------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We know a lot about mercury we didn't know a few years ago. We know for example, that one out of every six, now one out of every three, American women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, kidney disease.
I have so much mercury in my body -- I had my level tested recently, and Waterkeeper will test your level, you can send them a hair sample -- my level is about double what the EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children with impairment. I said to him, "You mean she might have," and he said, "No, the science is very certain today. Her children would have some kind of permanent brain damage." He estimated an IQ loss in those kids of about five to seven points.
Well, 630,000 children are born in America every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother's wombs. President Clinton, recognizing the gravity of this national health epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That triggered the requirement that all of those companies remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost less than one percent of plant revenue -- a great deal for the American people. We have the technology. It exists. We already require it in states like Massachusetts.
But it still meant spending billions of dollars for that industry, and that's the industry that gave $100 million to President Bush. About 12 weeks ago, the Bush White House announced that it was abolishing the Clinton-era rules and substituting instead rules that were written by utility-industry lobbyists that will allow those companies to never have to clean up the mercury. The rules say on their face that they have to clean up only 70 percent within 15 years, which by itself is outrageous. But, in fact, the utility lawyers who wrote those rules wrote so many loopholes into them that the utilities will be able to challenge them, probably successfully and certainly forever, and they will never have to clean up any additional mercury.
We're living in a science-fiction nightmare today in the United States of America, where my children, and the children of millions of other Americans who have asthmatic kids, live in a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. Where my children, and the children of most Americans, can no longer safely go fishing with their father and mother and come home and eat the fish -- because somebody gave money to a politician.
RFK Jr.
