Mercurial unision?

Obama's administration has come out in favor of a new international treaty to control mercury pollution. With the US on board, China and India followed suit, and they paved the way for over 140 countries to agree to negotiate a legal binding treaty that could reduce mercury pollution around the world.

The agreement was announced at a high profile UN meeting in Nairobi. The agreement marked an end to a 7 year effort to formally address the mercury issue. Negotiations had largely been stalled because the Bush Administration had blocked them. Achim Steiner, the Director of the UN's Environmental Program, said the US's move helped turn the tide.

With mercury pollution still on the rise, this agreement came at a crucial time. Mercury is a dangerous toxin that can cause neurological damage when exposed to children. Obviously, this spells more bad news for coal burning thermal plants that are worst generators of mercury. Hopefully the technology that will need to be implemented will be forthcoming at affordable costs to the developing world.

Just goes to show how much can be achieved if the rich north leads by example. Hopefully like the Montreal protocol which was effective in alleviating the ozone hole problem, this one too will have its success story to show in a few years.

Meanwhile, the much awaited $787 billion stimulus bill announced by Obama apportions $8 billion in high speed rail system and modernizing and revitalizing railroads. This is being seen as a move that will relieve congestion, conserve energy, prevent pollution and improve accessibility.

Indian Railways is the largest rail network in Asia and the world’s second largest under a single management. Covering over 1 lakh kilometers, it runs some 11,000 trains everyday. Now what prevents improving accessibility and speed on some of these tracks? (Forget any stimulus in our desi budget. At least we can pick some useful tips.)

For instance, in the case of the new Bangalore international airport, with so many crores poured into underpasses and Volvo buses, how come the fact that a railway line going all the way very close to the airport, was not made use of? Kuala Lumpur has a very efficient rail network connecting the 70 odd kms between the airport and the city.

But there is a cultural side to our preferences to commute. How many prefer to car pool or take a bus to work. Very few, as revealed by a survey. And this is not as much about convenience as it is about status! Will high speed trains and a metro mean fewer cars on the roads? Not really, believe many who say that those traveling by bus may shift to the metro, not the car commuters.

How does one change attitudes? Any answers? Will recession do it?

Mercury pollution

Not only do they spew carbon dioxide, but most of our thermal plants are giving out mercury which is highly toxic and has a negative effect on children’s growth.

A study has found that coal-fired plants in the US have put out more mercury into the environment now than in 2006. Twenty tons of mercury, a neurotoxin that affects brain development in fetuses, were released into the air by these top fifty offenders. Coal-fired plants account for 40% of all mercury emissions, the largest single source of mercury in air.

The 600 plus coal-fired power plants in the United States, which produce over half of the country’s electricity, burn 1 billion tons of coal and release 98,000 pounds (44 metric tons) of mercury into the air each year. Power plants yield an additional 81,000 pounds of mercury pollution in the form of solid waste, including fly ash and scrubber sludge, and 20,000 pounds of mercury from “cleaning” coal before it is burned. In the US alone, coal-fired power plants pollute the environment with some 200,000 pounds of mercury annually.

Low-level mercury poisoning is so prevalent, it is estimated that six percent of woman have enough mercury in their bodies to cause neurological damage to their unborn fetuses. The more coal gets burned, the more mercury is released into the environment.

The mercury given out is deposited on land and water. Biological processes change much of the deposited mercury into methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin that humans and other organisms readily absorb. Methylmercury easily travels up the aquatic food chain, accumulating at higher concentrations at each level.

According to the EIP report, mercury removal at coal-fired plants is possible with current technologies. Activated carbon injection, a sort of mercury-hungry sponge placed in the smokestack, can reduce mercury pollution by ninety percent in some instances. Combined with other technologies—sulfur dioxide scrubbers, selective catalytic reduction, fabric filters—the mercury output can be even further reduced.

(But the inescapable fact is that even if pollution scrubbers in modern smokestacks do reduce air pollution, they do nothing to help the coal miners who die each year in mine accidents or from diseases brought on by breathing hazardous coal dust.)

The scary part is that mercury pollution is not bound by regions and can travel as far as from China to Oregon. Airborne mercury emitted by these facilities is deposited anywhere from within a few hundred kilometers of the smokestacks to across continents, far from its source.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for nations to go for safe and abundant renewable sources?