the Republican position is that it will be cheaper for plants to clean up their emissions under the new rules because plants will clean up their emissions when they're no longer required to clean up their emissions and their newly minted legal right to poison children is an affirmative defense against lawsuits from people whose children have been poisoned and class-action lawsuits are pretty much a nonstarter now that they have to be heard in the overburdened federal courts.

Of course, if they're going to clean up their emissions anyway, then the cost to industry of regulations requiring them to clean up their emissions is, um, nothing, but it's the principle of the thing.

There are still a few small problems.

Mercury is also a by-product of many industrial processes. In the United States coal-fired power plants alone pump about 50 tons of it into the air each year. That mercury rains out of the sky into oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams, where it becomes concentrated in the flesh of fish, shellfish, seals, and whales. Last year the Food and Drug Administration determined there is so much mercury in the sea that women of childbearing age should severely limit their consumption of larger ocean fish. The warning comes too late for many mothers. A nationwide survey by the Centers for Disease Control shows that one in 12 women of childbearing age already have unsafe blood levels of mercury and that as many as 600,000 babies in the United States could be at risk. But that begs a critical question: At risk for what?

Infants born to mothers contaminated by mercury in Japan’s Minamata Bay in 1956 had profound neurological disabilities including deafness, blindness, mental retardation, and cerebral palsy. In adults, mercury poisoning can cause numbness, stumbling, dementia, and death. “It’s no secret that mercury exposure is highly toxic,” says toxicologist Alan Stern, a contributor to a 2000 National Research Council report on mercury toxicity. But high-level exposures like those at Minamata cannot help scientists determine whether six silver fillings and a weekly tuna-salad sandwich will poison you or an unborn child. “The question is, what are the effects at low levels of exposure?” he says.

Data now suggest effects might occur at levels lower than anyone suspected. Some studies show that children who were exposed to tiny amounts of mercury in utero have slower reflexes, language deficits, and shortened attention spans. In adults, recent studies show a possible link between heart disease and mercury ingested from eating fish. Other groups claim mercury exposure is responsible for Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and the escalating rate of autism.

How—and in what form—mercury inflicts damage is still unclear. Yet scientists and policymakers agree that more regulation is imperative. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to finalize its controversial first rule on reducing mercury emissions from power plants this month, and delegates from the United Nations Environment Programme met in late February to discuss an international convention limiting mercury use and emissions.

A decade ago researchers and lawmakers agreed that lead, another heavy metal, was harmful to children at levels one-sixth as high as previously recognized. But it took scientists decades to establish the scope and subtlety of lead poisoning. Mercury is now a ubiquitous contaminant. The average American may have several micrograms of it in each liter of blood, and the atmospheric burden of mercury has perhaps tripled since the industrial age. Whatever needs to be done to protect humanity from its love affair with quicksilver, it had better happen soon.

In August 1996 Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, spilled a few drops of a laboratory compound called dimethyl mercury onto one of her hands. She was wearing latex lab gloves, so she didn’t think much of it. A colleague saw her at a conference the following November. “She said she thought she was coming down with the flu,” says toxicologist Vas Aposhian of the University of Arizona. By the time Wetterhahn was diagnosed with mercury poisoning, in January, it was too late. Despite subsequent treatment that helped clear the metal from her body, she lapsed into a vegetative state in February and died the following June.

In related news, Tom DeLay has responded to his latest ethical difficulties (apparently Mr. Abramoff got one of the clients he bilked to send old Tom on a little trip) by taking on the Terry Schiavo case.

Given the increasing frequency of Mr. DeLay's ethical conundra and the increased potential for widespread brain destruction, he could be a really busy guy soon.

I just don't know how he makes the time.

No plants near you?

Don't breathe that sigh of relief too soon. Remember, your Republican representatives in congress assembled have made sure you don't even know what country your food is from. Could be a bucolic farm right next door to one of those plants we're counting on to be good corporate citizens and not destroy your baby's brain to save a few bucks.

Values voters, please note.

edit: hey, good thing we don't like science, because some of it says that new cases of autism increase measurably as the level of mercury released into the environment rises and that would worry me if I liked science.

I'm sure only people with different values from Mr. Bush's are affected, though.

Although the study was done in Texas.