseases attributable to fine particle

18 pollution from the Cane Run station.

19 They assigned a value of seven thousand,

20 three hundred dollars for each life lost; in 2010 that

21 was twenty-three lives.

22 Within the report, they indicate that the

23 smaller the particles, the easier they can invade a

24 person's blood system through the lungs and on to the

25 vital organs. It's particularly more severe to
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1 children, the elderly and those with lung diseases.

2 It goes on to list the incidences of

3 illnesses such as asthma, chronic bronchitis, hospital

4 admissions, asthma attacks, etcetera for the Cane Run

5 area.

6 These are all statistics though and do not

7 evoke much anger or much emotion or much, or much

8 conscience.

9 The reason that I am here is that I am scared

10 for my little girl, Brianna, who is eight years old.

11 And for all of the other children and the elderly in my

12 community.

13 Brianna is a little redheaded, soccer

14 playing, full of life little girl. She makes my life

15 worth living. She is probably worth much more than

16 seven thousand three hundred dollars to me.

17 If fly ash is on my house, and it is, then

18 it's in my yard where my little girl plays. She is

19 intelligent and she does well in school, but I am not

20 sure what is happening inside her small body as a

21 result of this exposure. That's why I'm here. That's

22 why I've ridden six plus hours from Kentucky and face

23 the same trip back.

24 The State of Kentucky is not protecting my

25 child from exposure to mercury. I am here asking, no
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1 pleading, that you do so by no longer exempting power

2 plants from the same regulations that other businesses

3 adhere to in regards to mercury.

4 It has to come from the federal level.

5 Kentucky will not vigorously regulate coal companies or

6 coal power plants. Case in point, even though we have

7 particulate samples that are coming back positive for

8 fly ash, the APCD, Air Pollution Control District, has

9 yet to fine or ask LG&E to remediate by cleaning

10 adjacent properties.

11 Another example, Joanie Jenkins [phonetic]

12 introduced a Bill and legislation that got stuck in the

13 Natural Resources Committee. It was a safety issue

14 that LG&E run, Cane Run, provide an emergency

15 contingency plan in the event of the breech of the high

16 hazard pond.

17 Because this Bill -- pardon me -- did not

18 pass, the children and the elderly are being put

19 needlessly at risk in my community.

20 I am too close to the pond to matter, but

21 those that just live a block or so away could have

22 gotten a warning that might well have saved their

23 lives, but because the Bill had the word coal in it,

24 was reason enough for it to get stuck in committee.

25 Kentucky politicians are swayed completely by
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1 industry instead of science. We are poisoning our

2 environment in order to keep costs down and profits up.

3 The corporate bottom line for LG&E Cane Run

4 says that they can't make money on this plant if they

5 can't poison the local committee -- excuse me -- local

6 community for free. And that's why they're here to

7 fight efforts to reduce toxic pollutions.

8 That's why the above statistics that, that I

9 mentioned are not factored in to LG&E and other power

10 plants bottom lines.

11 Mega wealth opposes change which will, for

12 sure, cut into their pockets. They worship at the

13 altar of profit.

14 I'm here because I want you to know that we

15 are paying a disproportionately higher price for cheap,

16 cheap electricity, with our health and our lives.

17 Remember Brianna when you ponder your

18 decisions and do not allow this fifty-seven year old

19 power plant to continue to spew toxic mercury and other

20 heavy metals into the environment for her to ingest.

21 We've waited enough time. She deserves to live and be

22 happy just as my neighbors do.

23 Those of the, those of us that live in the

24 shadows of these power plants, please protect us. You

25 are our only hope.
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1 Thank you for your time and God bless you.

2 MR. CLARK: Thank you, Ms. Little. Mr. Ukeiley.

3 MR. UKEILEY: Thank you. Hi. My name's

4 Robert Ukeiley, it's U-K-E-I-L-E-Y and I'm here on

5 behalf of myself and my comments are going to be

6 basically limited to the, the train wreck argument that

7 industry puts forward, which is if the, the MACT rule

8 and the other rules go forward, the industry will face

9 insurmountable challenges and basically the lights will

10 go out or as, as one of the commenters put it, the sky

11 is falling argument.

12 And my comments are going to be basically the

13 kind of, what I'd call the traditional response to why

14 that argument is false and then I'll provide a, a

15 vision of why it should be false.

16 But before I do that, the -- I did want to --

17 in that similar vein address one of the Georgia Power

18 arguments about that the construction for the pollution

19 controls can't be done in time and I, and I find that

20 ironic. I find it interesting that a lot of the

21 technology that we're talking about installing actually

22 was pioneered by Georgia Power, including at Plant

23 Yates, they used Plant Yates for experimental

24 technologies and then what typically happens is they,

25 they demonstrate the technologies Georgia Power and
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1 U.S. utilities and then, and then they say that they

2 can't apply them for some excuse and those technologies

3 are brought to commercial level in mainly Japan and

4 Germany and then twenty years later, after they're done

5 oh, it won't work on our coal. Like for years, they

6 said SCR won't work on U.S. coal, even though Germany

7 had SCR for twenty years. Then finally, they admit

8 that, that it will work and they acknowledge that --

9 and they eventually do it.

10 But anyways, responding to the, the general

11 argument about the sky is falling. In December 16,

12 2010, Charles River Associates, which is not -- it's a

13 consulting firm, does not -- it's not on the

14 environmental, non-profit side of the ledger, released

15 a report, a reliability assessment of EPA proposed

16 transport rule and forthcoming utility MACT rule and in

17 the -- you can Google, get it off of Google.

18 In the executive summary, they say, "When

19 considering both the current planned six gigawatts of

20 retirement and, and those driven by the utility MACT,

21 CAIR, NOx standards, we project a total of thirty-five

22 gigawatts of coal retirement in the eastern

23 interconnect and thirty-five gigawatts nationwide and

24 here's the point.

25 After projected coal retirements, all five
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1 eastern RTO's, regional transmission organizations, had

2 sufficient capacity to maintain without additional

3 resources beyond those already under construction.

4 Similarly put, Bradley produced a

5 report in August 2010 called Insuring a Clean Modern

6 Electric Generation Generating Fleet While Maintaining

7 System Reliability. Again, they're not a non-profit

8 environmental group. And they said and this is

9 basically a quote, "Each NERC reliability region has

10 excess capacity totaling over one hundred gigawatts of

11 excess capacity nationwide." And that's an important

12 figure because Bradley predicted that the shut13 down of coal would be more than a hundred gigawatts and

14 they continued, "Therefore, considering only the

15 projected level of coal units attrition relative to

16 existing capacity resources, it appears there will be

17 no capacity shortage, even if projected retirements

18 narratives prove accurate."

19 In other words, the sky is not going to fall.

20 One of the reasons why is because a lot of

21 the coal that units that are going to be retired have

22 very low capacity factor.

23 I recently had to visit a coal unit that I

24 visited last year and now it's retired and I was

25 dressed like this when I went to visit it and the
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1 utility -- the people that worked for the utility are

2 like, "Are you sure you want to go visit them?" I'm

3 like, "Yeah, I need to go see it." And they're like,

4 "Okay." So I walk up to the coal unit and it's covered

5 in cobwebs because it hadn't been used and that's one

6 of the units that they're saying that if it gets shut

7 down, the lights will go out and the sky will fall.

8 But obviously permanently retiring a unit

9 that does nothing or practically nothing is not going

10 to have any effect on our, our electricity reliability.

11 I appreciate your time.

12 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Thank you both very

13 much. Any questions for? Okay. Okay.

14 Okay, next. This is going to be different.

15 There's five folks that are going to come up or maybe

16 six even; Chelsea Carroll, Matt Callo, Sean Hutchins,

17 Alex English, Austin Delph, and Seth Hutchins. As I

18 understand, you guys are coming up together. I've been

19 in public hearings like this before where the rooms

20 been taken over, so.

21 FEMALE: [Indecipherable].

22 MR. CLARK: Yeah, that would probably be

23 great for our, our friend the court reporter, so, sure.

24 MS. CARROLL: I'm Chelsea Carroll,

25 C-A-R-R-O-L-L from Louisville, Kentucky.
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1 MR. HUTCHINS: My name is Seth Hutchins. I'm

2 from [Indecipherable], Kentucky.

3 MR. ENGLISH: Alex English, E-N-G-L-I-S-H

4 from Bardstown, Kentucky.

5 MR. DELPH: Austin Delph, D-E-L-P-H. I'm

6 from Berea, Kentucky.

7 MR. HUTCHINS: I'm Sean Hutchins,

8 H-U-T-C-H-I-N-S from Bardstown, Kentucky.

9 MR. CALLO: I'm Matt Callo, C-A-L-L-O from

10 Knoxville, Tennessee.

11 MS. CRONE: And my name is Natalie Crone and

12 I'm from Detroit, Michigan.

13 We are all Berea College students.

14 MR. CLARK: And Crone is -- I'm sorry --

15 spelled?

16 MS. CRONE: Sorry. C-R-O-N-E.

17 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

18 MS. CRONE: I'm so ready. We're all Berea

19 College students from Berea, Kentucky. I'm speaking on

20 behalf of the Kentucky Environmental Foundation on

21 behalf of educators that have seen a seven hundred

22 increase in children diagnosed with learning

23 disabilities due to exposure from mercury from coal

24 powers EGUs.

25 I am also speaking for expecting mothers who
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1 have a one in six chance of passing mercury poisoning

2 on to their children and most importantly, I am

3 speaking for thousands of Kentucky communities whose

4 economies and health, who have suffered due to a lack

5 of regulation on air toxics.

6 When I was fourteen, I lived in Somerset,

7 Kentucky. It sits on the beautiful Lake Cumberland

8 that is at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

9 I would swim in Lake Cumberland with my friends. I

10 would fish with my family and we would carelessly enjoy

11 the beauty of the nature around us.

12 People always ask, do you know what's beneath

13 the surface. Well, I thought I knew what was beneath

14 the surface of Lake Cumberland. I mean, there was

15 sand, fish, and seaweed. I checked. I have goggles.

16 Well, little did I know that down there,

17 beneath the surface and even in the air, there were and

18 still are, health-damaging toxins. People in this

19 country have fallen into a false sense of security. We

20 are under the impression that our government officials

21 are serving us with our best interest at heart.

22 As the saying goes, protect the people and

23 not the polluters, but clearly as of late, legislatures

24 have been protecting the polluters or as defacto, their

25 pocketbooks rather than serving the people who have
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1 entrusted their well-being to these legislatures.

2 We Berea College students have traveled here,

3 the long seven-hour drive, to demand that legislatures

4 and the EPA be held accountable to the people they

5 serve.

6 You, you officials in front of me have the

7 power to save lives. Through the EPA, you guys issued

8 a scientific legal documentation that it said it was

9 appropriate and necessary to control mercury emissions

10 from power plants in 2000. Well I sit here eleven

11 years later listening to the representatives of energy

12 companies arguing against the already established

13 science.

14 Research presented, presented by

15 representative of energy companies that do not want to

16 see their profits effected will obviously be presenting

17 bias numbers.

18 I call these companies to explain to mothers

19 and educators another reason for the shocking rise in

20 learning disabilities.

21 I would like to see a reason that is backed

22 by science already found in proving the affects of

23 mercury contamination.

24 We call on the EPA to end this eleven year

25 stagnation. Do you want to be the ones responsible for
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1 allowing the poisoning of our future generations? Set

2 the strict standards, please.

3 In the EPA report, you can avoid seventeen

4 thousand premature deaths. You can avoid eleven

5 thousand heart attacks, a hundred and twenty thousand

6 asthma attacks. That's huge. We ask you to stop this

7 air pollution. How dare you allow minority communities

8 to suffer.

9 Please protect me. Please protect us.

10 Please protect the people who cannot protect

11 themselves. Do not sit back and let energy companies

12 ravage the environment and poison our air. Please

13 protect us now.

14 Energy companies say it will be costly for

15 them to conform to your proposed regulations. We,

16 Berea College students, we would like to make it very

17 clear that we would rather see our energy bills rise a

18 few bucks than spending millions of dollars in public

19 taxes to aid innocent people, especially children who

20 suffer from these water and air toxins.

21 Thank you.

22 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Anybody

23 else want to? Okay. Thank you guys, appreciate it.

24 Okay. Simon Montelongo and Benita Dodd

25 please.
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1 MR. MONTELONGO: I'm Simon Montelongo,

2 M-O-N-T-E-L-O-N-G-O. [Indecipherable -- another

3 language].

4 MR. CLARK: I'm sorry?

5 MR. MONTELONGO: [Indecipherable -- foreign

6 language]. Hello. How are you? [Indecipherable --

7 foreign language]. I am Simon Montelongo. I am a

8 [Indecipherable -- foreign language] Cherokee from the

9 [indecipherable] boundary in North Carolina.

10 I grew up fishing with my grandfather in

11 [indecipherable] River. I like to go fishing a lot in

12 a lot of different places other than the

13 [indecipherable].

14 One day, I asked my mother if she would take

15 me to the Fontana Lake because I really love to fish

16 and she told me that I couldn't because of the high

17 mercury content in the lake. My mother explained that

18 the power plants put mercury and other chemicals into

19 streams and rivers that flow into the lake.

20 In, in my school, I study the effect of

21 pollution in rivers and lakes and how mercury gets into

22 the water and the small fish may eat it and then a

23 larger fish will eat the smaller fish and an ever

24 larger fish will eat that fish and then that larger

25 fish is eaten by the predatory birds like the hawks and
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1 everything and the hawks are the most affected by the

2 mercury pollution because it needs to eat so much.

3 And people also go fishing and they eat the

4 fish like my family and my people in my tribe. I would

5 like to have clean water everywhere I go, so I could

6 try to fish for different kinds of fish without mercury

7 and other toxic chemicals.

8 And finally, I want to fish in cleaner water

9 where my people have had for hundreds of years. I want

10 the EPA to protect the health of my family and my

11 people by telling companies to stop releasing harmful

12 chemicals from power plants.

13 [Indecipherable -- foreign language]. Thank

14 you.

15 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much, Simon.

16 MS. Dodd: How tough is it to follow a cute

17 little boy like that?

18 MR. CLARK: Sure.

19 MS. DODD: Good afternoon. My name is Benita

20 Dodd, B-E-N-I-T-A, D-O-D-D and I am Vice President of

21 the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. We're a

22 Georgia-focused market oriented public policy

23 organization, sometimes called a state think tank.

24 At the Foundation, my focus is on

25 environmental issues, which includes energy,
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1 transportation, land use, water, and air.

2 The Foundation is extremely concerned about

3 three aspects of the proposed MACT rule.

4 The cost to industry and consumers in

5 Georgia, the time frame, both in the limited

6 opportunity for analysis of the pages of regulations,

7 and in the compliance deadline and thirdly, the basis

8 for the EPA's tougher regulations.

9 First, the cost to industry and to consumers.

10 The utility MACT, of course, is the most immediately

11 threat. The rules would affect power plants

12 responsible for nearly half of the power generation in

13 the nation.

14 EPA says that this rule will provide

15 employment for thousands by supporting thirty-one

16 thousand short-term construction jobs and nine thousand

17 long-term utility jobs. But IHS Global Insight

18 estimates that every billion dollars spent on upgrade

19 and compliance costs will put sixteen thousand

20 dollars -- jobs at risk and reduce U.S. GDP by as much

21 as one point two billion.

22 When production gets higher here, industries

23 will lose their competitive edge and they'll begin to

24 move offshore and more Americans will lose their job

25 while the cost of living will get higher.
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1 The EPA says that the rules will cost ten

2 point nine billion a year. Industry estimates are much

3 higher. Estimates for the utility MACT alone are as

4 high as one hundred billion in some quarters.

5 Meanwhile, the cost to rate payers as in the

6 southeast region are expected to increase as

7 much as twenty-five percent.

8 Already, nearly one quarter of Americans have

9 reported difficulty in paying their utilities according

10 to a recent public opinion on poverty study.

11 Second is the time frame. The EPA has asked

12 for comments to be submitted by July 5. This is a one

13 hundred and seventy-one page proposal with nineteen

14 technical support documents and the more than five

15 hundred page regulatory impact analysis.

16 While EPA is operating under a court ordered

17 schedule, the judge noted that the consent decree

18 allows for a change of schedule and that she was more

19 than willing to allow EPA more time to get it right, as

20 she put it.

21 These are some of the most significant and

22 costly rules that EPA has ever proposed. That enough

23 should motivate the agency to allow ample time for

24 industry experts to analyze the EPA's conclusions and

25 to comment on their impact, especially the cost versus
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1 the benefits.

2 The compliance window for these rules will

3 also burden industry. Utilities have three years to

4 comply and I believe that they have a legitimate

5 concern about this compressed time schedule, especially

6 given that it applies to the entire industry at once.

7 The third is the basis for the, the EPA's

8 tougher regulations. Given that the air quality is in

9 fact the best in forty years, that power plants account

10 for less a half percent of mercury emissions and that

11 this is a global issue. We already have regulations to

12 cover particulate matter.

13 Since 1970, coal-fired electricity generation

14 has increased about fifty-seven percent and at the same

15 time, particulate emissions from coal-fired power

16 plants are down ninety-three point one percent. Sulfur

17 emissions are down fifty-six point six percent and

18 nitrogen oxide emissions are down thirty-eight point

19 seven percent.

20 Utilities have cut emissions of mercury by

21 about forty percent. Today even, the nation's power

22 plants are responsible for few than fifty tons of

23 mercury emissions per year.

24 I mention that it's a global issue. I know

25 fifty tons is a lot. Chinese power plants emit four
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1 hundred tons. Natural sources produce up to ten

2 thousand tons. Mercury, as the hazardous, the issue of

3 greatest concern is just not the hazard that it was.

4 Today, there's certainly no indication that

5 mercury is increasing in Georgia's environment. In

6 fact, it's just the opposite. Mercury in large mouth

7 bass, for example, has dropped by half since the

8 1960's.

9 Eighty percent of the advisories against

10 eating fish from U.S. waters are based on mercury and

11 the number of fishing places with those advisories have

12 increased over three hundred fifty percent since the

13 early 1990's.

14 Increasing the number of advisories would

15 lead one to think that the danger of mercury pollution

16 is increasing, but mercury emissions overall have

17 decreased sixty percent since 1990 and there's no

18 documented case of harm from mercury in fish ever in

19 this country.

20 Burdensome and costly regulations are no way

21 to encourage competition, investment or job creation.

22 Georgians are struggling to recover from the

23 economic downturn and they don't want intervention in

24 returning to a more secure lifestyle. That includes an

25 affordable cost of living and a thriving job market.
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1 Taking money out of American's, American's

2 pockets needlessly to implement air, air quality

3 regulations that are unnecessary in order to force this

4 country off reliable, affordable, and cleaner than ever

5 fossil fuel power generation is no way to a better

6 quality of life.

7 Thank you.

8 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. I was

9 curious, you mentioned a study saying that large mouth,

10 in largemouth bass, mercury levels had dropped by one

11 half in Georgia since the sixties. Is that correct?

12 MS. DODD: Yes.

13 MR. CLARK: Do you have a citation for that?

14 MS. DODD: Not with me, but I can -- I'll be

15 happy to email that to you.

16 MR. CLARK: Okay. That would be great.

17 Thank you.

18 MR. CULLIGAN: Yeah, similarly, if you could

19 include the citation on the hundred billion that --

20 hundred --

21 MS. DODD: Yes. I'll be happy to, but --

22 MR. CULLIGAN: [Indecipherable -- talking

23 over each other] the number, number of --

24 MS. DODD: -- I will, I will, I will submit

25 my comments and I'll --
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1 MR. CULLIGAN: Thank you.

2 MS. DODD: -- add footnotes.

3 MR. CULLIGAN: Thank you.

4 MS. DODD: You're welcome. Thank you.

5 MR. CLARK: Thank you both very much and

6 thank you, Simon.

7 Jessica Spruill, it looks like, and Sheila

8 Tyson please.

9 Okay. Great. Thank you. Go ahead.

10 MS. TYSON: Hello. My name is Sheila Tyson --

11 MR. CLARK: Sheila.

12 MS. TYSON: -- I'm from Birmingham, Alabama.

13 I am here representing the Citizen Advisory Board and

14 that's all ninety-nine neighborhoods in Birmingham and

15 we are very concerned about our environment in

16 Birmingham because we really, we don't have anyone

17 there that is actually able to stand up to the big

18 wheelers in, in our city that is going to protect us

19 with the environment.

20 We have a very -- we are the second in asthma

21 in the United States and our, our city is now here even

22 bigger than ours, nowhere bigger than New York.

23 We have a high rate of delayed learning in

24 kids. We have like number fifteen in respiratory

25 problems in our city. We have, we have a lawsuit going
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1 now where they had tested the soil in the parks and

2 it's full of mercury, asbestos, and all kind of

3 different chemicals and we're trying to fight that on

4 our own. We need you all to regulate these things that

5 is happening because in the small neighborhoods, and

6 it's always in communities of color. You know, Pierce

7 County in the State of Alabama is

8 dealing with that ash problem down there where they are

9 dumping it. Anything that's bad that people do not

10 want, it always ends up in our neighborhoods. That's

11 including storage, the holding tanks with the gasoline

12 and everything else.

13 But we have no one in spot, you know, even

14 the people that we elect. You have people that is

15 actually feeding them money and they're not looking out

16 for us. And we're expecting for EPA to do that because

17 we do not have the money or the ability really to

18 actually go in and actually fight these type of issues.

19 You know, we have been fighting this issue

20 even with the lawsuit that we have in now for five

21 years and it still hasn't came to any conclusion, but

22 still the problem with the mercury and all of that is

23 growing bigger, bigger, bigger and they turned right

24 around and built a brand new school on top of it. A

25 brand spanking new school and so our kids has to have
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1 to play with that. They're on the playground equipment

2 putting their hand in their mouths and everything like

3 that. So we are just hoping that you all will regulate

4 and you know, do not let them get away with anything

5 because we have to live in these neighborhoods and we

6 want a sustainable neighborhood and community also.

7 And we do not need all of these health

8 problems. And that's all you find in our school

9 system. You can go in any, any community in Birmingham

10 and pull the statistics on our students in our schools

11 and how high the rate of delayed learning, all these

12 other different problems that is coming up even with

13 the, the pregnancy rate. Even with the parents with

14 the, with the early birth rate in our city. It's so

15 very high.

16 And we're just having those types of problems

17 out here. We need some help and we need, we need the

18 EPA to make sure that this doesn't happen anymore and

19 actually come down there in Birmingham and actually do

20 something also about the problem that we are having.

21 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

22 MS. SPRUILL: Hello. My name is Jessica

23 Spruill. I'm from the University of Georgia. I just

24 finished my freshman year there and I'm here on behalf

25 of the UGA Beyond Coal Campaign and the Sierra Student
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1 Coalition.

2 Every since I was a little kid, I've always

3 really enjoyed nature and playing in nature. It was

4 always, you know, my sanctuary, my safe haven where I

5 could go and I felt at home and I felt relaxed and you

6 know, every day when I was little kid, you know, in

7 third grade I'd go with my friend exploring into our

8 creek everyday and it was a little adventure and it

9 was, it was fun and that was, that was where I felt

10 safe and secure.

11 And as I got older, I realized that not

12 everybody felt the same way about my, you know, my

13 sanctuary. A lot of people don't respect the

14 environment and a lot of people pollute without

15 thinking and they pollute -- they, you know, they

16 choose you know money over human health and a clean

17 environment and to me that was a big moral debacle to

18 me. I felt that that was ethically wrong.

19 And as I grew up, I shifted my studies

20 towards the environmental sciences and now I'm an

21 environmental engineering major and I just went to

22 power shift in Washington, D.C., where ten thousand

23 young people just like me went. We're fighting for,

24 you know, climate change and cleaner energies,

25 renewable fuels.
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1 And in saying that I know that it's not, a

2 switch to renewable fuels completely isn't going to

3 happen very soon, but the least we can do is make sure

4 that these, you know, power plants are safe to human

5 health and I feel like that is the EPA's like

6 responsibility and one day I would like to work for the

7 EPA. That's my goal is to work for the EPA and it's a

8 -- I've done three shadow days here and at the SCSD in

9 Athens. I've really enjoyed it. I've really enjoyed

10 the people and I know that they are all trying to do

11 the right thing and they, I feel like the EPA should

12 have the ability to protect human health and these new

13 standards, that is exactly what they do because you

14 know, mercury pollution, toxic air like chemicals is a

15 problem and I believe they should be highly regulated.

16 And I understand also that this would you

17 know, this isn't like an easy thing to do for all these

18 power plants to, you know, fix their machinery to abide

19 by these standards and that it costs a lot of money. I

20 very much understand that, but if we're talking about

21 costs and benefits, you know, what's the cost of human

22 health? You know how much do we value human health and

23 you know, besides the abstract cost of human health,

24 there's also hospital bills and medical bills and

25 doctor bills that we have to take into account and I
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1 believe that these regulations would save, you know,

2 save us thousands probably millions of dollars in the

3 future on hospital bills and I feel like that's

4 something we also need to take into account because you

5 know, the pollutants from power plants are causing

6 premature asthma and all different sorts of health

7 problems in our communities.

8 And you know, I'd like to know that when I go

9 out for a run on a hot summer day, I'm not going to be

10 wheezing and that you know I can breathe the air and

11 not have to worry about it being unsafe because I

12 believe and I think most Americans do believe that

13 clean air is not a privilege, but it's a right; it's a

14 civil right. So.

15 Thank you.

16 MR. CLARK: Well thank you very much. Thank

17 you Sheila for coming from Birmingham and Jessica, be

18 careful what you, what you ask for because -- I won't

19 speak for Carol, it looks pretty good, but you know

20 this could be -- in your future, you could look like

21 Bill, me or [indecipherable], so. And we're only in

22 our thirties, you know, so.

23 Anyway, thank you, thank you both very much.

24 Okay. Elizabeth Lopez and Joan Lindop

25 please. Ms. Lopez.
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1 MS. LINDOP: My name is Joan Lindop, L-I-N-D2 O-P. Unlike your listing there, I don't live in

3 Georgia. I live in Louisville, Kentucky.

4 MR. CLARK: Okay.

5 MS. LINDOP: About a mile up river, up the

6 Ohio River from me, there's -- I live a mile from the

7 Ohio River and upstream from me is, is a coal-fired

8 power plant. Upstream from us and from our source of

9 drinking water in Louisville.

10 We have two such power plants also

11 downstream, in the midst of residential communities;

12 Cane Run and Mill Creek that you've been hearing about.

13 They should never be that close to residential

14 communities. It's -- that's just not right.

15 Louisville Gas and Electric has put modern

16 controls on the Trumbull County plant that is -- but

17 there is still a mountain of waste on that site and

18 it's right next to the river. Every time we get a

19 flood, there's going to be stuff in the water.

20 We, in Kentucky, have more mercury and

21 particulates in the air than a body should have to

22 tolerate. Last February and March, two of our state

23 representatives introduced a bill that would provide

24 emergency plan when there is coal waste and another

25 bill to promote clean renewable jobs in our state, but
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1 neither bill got to the floor of the legislature.

2 Kentucky will not protect our air and water

3 as you heard from Kathy this afternoon. Our children

4 are in even greater danger than the adults.

5 The neurological damage to our organs and

6 especially the brain is not acceptable. The people

7 more affected are the, those least able to attend these

8 meetings.

9 I beg you, until we get more solar power and

10 more lead buildings, please restrict the amount of

11 toxic chemicals that these coal plants are allowed to

12 inflict on us.

13 Thank you.

14 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

15 MS. LOPEZ: Good afternoon. [Indecipherable --

16 foreign language] Lopez. I'm a Columbian biologist

17 and I'm here today to talk about the mercury impacts

18 on, on the Hispanic community.

19 So to do so, I want to submit for the -- I

20 want to read and submit for the record a couple letters

21 from two political leaders here in Georgia.

22 So the first one is from Sam Zamarripa.

23 He's a former member of the Georgia State Senate and he

24 wrote the EPA today this:

25 "I write to applaud you for your proposed
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1 mercury and air toxics rule which I believe will

2 significantly cut toxic air pollution in our

3 environment while also improving our quality of life.

4 As you are to finalize this rule, I urge you

5 to keep the final rule just as strong as the proposed

6 version.

7 As you know, mercury pollution is threatening

8 our health and especially the health of pregnant women

9 and children. This threat is pervasive, but it's

10 especially present among the Hispanic community due to

11 their proximity to toxic waste sites and due to the

12 recreational fishing in polluted streams and lakes that

13 have high concentrations of mercury.

14 The data from the first ever, national study

15 of Hispanics on environmental issues, demonstrate that

16 Hispanics in the United States are more likely than the

17 overall population to catch fish themselves in local

18 waterways and to eat the fish they catch.

19 This puts Hispanics at greater risk for

20 getting dangerous mercury into their bodies and makes

21 them, new proposed mercury, mercury and air toxics

22 protection from the EPA critically important.

23 I'm writing today to urge the EPA to pass the

24 new proposed rules to benefit all of our communities,

25 but especially those that are most directly impacted by
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1 the dangers of mercury pollutants.

2 Thank you for your efforts toward lowering

3 mercury, mercury pollution.

4 Respectfully from Sam Zamarripa."

5 The second letter I brought here with me

6 today is from Pedro Marin. He's Hispanic

7 state representative of the Georgia House of

8 Representatives.

9 He wrote:

10 "I'm aware of the EPA public hearing

11 happening in Atlanta on May 26 on the proposed air

12 toxics and mercury rule. I would like to express my

13 commendment to your agency as I believe this kind of

14 regulations will benefit the Hispanic community, not

15 only in Atlanta, but also along the United States.

16 Mercury and air pollutants have an enormous

17 threat over the Hispanic community. Indeed,

18 on a study, a study that Sierra Club commissioned from

19 Bendixen and Amandi, a professional polling

20 firm, warns us of these threats.

21 The problem is that the Hispanic communities

22 really enjoy outdoor activities and habits such as

23 fishing and even what, what we fish and these places us

24 in a very vulnerable situation concerning the

25 environmental impacts and the effects on our health.
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1 Previous studies of Hispanic fishing

2 patterns in California have established that

3 for Hispanics, this is a mostly a subsistence activity

4 with two fundamental goals. One is to obtain high

5 quality protein to compensate for economic inequalities

6 and the second is to pass cultural traditions onto the

7 next generation.

8 In most cases, the angler shares the fish he

9 catches with his family including young children and

10 women in childbearing age; the two sectors of

11 population most vulnerable to mercury poisoning.

12 The survey by Bendixon and Amandi also

13 revealed that Hispanic anglers fish close to their

14 urban communities because of lack of transportation

15 options.

16 The fish caught in the urban areas tend to

17 contain the highest concentration of, of mercury

18 contamination.

19 This means and shows that Hispanic community

20 is at higher risk than any other community and that we

21 are consuming levels of mercury per fish than what

22 eating safely allowed.

23 According to a Shilling study of

24 subsistence fishing conducted among several ethnic

25 groups in California, the consumption of Hispanic
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1 anglers exceed the EPA safe limit of mercury per day.

2 They consume almost twice that safe limit, which is,

3 which are seven micrograms per day.

4 For this and other reasons that I can't

5 address here, I want to support the EPA proposed air

6 toxic and mercury safeguards and I want to urge you to

7 keep these safeguards as strong as you proposing and

8 even more enforceable and I wanted to thank you for

9 your work, protecting people in America, including the

10 Hispanic community.

11 With that, I want to submit this for the

12 record and I want to, I want to thank you for

13 considering the, all the communities and considering

14 the impacts of mercury and air toxics on the Hispanic

15 community."

16 And thank you very much for having this kind

17 of space providing this for us to come.

18 MR. CLARK: Sure. Thank you. And thank you

19 for bringing the letters there. Thank you.

20 Okay. Next speakers please, Patti Gettinger

21 and Rel Corbin.

22 Great. Thank you so much.

23 MS. GETTINGER: My name is Patti Gettinger,

24 P-A-T-T-I, G-E-T-T-I-N-G-E-R. I'm a tax payer and

25 concerned citizen.
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1 The locust swarm of EPA regulations is

2 descending like a plague on our energy industry. These

3 regulations will decimate our access to reliable and

4 cost efficient energy. They will create financial

5 misery for citizens, particularly our most vulnerable.

6 They will strip out thousands of jobs and wipe out

7 business growth in a fragile economy.

8 To promote this destruction in terms of

9 health benefits that are dubious at best and outright

10 fabrication at worst is an insult to the tax payers who

11 pay your salaries.

12 Claiming specific numbers of health incidents

13 implies a level of certainty and precision that simply

14 cannot be scientifically supported, although the EPA

15 claims that particulate matter causes tens of thousands

16 of premature deaths, to my knowledge, not a single

17 medically documented case exists.

18 EPA researchers acknowledge that health risk

19 estimates are based on numerous assumptions with major

20 uncertainties. In other words, the EPA is generating

21 hypothetical, not actual values.

22 EPA claims mercury is a threat, particularly

23 to children, yet Japanese and Hong Kong citizens have

24 substantially higher blood stream mercury than in the

25 U.S. and their children routinely outscore American
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1 kids on standardized tests.

2 The Seychelles Island study showed no

3 evidence of adverse affects from prenatal methyl

4 mercury exposure that is ten times greater than in the

5 U.S.

6 A recent study funded by the National

7 Institutes of Health found no evidence of any

8 clinically relevant adverse affects of mercury exposure

9 on heart disease or stroke.

10 Why is the EPA ignoring these studies? Power

11 plants are not the largest source of mercury emissions.

12 A recent study estimated that two thirds of global

13 mercury emissions comes from natural resources, natural

14 sources; the ocean, vegetation, volcanoes, and forest

15 fires.

16 North American power plants represent less

17 than one percent.

18 A broken compact fluorescent light bulb emits

19 mercury vapor at one thousand times EPAs referenced

20 concentration. Hypocritically, EPA encourages the use

21 of CFLs while attacking coal-fired plants which provide

22 forty-five percent of our nation's electricity, our

23 very low cost providers and don't rely on foreign

24 imports since coal is an abundant American resource.

25 EPAs regulations will impose one hundred and
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1 fifty billion dollars in electric plant compliance

2 costs. In addition, the electric reliability

3 coordinating council says annual operating costs will

4 increase by one hundred billion dollars; ten times more

5 than the EPA estimates.

6 The results, plants close, energy supply

7 falls seven percent and energy costs rise up to twenty8 five percent.

9 Georgia gets half of its electricity from

10 coal-fired plants, so EPA's regulatory attack hurts my

11 community. We will pay more for basic necessities.

12 Home electricity, food, and clothing.

13 The public opinion on poverty says one in

14 four Americans has trouble paying electric bills.

15 Blacks, Hispanics and seniors are especially hurt by

16 higher utility prices and it won't be healthy if we

17 don't have the power to wash our clothes or wash our

18 dishes or to have heat in the winter.

19 The international brotherhood of electrical

20 unions stated that fifty thousand workers in the

21 utility, mining, and railroad industries could lose

22 their jobs.

23 For the EPA to say jobs destroyed by these

24 regulations will be temporarily replaced by new jobs is

25 like having one person dig a hole and another person
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1 fill that hole.

2 With unemployment at nine percent, gas at

3 four dollars a gallon, and high foreclosure rates, it

4 is obscene to implement regulations that further

5 destroy our standard of living.

6 In summary, EPA over regulation is a threat

7 to our economic health. What needs to be curbed is the

8 intellectual pollution of pseudo science, flawed

9 models, and guesstimates.

10 The EPA must indefinitely suspend these

11 regulations. Our citizens deserve better.

12 Thank you for your time.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Mr. Corbin.

14 MR. CORBIN: I'm Rel Corbin, a sixth

15 generation central Arkansaser [phonetic] [sic].

16 MR. CLARK: And, and you -- I'm sorry, your

17 name is --

18 MR. CORBIN: First name, R-E-L.

19 MR. CLARK: Yeah okay.

20 MR. CORBIN: C-O-R-B-I-N. Sorry.

21 MR. CLARK: Thank you. No, no that's -- no

22 worries.

23 MR. CORBIN: Okay. I spent one summer paving

24 roads in south Georgia. Stole a few sweet peaches

25 beside the road. I also spent a summer paving the
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1 roads in east Kentucky, in a holler so deep, they had

2 to pipe in sunshine and I saw some miners that were

3 greatly enlarged lungs from working in the mines.

4 But mother was born in Appalachia, Wise

5 County, Virginia, a coal-mining town. I

6 grew up in Lee County west of there where

7 in the thirties, my grandfather would go over the

8 mountain on Sundays to mine coal all week in Harland

9 County. I know a little bit about coal and I've

10 studied about it too.

11 Now, we need more and more energy and most

12 think the only way to get it is by burning hydrocarbons

13 or nuclear; both create much waste. We store more and

14 more of. Or our concern here, release it into the air

15 thinking it's just going to disappear. It's not

16 disappearing. Analysis of emissions from electrical

17 coal-fired plants show many heavy metals and other

18 poisons in those emissions and ultimately almost all

19 living organisms are exposed to and ingest those

20 poisons.

21 Now -- I'm sorry. Okay. Now our

22 government's going to tell us we must control or stop

23 producing those waste. The terrible, terrible

24 government telling us what to do. They don't know what

25 they're talking about.
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1 Well this is our government, actually. A way

2 we work together and cooperate for the good of all.

3 Senator Dale Bumpers and his biography tells

4 about rural Franklin County Arkansas said during the

5 Great Depression, the federal government introduced

6 pit privies. Before that, they just gone to the

7 bushes. And it was really very nasty before those

8 pit privies.

9 Now we've all seen the pictures in National

10 Geographic of bicyclists in China in masses riding to

11 work wearing their mask and you can see the smog.

12 That's not from volcanoes. That's from power plants

13 and heavy industry, but China is an ecological

14 disaster, but they know it. They don't have concern

15 for the individual, but they do have concern for the,

16 the country as a whole. They are the number one

17 researcher in renewable energy now.

18 Now, I don't understand why our power

19 companies don't hire people who are trained to design

20 plants that would generate energy in a sustainable way.

21 Florida Power and Light has had a thermal

22 power, thermal -- solar thermal power plant in the

23 southwest; Arizona and New Mexico. For twenty-five

24 years it works. Now they are planning on, about to

25 start building a plant forty miles from Miami, a
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1 thermal solar power plant.

2 Now we can do better. Our power plants can

3 do better. It may cost. We may have to raise taxes if

4 you do some of this. Subsidize creating sustainable

5 energy sources.

6 Profits make it crimped a bit. We will have

7 to adapt and change, but ultimately we'll

8 make a lot more money.

9 America's always done well, but when we've

10 changed because we had to and it's time we change.

11 Thank you. Oh and I now I'm preaching to the

12 choir here, but thank you for what you all have done.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you both.

14 Okay. Thank you both. Cassy Hobert, I

15 probably slaughtered that one, so and Michael Churchman

16 please. Cassy, right? Cassy. Ms. Hobert.

17 MS. HOBERT: My name is Cassy Hobert, C-A-S-S18 Y, H-O-B-E-R-T.

19 I'm a Kentucky native and a senior at Berea

20 College. I recently became an intern for the Kentucky

21 Environmental foundation. Since beginning my

22 internship, I've done a fair amount of research on the

23 adverse effects of mercury in the human body and though

24 I'm still far from being an expert, after reading one

25 startling statistic after another, I found I could not
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1 pass up this opportunity to give testimony because the

2 pollution of our water and fish affects me. It effects

3 my family and community and it will affect my daughter.

4 According to a recent report on mercury from

5 Environment America, Kentucky ranks sixth in the nation

6 in mercury emissions from power plants. Kentucky is my

7 home. It's where I grew up. It's where my parents

8 live and my kid brothers, and now it is so polluted

9 that the Department of Fish and Wildlife has advisories

10 limiting fish consumption from every waterway in

11 Kentucky due to unsafe mercury levels.

12 These are the same waterways that my older

13 brothers and I swam and fished in. And now my younger

14 brothers can't experience that, neither will my child

15 or my brothers' children if we don't do something about

16 this pollution.

17 The EPA standard that has been proposed is a

18 commendable start. And it is imperative that it be

19 passed as quickly as possible because it is the most

20 vulnerable people in the country that are being put at

21 the highest risk by mercury. The unborn children still

22 in their mother's wombs.

23 In the same report on mercury from

24 Environment America that I cited earlier, I found that

25 as many as one in six women in the nation has enough
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1 mercury in her bloodstream to put her child of risk of

2 adverse health effects from mercury exposure if she

3 should become pregnant.

4 I'm having my first child in August. A baby

5 girl. And I can't help but wonder if she will have

6 birth defects or developmental delays due to a

7 neurotoxin running through my veins and my baby's

8 umbilical cord that I never gave permission to be put

9 there.

10 My body has been invaded by these emissions;

11 contaminated by coal-fired power plants and my child

12 has been put at risk. This is not justice. It is not

13 just that an innocent child should be born with autism

14 or learning disabilities and it is not just that power

15 plants should get away with releasing poison into our

16 environment and our bodies.

17 So on behalf of my little girl and all of the

18 boys and girls in her generation and the next, I

19 implore the EPA to please do not back down from the

20 proposed standard. Hold power plants accountable for

21 cleaning up their emissions and safeguard the future of

22 our children.

23 Thank you.

24 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Mr. Churchman.

25 MR. CHURCHMAN: Yes. My name is Michael
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1 Churchman, C-H-U-R-C-H-M-A-N.

2 On behalf of the Alabama Environmental

3 Council, the Alabama Rose Alliance, GASP, and other

4 environmental organizations in Alabama and citizens

5 across our state, I speak to you today to strongly

6 support EPA's decision to regulate mercury and other

7 air toxics under the clean air act.

8 This crucial step has been delayed for far

9 too long while human health and the environment has

10 suffered.

11 I appreciate the EPA taking this important

12 step to safeguard our health and to level the playing

13 field across the electric generating sector.

14 As of 2009, four of the nation's top fifty

15 mercury-emitting power plants were in Alabama and three

16 of the top twenty-five were in the Birmingham metro

17 area.

18 As Alabama's largest city, it is also one of

19 the areas in Alabama identified as not attaining

20 certain air quality standards by the EPA.

21 Some of these plants are still using

22 pollution control technology from the 1950's and `60's

23 that does not address mercury emissions.

24 In 2009, power plants in Alabama emitted

25 nearly three thousand, one hundred and seventy-five
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1 pounds of mercury into the environmental. To put that

2 into scale, one seventh of a teaspoon of mercury

3 dropped on a twenty-five acre lake can make fish unsafe

4 to eat.

5 Though emissions have decreased in Alabama as

6 a state, we're still the sixth highest emitter in the

7 country.

8 We need the EPA to regulate mercury and help

9 protect the public and the environment.

10 We bring the message today that Alabamians

11 demand healthy air and water and we will no longer

12 stand for being a state with some of the dirtiest air

13 in the nation.

14 You've probably heard others from Alabama and

15 across our region say that it would be too costly to

16 add additional regulations to energy production in

17 Alabama and that it would cost jobs.

18 Should the cost of doing business

19 as an electric utility come from the bottom

20 line or our health.

21 The truth is, it is too costly not to

22 regulate mercury and installation of new pollution

23 controls would be a job growth opportunity across our

24 state.

25 Some say we have some of the cheapest energy
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1 production in the country and that industry often stops

2 in Alabama on their way overseas because of our energy

3 costs.

4 However, the true cost of that energy is not

5 reflected just in the rates that are paid in our energy

6 bills. Healthcare costs directly attributable to air

7 pollution, missed work or productivity because of air

8 alert days, a lack of the ability to consume locally

9 caught fish, as well as other environmental impacts

10 like CO2 emissions, coal ash, and mountaintop removal

11 are all costs that are not reflected in our energy

12 bills.

13 Throughout the day, you've heard how mercury

14 emissions from power plants pollute our air. Let me

15 remind us all that mercury doesn't just affect the air.

16 One of the real dangers is when particles from air

17 pollution are absorbed into the water and become toxic

18 to fish and humans as it enters the food chain through

19 fish tissue.

20 Alabama is blessed with an unbelievable

21 biological diversity. We're number one in states for

22 the number of species that live in our rivers and

23 streams, yet we rank third nationally for imperiled

24 fish. We also sixty-one water bodies on the Alabama

25 Department of Public Health's fish consumption advisory
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1 list for mercury contamination. That's an increase of

2 fifty-six percent in just five years. This list is

3 released annually, but there's very little effort by

4 the state to publicize the list and no signage on

5 listed water bodies.

6 According to a 1994 study conducted by Auburn

7 University, Alabama anglers consume an annual estimate

8 of forty-two to forty-six grams of fish per day. This

9 is much higher than the EPA recommended dose of twenty

10 grams per day or less for the general public and its

11 likely that with the current recession and increase in

12 food prices, fishing and fish consumption among the

13 general public is increasing. A 2008 study, state

14 outdoor recreation study in Alabama showed that over

15 half of Alabamians fished in fresh water over the

16 course of a year. Remember, many of those fishermen

17 are subsistence fishers who depend on that high source

18 of protein for their diet.

19 We don't want to have to tell Alabamians not

20 to fish and not to eat the fish they catch. Our

21 fishing industry on the gulf coast was already

22 devastated by the recent oil disaster, however mercury

23 is impossible to clean out of our waterways and fish

24 tissue once it gets in there. We must stop it at the

25 source.
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1 Mercury emissions and air toxic are

2 particular concern to Alabama Citizens and

3 Environmental Community. We support the EPA's efforts

4 to regulate mercury and air toxics from power plants

5 because we support the health of Alabama citizens and

6 visitors, Alabama's outdoor recreation industry,

7 Alabama's fish and aquatic life and Alabama's water

8 resources.

9 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Michael,

10 let me just ask one thing. The study you were talking

11 about, and I'm sorry I was writing as fast as I could,

12 but I, I didn't catch it. Alabama catching, consuming

13 forty-two to forty-six grams of fish per day higher

14 than -- do you have a site for that?

15 MR. CHURCHMAN: I can get it to you.

16 MR. CLARK: Okay.

17 MR. CHURCHMAN: It was a study that was

18 performed by Auburn University [indecipherable].

19 MR. CLARK: [Indecipherable]. Okay, if you

20 could, if you could do that, that would be useful.

21 FEMALE: [Indecipherable].

22 MR. CHURCHMAN: It was produced for, for the

23 Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

24 MR. CLARK: Okay. Well if you, if you could

25 source it, that would be great. We'd appreciate that,
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1 so.

2 MR. CHURCHMAN: Sure.

3 MR. CLARK: And congratulations Cassy, so.

4 Okay.

5 MS. HOBERT: Thank you.

6 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you very much.

7 Next speakers please, Molly Embree and April

8 Ingle. Eighty-five, eighty-six. I must, I must say,

9 I, I, I asked -- they're very good. Sarah's very good.

10 She's been doing this, but I asked her to phonetically

11 spell some of these names if it's really strange and

12 April Ingle comes back I-N-G-L-E and then in

13 parentheses I-N-G-L-E, so it's like okay. I must

14 really be slow, so okay. Anyway, Molly.

15 MS. EMBREE: Okay. My name is Molly Embree,

16 that's E-M-B-R-E-E.

17 I'm speaking for at least a hundred and

18 eighty-four of my friends, family, neighbors and

19 colleagues who want the EPA to enact stringent

20 regulations on emissions of toxic air pollutants.

21 I'm a developmental neuroscientist at

22 Yerkes National Primate Research Center and

23 Emory University, but I want to make clear that I'm not

24 speaking to represent Yerkes or Emory, but to

25 represent my own personal view.
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1 However, my professional work informs and

2 strengthens my personal view as you will see.

3 First, thank you for proposing to regulate

4 and drastically reduce emissions of mercury, lead --

5 I'm sorry, can you hear? Mercury, lead, arsenic,

6 chromium, nickel, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride

7 and other toxic air pollutants.

8 Second, I hold you responsible to the

9 American people to deliver on this protection of their

10 health.

11 I study brain development and it is an

12 exciting time in neuroscience. New technologies allow

13 us to study the structure and function of the, of the

14 brain in healthy people throughout development. For

15 example, go Gogtay, Giedd, and Lusk et al., 2004.

16 This image shows the pattern of brain

17 maturation from about age five to age twenty and as

18 healthy kids mature, their gray matter decreases as

19 white matter volume increases and the connections among

20 neurons strengthen.

21 Normal brain maturation in humans continues

22 well into our twenties, as anyone who has raised

23 teenagers can attest to.

24 New imaging research is beginning to identify

25 the differences between healthy brains and those
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1 affected by various pathologies, but we already know

2 more than enough to remove toxic air pollutants from

3 our environment. Decades of peer reviewed published

4 science data and that's not pseudo science, but science

5 data in reference to earlier commentary, -- published

6 science data are referenced on the EPA and CDC

7 websites.

8 We know that lead and mercury are potent

9 neurotoxins. They bio accumulate in fatty tissues of

10 animals and humans including the brain.

11 These chemicals are passed on from mother to

12 infant in breast milk. Exposure, even at low doses,

13 has its most profound and irreversible affects on the

14 development of fetuses and young children.

15 The serotonin system is disrupted by lead,

16 mercury and other chemicals and I will also say in

17 reference to previous commentary that controlled

18 experimental science in the lab can cut straight

19 through issue of whether -- of cause and effect, so we

20 know that the serotonin system is directly involved in

21 the development of not only brain and cognition, but

22 lifelong immune, digestive, and reproductive function.

23 I expect that industry will push back hard,

24 fighting for less regulation and conditions that favor

25 their bottom line. They will no doubt argue that
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1 requiring them to cut emissions will cost too much and

2 hurt the economy, but with recent headlines like the

3 CDC report out this week that one in seven U.S.

4 children has a developmental disorder such as asthma or

5 ADHD and increasing healthcare costs and with these

6 chemicals implicated in chronic diseases such as

7 diabetes and auto-immune disorders, we know more than

8 enough now to require industry to phase out toxic

9 emissions.

10 Oh and we should have gone to the -- sorry.

11 Back to our controlled experiments. So, we, we know

12 from controlled scientific experiments that introducing

13 these chemicals has not only an impact on the

14 developing embryo, but can effect longer lifetime

15 conditions.

16 So we know enough to require industry to

17 phase out toxic emissions now.

18 Scientists will eventually spell out the

19 mechanisms that cause many chronic illnesses and devise

20 treatments, but as people with effected loved ones, we

21 would prefer to prevent developmental problems and

22 chronic illness.

23 Prevention is what is really cost effective

24 and most humane. We owe it to our children and their

25 children.
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1 The American people are busy. They're

2 working. They're trying to take care of their families

3 and scrabble back from hard times. They need the EPA

4 to act on what it already knows.

5 Let our future scientific data not show that

6 we did not act and that illness increased as a result.

7 Let our future scientific data show instead that the

8 EPA stood up to industry and that as a result decreased

9 the incidents of illness and the cost of healthcare in

10 the United States.

11 Thank you for proposing this rule and we hold

12 you accountable to deliver it in full.

13 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Ms. Ingle.

14 MS. INGLE: Good afternoon. I'm April Ingle

15 and that's I-N-G-L-E. I'm the Executive Director of

16 the Georgia River Network and we are a statewide

17 organization that works here in Georgia to protect and

18 restore our rivers all the way from the mountains to

19 the coast.

20 We represent over seven hundred members and

21 thirty river organizations throughout the state of

22 Georgia.

23 As is clear, summer is here in Georgia and

24 many of us are now taking to our lakes and to our

25 rivers and our streams to enjoy time with our friends
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1 and family, to play in the water or just relax and

2 enjoy the peace and quiet of these really special

3 places.

4 I know for one that I'm looking forward to

5 doing that this holiday weekend.

6 Unfortunately however, hundreds of miles of

7 Georgia's rivers and thousands of acres of our lakes

8 have fish advisories due to the amount of mercury found

9 in fish tissue. These standards will help fix that.

10 These standards will provide the protections that we

11 need to continue this legacy in Georgia of going to our

12 rivers and lakes as families and friends that we've

13 been doing for generations in Georgia.

14 Actually, each summer Georgia River Network

15 takes three hundred and fifty people from all ages and

16 walks of life on a weeklong educational canoe and

17 kayak trip down a different Georgia river each summer.

18 And through this trip we raise the awareness of

19 thousands of Georgians about the importance of

20 Georgia's rivers and encourage people to get out and

21 enjoy them.

22 This year is our seventh trip and we sold out

23 in just over a month this year and in fact, there are

24 several people in the room who have been on the trip or

25 who are going to be going on the trip this summer.
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1 And the success that we've seen in Paddle

2 Georgia has had impacts on the communities that we've

3 traveled through each summer and this has lead to a

4 burgeoning water trail movement in Georgia where we

5 have communities all across the state that are putting

6 plans into place to increase our access to our rivers

7 in Georgia and we also, in our state, have invested

8 millions of dollars in a program called Go Fish which

9 is a program to lure huge fishing tournaments to our

10 state as a means of economic development, so when you

11 see communities and our state government really

12 investing in this idea of getting people out on our

13 rivers and our streams and our lakes.

14 And our families and our communities and our

15 state rely on these rivers and people's ability to

16 safely recreate on them as a means for economic

17 prosperity and quality of life for our citizens, as

18 well as the well being of our citizens and visitors of

19 our state and we really see the benefits first hand for

20 people in Georgia as they reconnect with their love of

21 rivers and water and wildlife and nature and take time

22 to bond with their family and friends while they're out

23 there and connect to healthy lifestyles by being

24 outside and being active.

25 So we support these standards for those
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1 reasons because they protect this legacy and our

2 ongoing investments to do even more to provide people

3 access to our rivers, lakes and streams.

4 And we -- I, you know I'm biased, but I

5 really think that they're unrivaled and these

6 protections are really great to protect that

7 spectacular beauty and grandeur that people get to

8 experience while they're out there.

9 These protections, these standards will

10 provide the protections that we need for this resource.

11 So thank you.

12 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you very much. Any

13 questions anyone? Okay. Thank you both. Okay.

14 Natasha Herbert and Arthur Gibert, Gibert. I

15 got it. Gibert. I was about to say Gilbert. Gibert.

16 Who would like to begin?

17 MS. HERBERT: I'll start.

18 MR. CLARK: Okay.

19 MS. HERBERT: Hello. My name is Natasha

20 Herbert, H-E-R-B-E-R-T and I am a Georgia citizen that

21 is concerned about the hazardous air pollutants from

22 coal-fired power plants.

23 I support the EPA's proposal to clean up the

24 harmful toxins that are emitted from the power plants

25 both locally in Georgia and across the nation.
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1 I have a public health background in

2 individuals as well as the larger society will benefit

3 from this proposed standard.

4 The chemicals that are released affect all

5 individuals including children and the elderly that may

6 suffer from respiratory illnesses.

7 These toxins pollute local water sources that

8 are then consumed by humans and animals and manifest in

9 our bodies.

10 The soil, which produces vegetables and fruits

11 for consumption, is littered with by-products that then

12 enter our bodies.

13 Our government set strict standards so that

14 citizens, like me, have access to clean drinking water,

15 free of harmful chemicals and we should take the

16 necessary actions to ensure all citizens have clean air

17 free of harmful chemicals as well.

18 The health benefits cannot be emphasized

19 enough. EPA estimates that by 2016, seventeen thousand

20 lives will be saved annually. From a prevention

21 perspective, heart attacks, eleven thousand and asthma

22 attacks, one hundred and ten thousand, will be avoided

23 by taking action now.

24 In general, an emphasis on prevention methods

25 saves the largest society economically compared to the
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1 cost of treating asthma attacks, cancers, respiratory

2 illnesses and other chronic conditions, such as birth

3 defects that these toxins can cause.

4 It is important that our government act on

5 behalf of the greater good and protect those that need

6 it most such as children and the elderly by cleaning up

7 the air.

8 This air that we take for granted on a daily

9 basis is polluted by these coal-fired power plants.

10 These facilities generate electricity so that we can

11 enjoy our air conditioning, television and other modern

12 day amenities, but it should not be at the cost of our

13 health.

14 I value my health, including my lungs, which

15 provide the necessary oxygen for our muscles and

16 tissues. These lungs should be free of chemicals, such

17 as formaldehyde, benzene, mercury, arsenic, and many

18 other byproducts from these power plants that are in

19 our air.

20 Studies have shown that heart -- studies have

21 shown the harmful effects these chemicals have on

22 human, human health and it is, it is unacceptable to

23 allow these companies to release them into the air.

24 These companies have the means to impact

25 health by cleaning up their plants and the technology
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1 for use to reduce toxic pollutants.

2 As a public health professional, I believe

3 the benefits of this proposal would have an immense

4 positive impact on the health of our society, including

5 individuals who suffer greatly from various respiratory

6 illnesses.

7 We cannot continue to take the air we breathe

8 for granted. These toxins are harmful and actions

9 should be taken to reduce the pollutants and the

10 emissions from the plants.

11 We must act now to ensure that citizens have

12 clean air to breathe, free from debris from coal-fired

13 power plants.

14 As a citizen, I value my health and I want to

15 breathe clean air and thus I support this proposal.

16 Thank you.

17 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Mr. Gibert, Mr. Gibert.

18 MR. GIBERT: Hello. My name is Art Gibert

19 and that's spelled G-I-B-E-R-T.

20 I'm Chairman and CEO of Art Gibert Landscape

21 Architecture and Photography, which is a very, very

22 small business.

23 However, my livelihood does depend on a clean

24 environment and my health.

25 I'm also here as a member of the Georgia
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1 Solar Energy Association, the Sierra Club, and Green

2 Roofs for Healthy Cities.

3 I'm a licensed landscape architect here in

4 Georgia and have been for over twenty years. I'm a

5 former member of the Chamblee City Council and I'm a

6 planner. I worked with the State of Georgia for two

7 and a half years before budget cutbacks got me laid

8 off.

9 I'm a native Georgian and I watched in horror

10 as our air has gotten dirtier and dirtier along with

11 our water and our land and I spent a summer in

12 Louisville, Kentucky, by the way, back in 1979 and I can

13 promise you that their air is often filthy.

14 In response to some of the comments from

15 apparently industry spokes-people, but perhaps they

16 were well meaning tea partiers or whatever. I don't

17 want to get into too many politics, but the competitive

18 edge will be lost. I don't think so. Actually if we

19 don't get some clean air and water around here, we're

20 going to run out and everybody will go somewhere else

21 and find a better place to live.

22 Our economic recovery is threatened by

23 imposing some pollution controls. Well, we still have

24 a car industry. We still have an oil industry. We

25 still have developers and believe me, all of those
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1 other groups have faced regulations and have been

2 forced to make changes to improve their impacts on

3 environment.

4 I would question the industry estimate of ten

5 times higher than the EPA estimate for the costs to

6 comply? Based on what? If they would go ahead and get

7 started, they will find that the compressed schedule of

8 three years is not a problem. Where there is a will,

9 there is a way.

10 I would ask that the EPA not give more time

11 for industry to review these standards. In fact, I

12 would propose to you that they could have been planning

13 for this eventuality for years and in fact, that they

14 have been planning for it for years. They know that

15 the standards will come and they have a plan in place

16 and they will do what is required and only what is

17 required.

18 Therefore, I strongly support your proposed

19 standards and I thank you very much for doing that.

20 Speaking of the costs that they say, some say

21 will go up twenty-five percent if these rules were

22 implemented. Folks, our power bills just did go up

23 almost twenty percent. Here in Georgia, Georgia Power

24 Company, a subsidiary of the Southern Company is one of

25 the strongest special interest groups in our state
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1 legislature. They contribute campaign money to

2 everyone. They donate money to all the local

3 communities and guess what? They expect a return on

4 these investments, so people do not go down to the

5 capital and speak up when they need to.

6 I'm here because I'm not beholden to these

7 special interest groups.

8 As an elected official from 2002 to 2006, I

9 attended several lavish receptions at the Georgia

10 Municipal Association Convention in Savannah. Georgia

11 Power officials told me to my face, Georgia does not

12 have enough sunshine to produce solar power.

13 Please. Okay. Since 1996, by the way,

14 Georgia Power has owned the largest single solar panel

15 array in the state and it's on the Georgia Tech

16 campus. It was built prior to the Olympics.

17 They got ample data and they're now beginning

18 to approach solar power, but you know what, they want

19 to make a profit on it and they don't want anyone else

20 to. That's where they're coming from; money.

21 So Southern Company, Georgia's Power's

22 corporate panel has spent millions of dollars lobbying

23 in the halls of federal government as well. This book,

24 Big Coal, on page eighteen of the introduction details

25 that you know, between 2000 and 2004, over three
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1 million dollars were spent by Southern Company donated

2 to the Republicans and overwhelmingly to Democrats to

3 influence federal legislation. I don't see a need to

4 point out as many others have that we've been waiting

5 for meaningful rules for years. I see my time running

6 out.

7 I will say in closing, I find it disgusting

8 that here in the U.S., we have hundreds of

9 organizations seeking cures for our ever increasing

10 diseases while we do not take better care of our

11 environment.

12 Again, please stand strong for these rules.

13 Thank you very much.

14 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Okay.

15 Andrea Lyle and John Krueger please.

16 MS. LYLE: Me first? Okay. Hi. My name is

17 Andrea Lyle and I live in Fayette County, Georgia, and I

18 did not know where else to come. I heard about this

19 and I thought this would be a great chance to speak up

20 for what's going on with the air in Georgia. It's not

21 about the coal, I'm sorry. So I'm a little off, but

22 it's about the air that we're breathing and it was

23 April, yes it was April of 2010. I'm sorry. You want

24 me to stop since it's only about the air?

25 MR. CLARK: Oh no, no, no. It's just
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1 [indecipherable].

2 MS. LYLE: Okay. All right. This is not

3 about the coal.

4 MR. CLARK: This is an air pollution

5 regulation so it's fine.

6 MS. LYLE: Okay. All right.

7 MR. CLARK: And actually, let me just say

8 Lyle is I'm guessing is L-Y-L-E.

9 MS. LYLE: L-Y-L-E, yes sir.

10 MR. CLARK: Okay. Thank you.

11 MS. LYLE: And, and I would also tell you,

12 everybody in the room, Andrea from Fayette at gmail dot

13 com (andreafromfayette@gmail.com). If you want any

14 information, I have gobs of government documents.

15 Anyway, in April of 2010 on my way to work, a

16 friend called me from Fayette County and she says,

17 "They're spraying stuff in the sky." And I'm like,

18 okay, you know and I blew her off. And she kept

19 telling me about it and I blew her off.

20 To get to the point, finally in July, I was

21 working at a hospital on the south side. I've lived

22 here since I was six. I'm fifty-three, so I know

23 commercial airliners versus military.

24 A friend called me outside the hospital and

25 she says, "You got to, you know, see this." There were
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1 four huge military aircraft on an incline, not a

2 decline, so I guess they were going to Dobbins and they

3 were plumes on each one so you had four, four, four,

4 four, sixteen plumes of brown disgusting pollution

5 coming out of them and that's when I became a believer.

6 So I started watching and paying more

7 attention and I noticed that every day, if I would just

8 look up instead of just straight ahead as I drove and I

9 would start looking up like out in my yard and stuff, I

10 would see X's and T's in the skies and eventually at

11 the end of the day, the sun would be blocked, so I have

12 been to my congressman. I have been to Saxby

13 Chambliss. I have been to Johnny Isakson. I have been

14 on the news. I have talked to Allison Weiss at the

15 EPA. I have wrote to Lisa Jackson. I, I have done so

16 much. I have so many government documents where the

17 government admits the Air Force, in 2004, that they are

18 doing this.

19 Some people call it cloud seeding. Some

20 people call it they're trying to deflect the sun's

21 harmful rays back up, you know, away from us, but what

22 happens is, it becomes a people, EPA problem. It

23 effects the air we breathe and it does. When I am out

24 in it for just a little while, I start coughing and

25 wheezing and I've never had asthma in my life and it's
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1 not pollution and I've seen the planes.

2 I've seen foreign writing on one, on one

3 wing. If you look on YouTube, you can see it for

4 yourself. They're call chem trails and I couldn't see

5 the manufacturer. I don't know if it's Boeing or

6 whoever, but I've seen the planes. I've got lots and

7 lots of pictures and videos that I've made and they go

8 straight down, they straight up. They, they go so

9 close together I used to wonder why they didn't crash.

10 Now I know they're guided by NASA after going to

11 US

12 Research Global Change dot gov, basically.

13 But no one will help and it's not just coal.

14 It's not just pollution. Because this happens in the

15 wintertime too and it's really horrible, but an attack

16 is being made on the people and they, they don't even

17 realize it because they don't look up. It's just not a

18 normal thing to look up at the sky.

19 And blue is not blue anymore and yes, I know

20 I'm talking fast, but I'm just that way and it could be

21 what I'm breathing making me that way. I don't know.

22 But thank you for listening to me. I hope

23 that somebody would please email me so I can send you

24 some of these government documents I have and articles

25 from the Washington Post where the U.N. is trying to
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1 ban this, which is probably a joke, but that's what

2 they say and I have proof that NASA's involved, but so

3 I, I bombed on your all's parade.

4 Thank you very much for listening to me. And

5 I'm just going to like get up and go try to find my

6 car. So have a good day.

7 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

8 MR. KRUEGER: Hi, my name is John Krueger,

9 spelled K-R-U-E-G-E-R and I appreciate the opportunity

10 to come before you today and certainly your willingness

11 to, to hold this hearing and give us all a chance to

12 speak our views.

13 I handle policy development for the Georgia

14 Chamber of Commerce and I should state that I'm also a

15 nearly forty-year asthma sufferer, so I'm sensitive to

16 air regulations.

17 The -- just to explain as background. The

18 Georgia Chamber is a statewide organization for

19 business in Georgia. We have nearly three thousand

20 members representing five hundred different types of

21 business and industries from nearly all of Georgia's

22 one hundred fifty-nine counties. Our member also

23 include almost four hundred local and international

24 Chambers of Commerce and other business associations

25 whose combined membership represents over half of
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1 Georgia's workers.

2 And I say that because sometimes Chambers of

3 Commerce are accused of being, you know,

4 representatives of big business. We aren't.

5 Nearly sixty percent of our members have

6 fewer than fifty employees and two thirds of those are

7 located outside of metro Atlanta. We're proud of our

8 membership. Our membership, you know, employ the

9 people in this state and, and so on behalf of our

10 membership, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to

11 you today.

12 But now the Georgia Chamber monitors proposed

13 legislation and regulatory rules before both state and

14 federal legislatures and agencies on a variety of

15 issues in an effort to educate and certainly, you know,

16 get our members to advocate on, on issues of importance

17 to the business community and I think it's important

18 today that, you know, even though we represent

19 business, this isn't about, you know, lack of respect

20 for the environment. This is about public health, but

21 this is also about reasonable regulations that are

22 thoughtful and you know, achieve the desired impact in

23 a reasonable way.

24 Our members, many of them are leaders in this

25 state and the country on sustainability initiatives and
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1 certainly one of the priories for our chamber this year

2 is to grow that and, and you know, educate our members

3 on, you know, the desired impacts of being sustainable

4 and understanding, you know, the way streams and their

5 processes and in being sensitive and being, you know,

6 good stewards of the environment.

7 But, you know, as we've heard, you know, today air

8 quality has improved significantly and so as we look at

9 these rules, we are concerned with the impact in, in

10 essentially a threefold ways.

11 First is the cost benefit impact. Again,

12 this is on, you know, the economics of the cost of

13 these rules and what the desired public health benefit

14 will be. We've all heard and certainly you, you know,

15 spent what, maybe almost ten hours now listening to

16 data from different sources and I think we'll all agree

17 that, you know, there are significant costs associated

18 with this. And we're concerned from, you know, again

19 our membership providing many of the good paying jobs

20 in this state, what the impact of this will be on their

21 ability to remain competitive and certainly the impact

22 on their bottom line.

23 The truth is our utilities in this state have

24 already invested billions of dollars in environmental

25 controls and it's built into their plans to keep doing
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1 that, but the impact of what these proposed rules do,

2 there are concerns on what that would do for their

3 profit, you know, their, their ability to continue to

4 function and to continue to provide jobs.

5 That leads to certainly the economic impact

6 on rate payers. You know, we've heard estimates from

7 anywhere from twenty to twenty-five percent growth in

8 utility costs. I've, you know, in my career, I've

9 served on staffs in Congress and at the state level and

10 you know, for years have looked at and, and tried to

11 weigh the, you know, the members I've worked for have

12 tried to weigh the economic benefits of regulations and

13 you know, in the matter of utilities, you know, I've

14 seen it study after study from, from ratepayers.

15 Everybody wants, you know, green technology and

16 certainly, you know, we in Georgia continue to expand

17 renewable technology when it comes to utilities, but

18 they're not willing to pay that price and so certainly

19 that's a, that's a tremendous impact on the citizens of

20 this state.

21 And then finally, you know, looking at the

22 compressed time line of, of the implementation of these

23 rules cause us some concern as well.

24 Really in, in, you know, closing I'd say

25 that, you know, it's interesting that the title of
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1 these rules are maximum achievable control technologies

2 and I would just caution you that just because

3 something's achievable, doesn't mean it's, it's

4 worthwhile. You know, we could outlaw all these

5 sources of, of emissions from, you know, all power

6 plants or you know, fossil fuel power plants to

7 gasoline engines to anything and still not control the

8 prominence of some of these toxins in the air that

9 occur naturally, so really on behalf of the Chamber, I

10 just would request that the EPA be diligent in their

11 analysis in, in the impact these regulations on

12 businesses in the southeast.

13 Thank you.

14 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Any

15 questions or anything? Thank you.

16 I think this is our last two speakers for

17 the, before dinner anyway, so let, let me just say if

18 you've signed up to speak and you haven't -- I'm sorry.

19 I have two more speakers, June Deen and Flora

20 Tommie. I, I -- okay. Those are you guys, those are

21 you guys, great. If, if there's someone else that has

22 not yet spoken who is either thinks they're signed up

23 to speak or is planning to speak before dinner, please

24 go out -- just let them know outside. Otherwise, these

25 will be our last two speakers before the dinner break.
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1 And so June Deen and Flora, is Tommie, I

2 think is the way -- is that right?

3 MS. TOMMIE: Tommie, yes.

4 MR. CLARK: Tommie. Okay. Is June here?

5 Ms. Tommie if you could, you could go ahead and, and

6 you know, state your name, spell it and go ahead and

7 talk and, and she may join us here in just a minute.

8 Okay.

9 MS. TOMMIE: For the record. My name is

10 Flora, F-L-O-R-A, M. Tommie, T-O-M-M-I-E. I am here

11 today on behalf of myself as well as representing the

12 Perkason [phonetic] Civic Association and it's located

13 in southwest Atlanta and we have a system called NPUs,

14 neighborhood planning units and that's within NPUX in

15 the City of Atlanta.

16 One of the reasons I am here today is my

17 concern that we have not yet enforced these

18 restrictions upon the industry. Currently, we have sat

19 here and we have waited while more people have problems

20 with respiratory diseases and illnesses as well as

21 develop more problems with our environment, with our

22 rivers, our streams, and our lakes and Georgia is one

23 of the states that does have a problem.

24 Personally, I'm going to give you a story as

25 to why I'm so passionate about this issue.
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1 Number one, I have to push down to hear

2 myself talk sometimes because I have severe respiratory

3 problems. I have been hospitalized in the past of lung

4 disease. I have also been hospitalized with heart

5 condition related to breathing problems as well and

6 that was documented through Grady Hospital as well as

7 Emory Hospital, Crawford Long, Crawford Long at Emory

8 University midtown Atlanta.

9 First time I experienced a problem breathing

10 was, I was outside walked through a severely congested

11 traffic area, right there in midtown on Ponce de Leon.

12 Got there, passed out, developed lumps in the throat,

13 could not breathe. Had to have emergency operation.

14 Next time, they told me I had developed

15 pericarditis, severe inflammation of the heart and lung

16 sacks.

17 All of this stuff happening, all the while

18 they told me I had developed asthma to the point that I

19 could not just go outside anytime I wanted to exercise

20 or to walk.

21 Now my issue is this. Industry says that we

22 should just wait continually. I don't have that luxury

23 of waiting. I have to have clean air. Before, I

24 couldn't take a job in California because the air

25 quality was so bad there that they had to begin working
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1 on it, then there were other states where the company

2 was going and I worked in corporate planning and budget

3 for insurance corporation at the time.

4 Now so I have to make a decision as to how I

5 will make a living or even be able to exercise to stay

6 healthy based upon the air quality of any place I go.

7 Next, I had the issue also of passing out and

8 having Atlanta Fire Department rescue me before we had

9 an air monitoring system in the City of Atlanta,

10 whereby the state would tell people whether it high,

11 unhealthy air days.

12 I discovered then that I could not breathe

13 because the air on those days were unhealthy as they

14 told me and I had to have oxygen and everything to help

15 me breathe and getting it out of the atmosphere.

16 I, therefore, began the issue of going ahead

17 and filing a lawsuit against the State of Georgia to

18 develop a monitoring system whereby people would be

19 told when we had unhealthy air days.

20 Industry still has never been -- I call it

21 friendly to us as human beings living with them. We're

22 not separate from the industry. All of us have to live

23 and have air. Our children have to.

24 I don't think anyone should have to wait

25 until it gets to this point and say, okay we can't fix
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1 that yet, let's hold off on the regulations. I say

2 they can. I say they can because number one, I was

3 there as a child when EPA was established and industry

4 was saying they couldn't meet those regulations then.

5 I was there as a child when we had President

6 Carter bring up the regulations for the Environment

7 Regulations to being across the country. My family

8 raised, helped raise President Carter. I was born in

9 Plains, Georgia, in south Georgia. Our home is still

10 there, so creeks, rivers, streams, I grew up around

11 fishing people.

12 I remember the day when people went to fish

13 and they couldn't eat the fish. I remember when the

14 subsistence of the signs began to be put in place in

15 Georgia and we could no longer just go fish in creeks

16 and streams.

17 These are places that are basically,

18 predominantly African American, native Americans, poor

19 whites, and they are the type of people who -- they

20 don't have the jobs or the health insurance to be able

21 to go and get their problems taken care of. No one

22 took care of them. Everything they do, they have to do

23 on their own.

24 I think we have to say that these regulations

25 are needed finally to help us begin to have a healthy
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1 society so that we don't bury people in the ground

2 early because of heart attacks caused by lack of access

3 to clean air and be able to eat our fish in our creeks

4 and streams.

5 I want to definitely let you know if industry

6 come after your scientists, you should all surround

7 your scientists and EPA people and say we are going to

8 look at U.S. EPA is the one agency that is here to

9 protect, help the people, as well as help industry know

10 how it can become better. It should not be this battle

11 that's been brewed between people by political parties

12 with people wanting to have power. It should be about

13 the issue of the human life and helping our children

14 not to be born with developmental disabilities, so that

15 we can therefore take the next generation, they can go

16 fishing.

17 I have places where people go fishing that

18 people have to catch them and stop them from eating the

19 fish because it's contaminated and I don't know how I

20 can get any clearer.

21 Industry said they couldn't meet the

22 standards and we had Chattanooga, Tennessee. The worst

23 place in the country and one of the worst in the world

24 and look at what we had to pay to clean it up. We

25 can't clean up human bodies. Our children can't get
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1 their minds back from mercury pollution, so we have to

2 start stepping up to the plate and saying move ahead so

3 that you can help industry become one of

4 the best in the world and not compare ourselves to

5 China, who has sub-zero standards for environmental

6 pollution. We should not ever compare ourselves to

7 such a society because I thought we all valued our

8 citizens and your ratepayers are human beings. They

9 have to have clean air. They have to have food and I'm

10 glad that our former state senator also submitted a

11 letter to you, Senator Zamarripa represented our

12 district and I'm one of the people who helped to get

13 him elected because we have a diverse population of

14 people who can't come to meetings because they can't,

15 feel they can't speak correctly. They can't write

16 because they have limited writing abilities. They

17 don't have access to technology to know what's wrong.

18 But I do see, when I see children walking

19 around with nebulizers, inhalers and all of this, that

20 that's wrong. That's not what we should leave our

21 children as Americans. That's not why we set up our

22 national park system or any of these agencies that are

23 there to help us preserve and look after our next

24 generations.

25 And I'm sorry, but I lose wind.
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1 MR. CLARK: Okay.

2 MS. TOMMIE: Thank you.

3 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Deen.

4 MS. DEEN: Thank you for allowing me to speak

5 today. And thank you for your remarks. I appreciate

6 that.

7 I'm June Deen, J-U-N-E, D-E-E-N and I'm here

8 to speak on behalf of the American Lung Association in

9 Georgia.

10 Toxic air pollutants emitted to the

11 atmosphere by coal-fired power plants threaten not only

12 the air we breathe, but the water we drink, the soil we

13 live on and the food we eat.

14 This pollution harms the health of people who

15 live adjacent to the power plants and hundreds of miles

16 away.

17 Georgia laws propel some Georgia plants to

18 move further along in meeting the proposed

19 requirements. It's time to level the playing field for

20 all plants by making national rules.

21 EPA's proposed standards are based directly

22 on emission levels already achieved by electricity

23 producers across the nation.

24 The limits would provide equal protection to

25 people across the country, including protection from
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1 toxic emissions crossing state lines.

2 The American Lung Association recommends that

3 all coal-fired power plants cut emissions to meet the

4 limits under the proposed standards.

5 Additionally, the American Lung Association

6 firmly opposes any attempts to reduce EPA authority to

7 regulate these emissions, as there have been significant

8 strides in cleaner air nationwide since the Clean Air

9 Act was passed in 1970.

10 Thank you.

11 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Thank you

12 both for taking the time. I believe we are going to

13 postpone until -- or I'm sorry, Carol. Yeah, yeah,

14 yeah [indecipherable] no. Is it --

15 MS. KEMPER: Is it Ms. Tommie?

16 MR. CLARK: Tommie, Ms. Tommie.

17 MS. TOMMIE: Yeah. Flora.

18 MR. CLARK: Flora. Actually --

19 MS. KEMPER: May I ask --

20 MR. CLARK: -- Carol had a question for you.

21 MS. KEMPER: I'm sorry. What community in

22 southwest Atlanta did you say you were from?

23 MS. TOMMIE: Perkerson, P-E-R-K-E-R-S-O-N.

24 It's the Perkerson Community and it's named for one of

25 the settling families of Fulton County.
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1 MS. KEMPER: Thank you.

2 MS. TOMMIE: You're welcome.

3 MR. CLARK: Thanks very much.

4 MS. TOMMIE: You're welcome.

5 MR. CLARK: We are going to suspend the

6 hearing until -- and reconvene at six thirty tonight.

7 Thank you all very much for your time.

8 (Supper break from 5:39 until 6:31 p.m.)

9 MR. CLARK: -- only, only three here so far,

10 as far as I know, but let me go ahead and start with

11 the opening statement so.

12 Hi folks, we'll reconvene the hearing. I

13 have an opening statement which I will -- there's a

14 copy of it there and I'll just do a very short summary

15 of it. I think many of you have heard this already.

16 But, as you know this is a public hearing

17 that we're holding on Environmental Protection Agency

18 Rules to reduce emissions of hazardous air pollutants

19 from power plants and also new source performance

20 standards to reduce emissions of particulate matter,

21 SO2 and, and mercury from power plants as

22 well.

23 My name is Jeff Clark and I'm with EPA's

24 Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards and on our

25 panel tonight Carol Kemper who is the Deputy Division
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1 Director for the Division of Air, Pesticides, and

2 Toxics for EPA Region Four.

3 Beverly, I don't know if you're going to join

4 us or not, but Beverly Banister is yeah, will be with

5 us as well. Beverly is the Director of that division

6 and that division covers eight southeastern states.

7 Bill Maxwell who is one of the primary

8 authors of, of this proposed regulation and has been

9 working on utility toxic issues for at least the twenty10 one years that I've known him and, and then myself.

11 So, we proposed these rules on March the 16,

12 2011. We have a consent decree to finalize the rules

13 by November the 16 of 2011.

14 We're in the middle of a public comment

15 period and are looking for public comments through July

16 the 5th.

17 The transcript from this hearing and from two

18 other hearings that we held; one in, in Chicago and the

19 other in Philadelphia, those transcripts will all be

20 part of the public record and as you give oral

21 statements tonight, if you have written comments that

22 you'd like to give us now or later, we would certainly

23 welcome having those.

24 These are the first, there first federal

25 requirements for power plants to reduce toxic
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1 emissions. There are no existing federal requirements

2 for power plants to limit their emissions of toxic

3 pollutants like metal and -- metals and arsenic and,

4 and mercury.

5 And the prior administration, under the prior

6 administration, EPA finalized a rule that cut mercury

7 pollution from power plants, but the D.C. Circuit Court

8 struck the rule down as illegal and required EPA to

9 develop standards that follow the law in order to

10 protect public health and the environment and that's

11 what we're doing with this proposed rule.

12 What, for those few of you that were not here

13 earlier, let me just say that as far as giving comments

14 tonight, we're going to stay until eight o'clock.

15 We'll stay later if more people show up and want to

16 keep going, we'll stay, you know essentially as long as

17 it takes.

18 We've been generally holding people to five

19 minutes mainly because we've had so many people and we

20 wanted to be fair and get everyone through the process.

21 It might be a little more relaxed tonight if there's

22 not very many people here, but generally, there's a time

23 keeping system that we have here that -- you have a

24 green light that comes on when you start talking that

25 lasts for four minutes and then a yellow light kicks on
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1 to sort of say it's time to sum up, and then a red

2 light will start flashing after the five minutes is

3 over.

4 Again, generally I, I think we should

5 probably be okay with that given the, the number of

6 people tonight.

7 As I said, there are three people right now

8 that I know of that are signed up to speak and we're

9 bringing them, bringing you up two at a time and ask

10 you to sit at the table there and so let me call up Lev

11 Guter, Guter. Is that right?

12 MR. GUTER: Yes.

13 MR. CLARK: And, and Jenna Garland.

14 MR. CLARK: And also you if you could spell

15 your name for the court reporter who again, Rich is the

16 most important guy in the room here so as long as he's

17 happy, we're happy so.

18 MR. GUTER: All right. Well my name is Lev

19 Guter and that's spelled L-E-V, last name Guter, G-U-T20 E-R.

21 MR. CLARK: Great.

22 MR. GUTER: And I'm an Associate Organizing

23 representative with the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal

24 campaign.

25 Thank you for the opportunity to comment in
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1 support of these historic standards to protect our

2 communities from mercury and air toxins.

3 I live and work in Little Rock, Arkansas, and

4 I have traveled here today to express my support for

5 the proposed standards that will reduce mercury

6 emissions by ninety-one percent from coal-fired power

7 plants and soot by fifty-five percent.

8 Coming from Arkansas, I would like to give

9 you a little perspective on the degraded air and water

10 quality that we experience from coal plants there.

11 Air and water quality are, of course,

12 interconnected because the fallout of heavy metals and

13 air toxins from tall smoke stacks rain down into our

14 rivers and streams.

15 Methyl mercury winds up in our fish for

16 instance, and in Arkansas, hunting and fishing are an

17 integral part of life and culture in many parts of the

18 state.

19 Protecting the environmental and public

20 health in Arkansas is fundamental to lowering health

21 care costs as well as safeguarding the quality and

22 longevity of the lives of all Arkansans.

23 Yet, because of air toxins and mercury spewed

24 out by coal plants, many of our streams and rivers have

25 advisories against eating fish. In fact, according to
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1 the Arkansas game and fishing commission, twelve out of

2 the seventy-five counties are under fish advisories and

3 twenty lakes and rivers in Arkansas are impaired for

4 mercury.

5 Just a couple of those rivers include the

6 highly popular and recreated Ouachita River and Saline

7 River. And it's not surprising that mercury is such a

8 problem because the four operating coal plants which

9 are in Arkansas, Independence, White Bluff, Flint Creek,

10 and Plum Plant and they collectively emit over one

11 thousand and two hundred pounds of mercury every year.

12 Arkansas has no mercury controls on its coal

13 power plants and without federal protections, there not

14 going to be.

15 The American Lung Association, on page fifty,

16 of its 2011 State of the Air report sites that in

17 Arkansas, over seventy one thousand adults are at risk

18 for asthma attacks and twenty-six thousand children are

19 at risk for pediatric asthma attacks.

20 And since an estimated sixty-five thousand

21 children in Arkansas don't have any health insurance,

22 that means that their parents can't afford the

23 expensive pediatric visits for their children and since

24 the parents can't afford the necessary preventative

25 care, they end up taking them to the emergency room
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1 only after there's a full-blown asthma attack. And

2 only until the absolute worst symptoms are present do

3 they have the ability to go to the emergency and then

4 who pays for that visit? It's not going to be the

5 poverty-stricken parents. It's going to end being the

6 tax payers and the hospitals. And so that cost burden

7 gets shifted onto the taxpayers.

8 And who doesn't have to pay the brunt of

9 those costs? It's the very industry that are

10 aggravating the symptoms in the first place and that

11 industry is the coal industry. And they do not have

12 the necessary protections to keep them accountable.

13 They are spewing out coal dust, and mercury,

14 arsenic, heavy metals in the environment, yet they do

15 not have to internalize that cost into coal. Those

16 costs are externalized and that is why it is the public

17 who is paying for the dirty coal industry and in fact,

18 in a way they are subsidizing the externalities that

19 the coal industry is forcing upon the public by

20 breathing dirty air and eating the dirty fish in the

21 mercury laden water.

22 So, in, in summary, implementing reductions

23 in toxic mercury and air pollution will lessen the

24 health cost burdens that the public has already been

25 shouldering. Today's proposed mercury and air toxins
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1 protections will place accountability on those

2 industries who reap the greatest profits from burning

3 coal and only once they have accountability will we, as

4 a society, be able to move towards a cleaner burning

5 sources of fuel, and a clean energy economy and I would

6 urge the EPA to finalize these proposed standards.

7 And I thank you for your consideration.

8 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Ms. Garland.

9 MS. GARLAND: Thank you. Okay. I, I thought

10 this might tilt.

11 MR. CLARK: It should tilt a little bit. If

12 you force it, I think if you push it. There you go.

13 MS. GARLAND: I had to put some muscle behind

14 that.

15 MR. CLARK: Yeah.

16 MS. GARLAND: All right. Thank you. Good

17 evening. My name is Jenna Garland. That's spelled

18 J-E-N-N-A, G-A-R-L-A-N-D.

19 I want to first thank you all for being here

20 in Atlanta and thank you for your unwavering attention.

21 I know this has been a long day for you three as well.

22 I am a native Georgian. I was born and

23 raised in Woodstock, Georgia. I now live and work in

24 Athens with an organization called Southern Energy

25 Network.
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1 We are a non-profit organization that works

2 to combat climate change, advance renewable energy and

3 promote a smart, just energy economy by building a

4 diverse movement of young people in the southeast.

5 And we organize grassroots campaigns and

6 provide education and training to empower young leaders

7 and cultivate regional progress.

8 So I, I work with young people whose lives

9 have been directly affected by mercury pollution. I

10 primarily work with high school and college students

11 and the students I work with are, you know, ensuing the

12 traditional party atmosphere of college and they are

13 choosing to spend their time and energy on

14 environmental activism. Some of those students have

15 been here today. Some of them spoke earlier and I

16 think the, the fact that they dedicate such time and

17 energy to environmental activism rather than being at a

18 bar or a beach, is really indicative of the passion

19 young people for our planet and our people.

20 So I, I want to say that overwhelmingly the

21 community that my organization works with supports

22 EPA's proposed mercury regulation and on behalf of

23 myself and our students, I want to echo Katherine

24 Cummings words from earlier and say that we both

25 support the regulation and its enforcement. I think
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1 that part is critical.

2 I know that I am very lucky and very

3 privileged that as far as I know, I personally have not

4 been directly affected by mercury pollution yet.

5 Neither my sister nor myself suffer from any

6 neurological disorders, so I'm reasonably confident

7 that my mother did not have elevated mercury levels

8 when she was pregnant, but I don't have that same level

9 of confidence about my future.

10 And when women become pregnant and choose to

11 have a child, they take on a huge responsibility.

12 They're taking on, you know, changes to their bodies,

13 changes to their behaviors, and their lives and they're

14 doing all of this to increase the likelihood that their

15 babies are going to born healthy and happy and to be

16 very frank, I'm very tired of the fact that it's an

17 individual's Responsibility to protect ourselves and

18 our children from neurotoxins. I don't think that's

19 the way it should be.

20 You know, by continuing to rely on coal, and

21 by fighting regulations like this very one proposed by

22 EPA, power companies are telling us that our lives do

23 not matter as much as money in their bank accounts.

24 To the same individuals who testified this

25 morning on behalf of Georgia Power and Southern
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1 Company, represent corporations that have spent tens of

2 millions of dollars lobbying to de-fund the

3 Environmental Protection Agency. These are the same

4 people who put money in the pockets of politicians, who

5 wrote legislation and then cast votes to try and

6 de-fund the Environmental Protection Agency. And these

7 are the same people who work to strip the Environmental

8 Protection Agency of its authority to regulate

9 hazardous pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

10 So, you know, when they get up here and, and

11 do their kind of dog and pony show about oh its going

12 to cost jobs and everything. You know, frankly I just,

13 I don't believe them and Georgia Power, Southern

14 Company and I want to add in the Georgia Public Policy

15 Federation because one of their folks was here earlier.

16 You know, they do not represent people. I am a

17 customer of Georgia Power because I have no other

18 choice, so I can't vote with my dollar the way I do

19 with a lot of other services and goods I buy.

20 I send Georgia a check every single month,

21 but they do not represent me or my interest or my

22 opinions. And I want to make the case that that's

23 especially true with the Georgia Public Policy

24 Federation. They're not a membership organization.

25 The woman who spoke on behalf of them said oh Georgians
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1 don't want more regulations that will cost money. I'm

2 sorry, I've been in Georgia for twenty-six years. I do

3 want the regulations that are going to protect our

4 health. I'm okay with paying a few extra dollars of my

5 power bill if it means that me, my children, women who

6 are pregnant right now, the babies that are being born

7 every day in the state of Georgia are going to be

8 healthier.

9 And in fact, my rates already did go up

10 because Georgia Power wanted to guarantee a twelve

11 percent profit margin for its shareholders and the

12 Public Service Commission voted to approve that. So

13 I'm already paying Georgia Power extra to make sure

14 their shareholders have a little bit of money. I'm

15 one hundred percent okay with a few more dollars to

16 protect the health of my, my neighbors.

17 I believe that this is why we have government

18 because we need individuals and communities for it to

19 be protected from those who would use our lives, our

20 health and our children's health in order to make a

21 buck.

22 So I just want to close by, you know, once

23 again saying thank you to the three of you for being

24 here. Thank you for writing this rule. Thank you for

25 giving myself and others the opportunity to comment in
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1 support of it and I want to say that you know, you are

2 doing the right thing. This is going to mean a huge

3 difference to the lives of millions and you know, thank

4 you. I appreciate it.

5 MR. CLARK: Great. Thank you very much. Any

6 questions or comments from anybody? Thank you.

7 Two more speakers, Michael Wall and Bill

8 Cunningham please. Go ahead.

9 MR. WALL: Hi. My name is Michael Wall.

10 It's M-I-C-H-A-E-L, W-A-L-L. I want to sincerely thank

11 you guys for sitting here all day and listening to a

12 stream of folks arguing for and against this rule.

13 Thank you for your endurance and your willingness to

14 listen to all of us.

15 I'm a seventh generation Georgian. I grew up

16 in Tale County around the creeks and tributaries of the

17 Flint River. I live in Atlanta now, but when I was a

18 child, my grandfather would take me fishing and we

19 would bring home strings full of fish. And those are

20 some of the fondest memories I have of my grandfather

21 and it disturbs me deeply to think that kids today,

22 fishing with their grandfathers, bringing home a string

23 full of fish or taking home poison and I look forward

24 to the day when Georgians can have faith that what they

25 harvest from the rivers and streams here are safe and
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1 poison free, so please enact this rule.

2 Mr. Maxwell, thank you for your hard work on

3 this rule, decades of service. Thank you sir. I

4 appreciate it.

5 MR. CLARK: Thank you. Mr. Cunningham.

6 MR. CUNNINGHAM: Yes. My name is Bill

7 Cunningham, B-I-L-L, C-U-N-N-I-N-G-H-A-M.

8 I'm speaking on behalf of the Unions for Jobs

9 and the Environment, UJAE for short. UJAE represents

10 twelve labor unions whose members total over three

11 million. These organizations include manufacturing,

12 transportation, electric utilities, and mining.

13 These unions support the expansion of

14 renewable, as well as conventional energy sources and

15 all recognize the importance of coal generation and

16 keeping electricity production reliable and affordable,

17 as well as reducing the U.S. dependence on imported

18 energy.

19 Our members are concerned that EPA's proposed

20 rules for maximum achievable controlled technology,

21 that new and existing coal-based generating units could

22 lead to tens of thousands of job losses at utility

23 plants, coalmines, and in the rail sector.

24 And the question isn't whether PM, mercury,

25 acid gasses, and so on should be regulated. The
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1 question is what those regulations should be. How

2 they -- how much -- how they should be improved.

3 We agree with several aspects of the proposed

4 MACT rules, such as alternative compliance standards

5 for acid gasses. These kinds of flexibility measures

6 will help minimize the adverse impact on the rules on

7 our members.

8 We urge EPA to re-propose the rule to address

9 statistical errors in the calculation of the proposed

10 emission standards for mercury.

11 We cannot comment meaningfully on the rules

12 until we know what standard the agency ultimately will

13 propose.

14 Alternatively, we urge an extension of the

15 current sixty-day comment period to ninety or one

16 hundred and twenty days. In the past, more time to

17 analyze and comment on rules that are much more complex

18 than the one being here considered were given.

19 The proposed rule's source emission limits

20 will not allow any new coal plants to be constructed

21 because no single unit could meet all the proposed

22 emission limits. The new source limits are based on

23 emissions data from many different coal plants with

24 widely varying fuel and pollution control

25 characteristics.
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1 We urge EPA to take coal sulfur content into

2 account in setting the alternative acid gas SO2

3 standard. We do not believe that this rule should

4 require coal switching at scrubbed units.

5 We do not agree with EPA's estimate of ten

6 gigawatts of coal plant closures due to the rule.

7 Several independent estimates of the impact of the

8 proposed rule are in the range of forty to sixty

9 gigawatts.

10 EPA should analyze the cumulative impacts of

11 this rule and proposed transport rule together for SO2

12 and NOx emissions because utilities will

13 be required to meet both rules in the same time frame.

14 We are skeptical about the jobs analysis done

15 by EPA. We agree that thousands of construction jobs

16 will be created and that's a positive benefit for these

17 trade unions, our trade unions, but we believe the

18 agency is under estimating the loss of permanent jobs

19 if hundreds of coal plants close and utilities switch

20 to natural gas. One of UJ's members, the United Mine

21 Workers of America, has estimated that more than fifty

22 thousand direct jobs are at risk in the coal,

23 transportation and utility sectors.

24 If three hundred workers lose their jobs at a

25 coal plant, the new jobs created at the natural gas
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1 plant would make up only a small fraction of the

2 losses. Community impacts, such as the loss of tax

3 basis and support for local school systems need to be

4 addressed in EPA's analysis.

5 We support the construction of control

6 technologies to enable coal to be burned cleanly and we

7 see that much progress has been made in the past

8 because of EPA regulatory initiatives, but requiring

9 multi new emission standards for many older plants will

10 drive investments away from these plants and their

11 workers.

12 A major problem with the rule is its thirty13 six month compliance time frame as set by section one

14 twelve of the Clean Air Act. We urge EPA to provide an

15 across the board extension of at least one year as it

16 did in the marine MACT rule.

17 More plants will be shut down and more jobs

18 lost with the short three-year time table impacting

19 more than one thousand units and we are reviewing the,

20 the possibility of doing the kind of construction that

21 would be anticipated under the rule and to think that

22 basically the three-year time frame is much too short

23 for that construction to be done.

24 Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

25 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Thank you,
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1 both of you. Any questions guys? Okay. Thank you.

2 I think we will suspend the hearing for a few

3 minutes. It sounds like a crowd might be coming down

4 the hall, so we'll see.

5 (Hearing suspended from 7:03 p.m. until 7:07 p.m.)

6 MR. CLARK: Okay. I think we're ready to

7 reconvene the hearing and our next witness will be Mark

8 Woodall please. Apparently, they're popular.

9 MR. WOODALL: Thank you. My name is Mark

10 Woodall, M-A-R-K, Mark, Woodall is W-O-O-D-A-L-L.

11 I'm the chairman of the Executive Committee

12 of the Georgia Chapter of the Sierra Club and on behalf

13 of our ten thousand members here in Georgia, we

14 appreciate you coming to Atlanta and hearing about this

15 very significant public health issue, the toxic air

16 pollutant standards.

17 As you folks are probably aware, you're in

18 the middle here of some of the biggest coal-fired power

19 plants in the world. To the northwest, we have Plant

20 Bowen on the Etowah River and directly south would be

21 Plant Scherer on the Ocmulgee River north

22 of Macon and actually just a few miles from here is the

23 old Georgia Power Plant Jack McDonough, which is still

24 burning two boilers of coal, I think, but will soon be

25 three large natural gas-fired boilers over two thousand
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1 megawatts, so I would say to the gentleman from Georgia

2 Power that spoke earlier, there are alternatives to

3 their dirty old coal burners.

4 We are currently fighting three proposed coal

5 plants in Georgia and having been down to Early County

6 numerous times and over to Sandersville to hear the

7 Georgia EPD talk about this. the best I can get out of

8 the EPD branch chief, the multi-pollutant rule,

9 they don't care how many pounds of mercury or tons of

10 mercury are emitted. It's whatever the technology is,

11 best I could tell listening to Mr. Capp. I don't know.

12 I'm sorry I missed his earlier testimony, but obviously

13 this is not a tolerable situation for the people here in

14 Georgia and we believe it should come to an end.

15 I'm also a shareholder in Southern Company

16 and I was at the annual meeting over at Kellerwood

17 Gardens earlier this week and got a copy of their new

18 history big bet and currently I just started reading

19 it, so I'm all on the dams they built, the bets they

20 made on hydro power, but they certainly made a big bet

21 when they built the big coal burner down there north of

22 Macon, Plant Scherer, and as some of you may be

23 familiar, they went out there and graded off a part of

24 that proposed site and got themselves grandfathered in

25 before the -- I believe that was the 1977 amendments to
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1 the Clean Air Act. So all you heard that discussion

2 about the millions of dollars they're spending now to

3 add scrubbers and bag houses and SCRs and all the

4 things they're adding should have been added twenty

5 years ago and we shouldn't have had all this mercury

6 loaded up on the people and the environment of Georgia.

7 So they certainly got a ways to go, but for

8 them to plead that they need more time after delaying

9 and creating and jumping through every loophole

10 possible, we don't have a whole lot of sympathy for

11 that and as we have heard there are alternatives to

12 some of these dirty coal plants they got, so they need

13 to clean them up and we would appreciate you not

14 allowing them to place any more big bets on the safety

15 and the health of the people in Georgia.

16 I don't know, I haven't gotten to their --

17 the discussion of first two units at Vogel. Those of

18 you that follow nuclear may be familiar that when they

19 built the first two units, they planned to spend eight

20 hundred million dollars for four units there at Vogel

21 and then Three Mile Island came along and they spent

22 over nine billion dollars for two units which almost

23 bankrupted the entire Southern Company.

24 So now they are betting again on nuclear

25 power, so that apparently is their alternative, also
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1 another one of their alternatives. We don't think much

2 of that one, but they are spending many, many billions

3 of dollars over there, so I believe they can scrape up

4 a few million dollars to protect the people of Georgia

5 from mercury and other toxic air pollutants, so we

6 appreciate you all doing this rule. [Indecipherable]

7 as fast as you can.

8 Thank you.

9 MR. CLARK: Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.

10 If there's no question for Mark, next is Tony Anderson,

11 please. Mr. Anderson.

12 MR. ANDERSON: Thank you. First off, let me

13 please start off by saying it's an amazing pleasure to

14 be able to be here on this beautiful, yet rainy day to

15 offer I think what will be a pretty involved -- pretty

16 amazing opportunity for me. This is my first time

17 actually participating in this activity and I think

18 that I'm pretty blown back by what this means.

19 I'm not a scientist. I'm not a professional.

20 I'm not an expert. But what I do know is that one of

21 the most toxic and most persistent heavy metals in the

22 known environment is mercury.

23 And what I do know is that I was born -- I'm

24 -- I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where

25 there is a known -- it's a known fact that heavy metals
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1 are in our water. Heavy metals are in our, our land.

2 Heavy metals are in our lungs.

3 My kid sister, when she was less than one, we

4 discovered she had asthma and the asthma, the type that

5 she needs steroids. The ones that blow your body up.

6 By the time she is ten years old, she is not where her

7 weight says her height -- or her weight is where --

8 meets her height. And that's a problem.

9 Coal-fired power plants produce particulate

10 matter including in that is, is mercury, that gets,

11 gets thrown up into the air and puts into our lungs and

12 we breathe that in.

13 It's a known fact that coal-fired power

14 plants are most of which, thirty percent are, are in an

15 area which people of color, -- excuse me. Eighty

16 percent are in communities where people of color live

17 and there is a disproportionate affect on that.

18 David Boyd Haley [phonetic]. He's a

19 Professor and Chairman at the, of the Chemistry

20 Department at the University of Kentucky, made this

21 connection. He said, "Hey, mercury toxicity is a

22 causal affect in autism." And directly is vaccines and

23 dental amalgams and basically the idea was we know that

24 mercury enzymes alter brain tissue. And the gist,

25 that, that -- I think, what I took from that is that,
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1 you know, the degenerative process of what mercury does

2 to the brain makes people dumb and if we continue not

3 to allow for this, for mercury, among other heavy

4 metals to be regulated, we are actually, we're allowing

5 tacitly the dumbing of the future generations of us.

6 There's a reason why the healthcare,

7 healthcare world ruled out mercury in developed

8 nations. In Sweden, zero mercury usage in health. In

9 America, it's almost impossible to buy anything with

10 mercury in it. Why have we not done so as it relates

11 to single source -- as it relates to coal-fired power

12 plants and other -- and other power plant generating

13 facilities.

14 Coal -- or excuse me, mercury is bio

15 cumulative. It bio magnifies in our food chain and we

16 must be environmentally proactive as it regards to

17 regulating this.

18 This -- I work with an organization called

19 the Let's Raise a Million Project where we connect

20 communities of modest means with energy efficient light

21 bulbs, as a way to start the conversation about

22 sustainability. It's a known fact that those people --

23 we've, we've already introduced sixty -- excuse me,

24 thirty thousand CFLs and water kits into communities of

25 modest means and we ask a survey before we, we, we, we
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1 begin the retrofit and a whopping sixty-two percent of

2 the communities in which we engage cannot recognize the

3 energy star logo. We show them the energy star logo

4 and we said what does this mean? Sixty-two percent.

5 And so what's happening now is that there is

6 a different, there's a -- the need for this ruling that

7 you're protecting a group of people that don't even

8 know the harm that they're faced with. That's

9 extremely telling and so I'm here conversing and

10 sharing my thoughts with you, but there's a whole host

11 of others that don't even know what this is about. And

12 being that this is my first time doing that, I think

13 that's telling in itself.

14 So, on behalf of Let's Raise a Million

15 Project, a few other organizations that I'm

16 representing; Sierra Club, Environment Georgia, thank

17 you and I hope that this comes -- I hope greatness

18 comes out of this and EPA stands up to and, and walks

19 into its authority.

20 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. Sarah are

21 we?

22 SARAH: [Indecipherable].

23 MR. CLARK: Okay. So we're not exactly --

24 SARAH: No. We're not [Indecipherable].

25 MR. CLARK: Breaking. We're just in slow
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1 motion here for a minute.

2 MALE: Well, we didn't expect hail.

3 MR. CLARK: Really. Yeah, when we were

4 [indecipherable].

5 VARIOUS VOICES: [Indecipherable -- talking

6 amongst themselves].

7 MR. CLARK: So Erin Glynn is next and I take

8 it this is Erin here?

9 MS. GLYNN: Yes.

10 MR. CLARK: Okay. Just need for you to be by

11 a microphone. We can, we can take it to you over

12 there, if you want to sit there.

13 MS. GLYNN: No, I'm [Indecipherable]. It's

14 just a video.

15 MR. CLARK: Okay. [Indecipherable].

16 MS. GLYNN: So my name Erin, E-R-I-N, last

17 name Glynn, G-L-Y-N-N from the Georgia Sierra Club and

18 I don't have a comment today, but I'd like to submit

19 this comment from the Upper Wautaga River Keeper and

20 it's their official comment to be entered into the

21 record.

22 Thank you.

23 MS. SAVAGE: [Video narrator] My name is

24 Erin Savage and we're here representing the Upper

25 Wautaga River Keeper. We're on the Wautaga Lake which
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1 is a pristine mountain lake; seventy percent of its

2 shoreline is surrounded by state and federal land.

3 There is no point source of pollution.

4 Nevertheless, in 2007, the Tennessee

5 Department of Environment and Conservation added the

6 Wautaga Lake to the list of fish consumption

7 advisories. This advisory is aimed toward children,

8 pregnant women, and nursing mothers because mercury

9 consumption can impair the neurological development of

10 children.

11 MR. CLARK: Is your microphone still working,

12 Sarah? Is it still working? Your microphone, right?

13 Okay.

14 SARAH: It's loading.

15 MR. CLARK: Yeah.

16 MS. SAVAGE: [Video narrator] Since the

17 Wautaga Lake is a pristine mountain lake, no point

18 source of pollution, there's only one place that this

19 mercury can be coming from and that's atmospheric

20 deposition. The largest anthropogenic source of

21 mercury in our air in the United States is coal-fired

22 power plants.

23 So that's why we're here today with the Upper

24 Wautaga River Keeper to support the EPA's regulation of

25 mercury, acid gasses and toxic air pollutants from
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1 power plants.

2 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. And by my

3 count, you were witness number one hundred. So.

4 FEMALE: So she gets the prize?

5 MR. CLARK: She gets the prize, yeah. Our

6 next two speakers then would John Noel and Burt Lesnick

7 please.

8 MR. NOEL: I might have spelled my name, is

9 that right?

10 MR. CLARK: Please do, yeah.

11 MR. NOEL: Okay. My name is John Noel,

12 J-O-H-N, N-O-E-L. I'm a Tennessee native and a Georgia

13 resident of fifteen years. Former state legislature

14 and own a business for eleven years doing energy

15 efficiency work.

16 I come as a citizen today because I live in a

17 neighborhood of northwest Atlanta that is literally in

18 the shadow of Plant McDonough, the coal-fired power

19 plant across the Chattahoochee River.

20 And I had recently moved my offices and I

21 noticed that our conference room window has a beautiful

22 view of the coal-fired stack and when it is blowing and

23 going as it is doing right now, it is a sight to

24 behold. And all that, all that pollution just finds

25 its way right into the Atlanta air shed. I understand
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1 that plant may be closed in the years ahead, but

2 there's plenty like it that are still subsisting.

3 And so, I see firsthand. I live under its

4 ash cloud, if you will, and I understand that's

5 troublesome and I know that it's dangerous and

6 difficult, but I also know that there are solutions and

7 they are, they are energy efficiency solutions and they

8 don't cost a lot of money and they have wonderful pay

9 backs for people and they don't have to -- it doesn't

10 have to be and this is the wonderful thing the power

11 companies succeeded in doing is, if you do this to

12 coal, the electricity rates are going to go up and

13 one -- one point to that would be, so what? What's more

14 important to your health or slightly lower electric

15 rates, but I counter that argument and say that in fact

16 they won't. That if we, if we were aggressive about

17 energy efficiency, our utility rates would be stagnant,

18 perhaps even go down. And we certainly would be doing

19 the planet a favor and we would be doing our

20 pocketbooks a favor.

21 So having been in that business and

22 understanding everyday when we do things for customers

23 that it matters and you can just watch their utility

24 bills drop significantly and I could go into depth

25 about examples of that, County Courthouse, well Big
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1 County Courthouse, this large facility, this whole

2 facility used to be an energy hog. If you look at the,

3 the, the billings for it now after a lighting retrofit.

4 It just goes like this. And that is what but one

5 building in a, in a, in a fairly large metropolis in

6 Georgia. How many more could that be done to and other

7 things, other than just lighting.

8 So there's an energy efficiency component

9 that we need to think about that are solutions to

10 stopping this, helping stop this coal pollution and I'm

11 delighted you all are here to take our public comments

12 and I really appreciate it. It's, it's overdue. We're

13 literally killing our population and it's not, it's not

14 right.

15 Thank you.

16 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

17 MR. LESNICK: Burt Lesnick. Hi.

18 MR. CLARK: Hi.

19 MR. LESNICK: I'm representing the American

20 Thoracic Society. Imagine yourself as a child with

21 asthma. You might have trouble breathing every day, but

22 today the air pollution count is high. You're having

23 much more trouble. You can't force the air out of your

24 chest and as a result, you trap more air. Until your

25 chest starts looking like a Michelin Man. Now you
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1 can't get air in or out of your chest. Your inhalers

2 are not working and you're desperate for air. You're

3 on the way to the emergency room, maybe to be admitted,

4 maybe to get a breathing tube placed in your windpipe.

5 Your asthma has changed from a chronic illness to a

6 life threatening moment. You may see me, your

7 pediatric pulmonologist. A lung doctor.

8 At the hospital, we would use medicines to

9 open up your airways and reduce the swelling. We'll

10 get to work and we might get you off the breathing

11 machine and home again.

12 So I'm Burt Lesnick and I'm a pediatric

13 pulmonologist and I treat kids with lung disease. The

14 kids I treat generally have severe lung disease.

15 We know air pollution is really bad for your

16 lungs. Years of research and literally thousands of

17 studies have made clear that air pollution can make you

18 sick and if you have a chronic condition like asthma,

19 it can make you sicker and in some cases it can kill

20 you.

21 When I see kids with lung disease, they're

22 often in pretty bad shape. Usually through medicine,

23 education, trigger avoidance, I can help kids and their

24 families do a better job at managing their lung

25 disease, but it's tough to protect yourself from the
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1 air that you breathe.

2 I know air pollution has an impact on kids'

3 respiratory health. Every time there's a high ozone

4 day in Atlanta, I know the office and hospital will be

5 slammed with kids who are having an asthma

6 exacerbation.

7 Well, my casual observation is anecdotal at

8 best. There are several carefully designed research

9 studies that back up my observation; one of them

10 occurred here in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics when

11 there were fewer cars on the road and we had fewer

12 emergency room admissions for asthma.

13 So when it comes to air pollution, I spend

14 most of my time rescuing patients from the bad affects,

15 but today I'm here to do something different. Instead

16 of waiting for the air pollution to make the kids sick,

17 I want to be here and support the proposed rule that's

18 trying to stop the air pollution from making the kids

19 sick to begin with.

20 The proposed rule will remove tons, literally

21 tons of pollution from the air that we breathe. The

22 rule will reduce acid gasses and particle pollution,

23 both of which are known triggers of asthma attacks. It

24 removes powerful pollutants like mercury, lead, and

25 dioxins, dioxins all which can build up in the
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1 environment and compare -- can impair a child's growth

2 and brain development.

3 The good news is we know how to remove much

4 of this pollution from the air. There are power plants

5 across the United States that have already installed

6 the equipment needed to remove much of the pollution

7 from their smoke stacks.

8 Today's proposed rule will require all, yes

9 all power plants to install pollution control

10 equipment. This is how we will get cleaner and

11 healthier air to breathe.

12 Reducing air pollution will have significant

13 health benefits for the U.S. especially for kids. EPA

14 estimates the rule when fully implemented will prevent

15 a hundred and twenty thousand cases of asthma symptoms,

16 eleven thousand cases of acute bronchitis and twelve

17 thousand emergency room and hospital visits every year.

18 In my world, that means far fewer sick kids. Fewer

19 anxious parents and a whole lot healthier America.

20 As a member of the American Thoracic Society

21 and a Pediatric Pulmonologist, I am please to support

22 EPA and its proposed rule to reduce air pollution.

23 While my comments today do not go into depth on the

24 many technical issues raised by the proposed rule, the

25 ATS will submit formal written comments during the
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1 public comment period to provide EPA with further

2 input.

3 Thank you and I would be happy to answer any

4 questions.

5 MR. CLARK: Thank you. I don't know that we

6 have any questions for you. So, yeah. So thank you so

7 much.

8 MR. LESNICK: Thank you.

9 MR. CLARK: We appreciate your testimony. I

10 think we are suspending again for a few minutes, so.

11 (Hearing suspended from 7:31 p.m. until 7:34 p.m.)

12 MR. CLARK: I'm sorry. Oh that's right, we

13 got our man Bill. We are ready to reconvene. We --

14 who's, who's -- okay. Brandon Sutton and Carly Queen.

15 Hi, how are you? And if you could also -- when you say

16 your name, spell it for the court reporter too please,

17 that would be great.

18 MR. SUTTON: My name is Brandon Sutton, it's

19 B-R-A-N-D-O-N, S-U-T-T-O-N.

20 I'm here to respectfully ask the EPA to

21 fulfill its mission of protecting human health and the

22 environment by following through on plans for

23 tightening standards for mercury emissions.

24 The standards will benefit public health and

25 have long lasting positive impacts on the environment
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1 and economy for decades to come.

2 I've seen the impacts of the lack of adequate

3 regulation in the energy sector in my Spirit of the

4 Gulf Coast documentary work over the past year.

5 Today's I'm not just bringing my voice, but I'm

6 bringing the voices of people hundreds of miles away

7 that are still suffering from the tragic oil spill

8 disaster last summer.

9 What I learned in multiple visits to the

10 region over the past year is that there is still an

11 ongoing impact not being widely reported in the media.

12 In following this unfolding drama, what I want to

13 express to the EPA is that the impacts are not always

14 visible to you, may not always visible to the media.

15 The real consequences are in stress levels, the

16 depression cases, doctors office visits, broken local

17 economies, dwindling bank accounts, shattered dreams

18 and the very real life from many people who live in

19 communities throughout the gulf region.

20 On the surface, oil and mercury don't have

21 much in common, but the lessons I learned in the

22 aftermath of the oil spill apply directly to your

23 decision to adopt stronger mercury emission standards

24 now.

25 You can't always see the impacts of toxic
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1 pollution, but they are real and they're serious. You

2 can't always see that a pregnant woman walking down the

3 street, has mercury contamination by looking at her,

4 just as you can't see that there is an oil spill impact

5 in coastal Alabama by looking at the white sandy

6 beaches.

7 Mercury pollution adversely affects public

8 health across the U.S., yet the regulation of this

9 pollutant can actually create jobs in the same

10 communities that are impacted by this contamination

11 today.

12 The decision to tighten standards on mercury

13 emissions is indeed vital to creating healthy

14 communities across the nation.

15 I ask myself how I could help you reckon with

16 the delayed consequences of this toxic contamination

17 when immediate consequences are not necessarily

18 dramatic. I can show you economic impacts, distrust of

19 seafood and frustration with the spill clean up

20 overall, but I only have time to share a few voices

21 with you today.

22 Although not widely acknowledged and largely

23 invisible to the rest in the country, these stories are

24 real. From Mobile, Alabama, to Grand

25 Isle, Louisiana, I've personally spoken to citizens who
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1 continue to struggle even now. I hope their stories

2 will help you in your decision to tighten standards on

3 mercury emissions.

4 You have the opportunity to take preventative

5 action on behalf of the people who live in sensitive

6 areas where mercury contamination is an ongoing threat.

7 I hope you'll take it.

8 FEMALE: [Narrator on video] My daughter said,

9 "Momma, why does it take a tragedy for people to wake

10 up?"

11 CHILD: A lot of the people are naive to

12 what's going on in the rest of the country.

13 CHILD: And they believe that the oil isn't

14 here anymore, but it is. It's not gone.

15 FEMALE: It's no longer winter time so the

16 doctors can't say that the cold air and the heat inside

17 house, the flu, and the upper respiratory. That can't

18 happen anymore. The pollen is gone now so they can't

19 blame the pollen for all the asthma and people, now

20 here it is, you know, springtime and people are --

21 it's the same thing they had at Christmas, they have

22 now. It hasn't gone away.

23 MALE: This fall and this winter, we seem to

24 be suffering more from respiratory type illnesses.

25 CHILD: Talking about the health is pretty
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1 much in the same attitude towards talking about the oil

2 spill. People still try to act like they don't talk

3 about it, they don't think about it, it's going to go

4 away, but it's hard to ignore.

5 FEMALE: And there's not been anybody, any

6 media, any doctor, any surgeon general, any government

7 saying okay citizens, if these are your symptoms,

8 please let us know so we, we can, you know, see what we

9 can do to, to find an answer.

10 MALE: We need to get the government really

11 to take responsibility on the behalf of people. That's

12 what we, we vote them in there for. That's what we pay

13 them for. That's why you got them up there for. So

14 help us. Help the people down here.

15 MALE: You know, I think we really need to be

16 sensitive and, and conscious to how our technology can

17 harm the environment and ultimately harm ourselves and

18 all of nature as well.

19 MR. SUTTON: Thank you for letting me share

20 those stories with you today.

21 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

22 MS. QUEEN: Hi. My name is Carly Queen.

23 MR. CLARK: Hi.

24 MS. QUEEN: C-A-R-L-Y, Q-U-E-E-N. I grew up

25 in western North Carolina near the Great Smokey
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1 Mountains National Park; one of the most beautiful

2 places in the country if you ask me and we tend to

3 think of ourselves as having the best, cleanest water

4 in the southeast region.

5 I grew up with asthma. I moved from North

6 Carolina about seven years ago to come and get my

7 Bachelor's Degree from Georgia Tech in Mechanical

8 Engineering and I currently work for National Wildlife

9 Federation as their southeast field coordinator for the

10 campus program. But I'm here today as an individual.

11 I actually wasn't going to comment today. I

12 came as an observer because I didn't really feel like I

13 had a good story to tell about mercury and toxics. And

14 then today when we were getting our mercury hair tests

15 done over lunch, I started to think, you know, I'm very

16 privileged to have grown up as a vegetarian. I've

17 never eaten fish, so I probably have not been exposed

18 to any kind of high levels of mercury or other toxics

19 in that way, but then I started to think, you know, the

20 part of Atlanta that I live in and where I grew up in

21 North Carolina are both very close to industrial sites;

22 paper mills, train yards, all sorts of chemical plants

23 that I don't even know what they do or what they're

24 emitting. And so it would be really interesting to see

25 what my results are.
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1 But I started to think more about the people

2 I'm connected to in my family and so, I'm really here

3 because I'm concerned about my friends and my family

4 and my mother and my father and future generations and

5 the impacts that this constant emission of toxic

6 pollution into our atmosphere and into our water could

7 have on them. Impacts that we don't even completely

8 understand. I worry about my mother and father who,

9 you know, my step-father goes out fishing in North

10 Carolina and Georgia all the time, catches trout and

11 you know, they eat it and I know in North Carolina,

12 there's a statewide advisory about mercury and I'm sure

13 that it's probably just as bad here in Georgia.

14 And so I worry about that and then I know my

15 mother did experience some minor neurological damage

16 from mercury poisoning some years back from a filling

17 that leaked and so they're definitely very visible

18 impacts. She went to the doctor because she was sick

19 and finally they figured what was going on, so it does

20 have health impacts. I know you know that, but it has

21 been called into question today, which is just crazy.

22 I've also seen children with severe autism

23 and how impossible it is for them to even communicate

24 or function as a human to another human being. This

25 child just screaming and crying for no reason and
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1 there's nothing you can do to calm them.

2 Also at the beginning of this year, my father

3 was diagnosed with leukemia and he passed away in

4 February. My step-mother also has been diagnosed with

5 multiple sclerosis and when I talked to my physician

6 about this, you know, she was, she asked well was he a

7 chemist or something, you know, because she suggested

8 that his disease could have been linked to some kind of

9 exposure to toxic chemicals.

10 When I did a little more research about it,

11 no there's not definitive answers out there that this

12 is definitely causing all the leukemia in the world,

13 but there have been numerous studies connecting mercury

14 exposure to both multi sclerosis and leukemia, and so

15 it just makes me wonder, you know? Even though we

16 don't know exactly or have the evidence just laid out

17 in front of someone from the laboratory tests that yes

18 this causes leukemia in humans, doesn't mean that it

19 doesn't. And it doesn't mean that it's not causing all

20 sorts of other adverse health effects that we don't

21 understand, so I just think it's really important and I

22 urge you to use the precautionary principal and enact

23 the strongest possible protections for the public

24 health against these toxic emissions.

25 I just want to say a few things about some of
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1 the comments from industry representatives earlier

2 today. I want to say that I do not feel that they

3 speak for me or for the public. I'm disgusted that

4 they claim to speak for low income communities and

5 communities of color because they don't. They speak

6 for a very small handful of elite rich people who, you

7 know, even if they do get sick can pay for all their

8 health bills and whatever and they don't live near the

9 coal plants. They don't live, you know, where they're

10 exposed to these astronomical levels of toxic pollution

11 and the people that they're claiming to care about, you

12 know, in, in keeping the power rates low are not people

13 that they actually care about and they don't care about

14 jobs. They're trying to get rid of your jobs by de15 funding the EPA, so I just urge you to please don't

16 listen to them, they're lying. And please protect our

17 health and enact the strongest possible rules.

18 And thank you for the opportunity to comment.

19 MR. CLARK: Thank you for the comments.

20 Okay. Melissa Nummink.

21 MS. NUMMINK: Good evening. I can imagine

22 that you guys are ready to go. I'm going to make this

23 short and sweet.

24 MR. CLARK: If you could -- let me just,

25 before you make it short and sweet if you could --
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1 MS. NUMMINK: Yes. My name and spell it.

2 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

3 MS. NUMMINK: My name is Melissa Nummink --

4 MR. CLARK: I'm a bureaucrat, you know, after

5 a while you just --

6 MS. NUMMINK: That's okay. I got it. I'm a

7 teacher. I know how rules are. M-E-L-I-S-S-A,

8 N-U-M-M-I-N-K.

9 MR. CLARK: Thank you.

10 MS. NUMMINK: I teach science here in Atlanta

11 in the public school system. And I ride my bike to

12 school every day and I encourage my students to do the

13 same for exercise and the environment.

14 Air toxics like arsenic, mercury and dioxins

15 make this healthy exercise questionable. My students

16 aren't fouling their own air, these eleven, twelve, and

17 thirteen year olds are not the reason that we have

18 toxins. It's coal-fired power plants and I don't

19 understand why we're poisoning ourselves.

20 With the data that I was able to look at; you

21 know seventeen thousand premature deaths, eleven

22 thousand heart attacks, eleven thousand cases of acute

23 bronchitis, and a hundred and twenty thousand asthma

24 attacks being the toll that air toxics take on our

25 society annually.
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1 With our government refusing to place safe

2 emission standards on energy companies, I'm floored.

3 Our government should be for the people, not

4 corporations including air quality through fair

5 regulation is for the people. Inaction is unhealthy

6 for the people.

7 Science has provided us methods to diminish

8 these air toxics. It requires effort, but it's

9 reasonable effort. I can tell you that looking at the

10 little faces that I do every day would convince you too.

11 Until we move towards better alternative

12 energies, we should make our current energy safe. Air

13 toxics, they can be controlled. Inaction by our

14 government and all of us allow us, allow them to exist

15 in the air so, you know, the energy companies, I'm sure

16 say that this, you know, rule will mean layoffs, fewer

17 jobs. That is truly inconvenient. I understand. But

18 it's also inconvenient that people get sick from power

19 plants. It's also inconvenient that children develop

20 neurological disorders that they have trouble learning

21 in my classroom because of these chemicals. And that

22 pollution causes heart attacks and premature deaths.

23 So the children in my classroom are relying on the

24 adults to make their world safe.

25 I wouldn't expose my child to air toxics
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1 willingly. I'm here on behalf of my students, my mom

2 who has asthma, and the future to ask you to consider

3 please to stop it. The EPA needs to do anything

4 necessary to provide toxic free air. The solutions are

5 available to make life better for us all and we don't

6 need to poison ourselves any more.

7 Thank you so much.

8 MR. CLARK: Thank you very much. We will

9 suspend the hearing again for a few minutes.

10 (No other speakers present. Hearing adjourned.)

11 (Off the record.)

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