David Thomas: “I think we deal today with a very interesting and important issue, as a matter of fact. All of us want to do something…”

“I think we deal today with a very interesting and important issue, as a matter of fact. All of us want to do something about mercury and the emissions of mercury. We also want to have electricity, and we want to have it at a reasonable cost. Of course, our efforts now, in terms of energy, are to try to move toward using more and more coal for production because that is the biggest fossil fuel resource we have. What we have, of course, is a proposal by the administration over a period of time to reduce mercury from this kind of production by as much as 71 percent in the country and to be able to do that in a way which will allow us to continue to use coal and to allow us to continue to do it at the reasonable price that we now have. What we have done is developed a program to accomplish those important things. We have a regulation, 15 years in the making, which has been designed to allow for the continuation of production, to allow for the reduction over 70 percent in a period of 9 years, and to allow those who have trouble to have some offset sales so the result is a reduction in mercury, which we all want to do, while we continue to produce, which we all want to do. I think it is a big mistake, after all these efforts that have been made to accomplish all the things we want to accomplish, to say we want to reject that and establish something that is likely to be unworkable over a period of time, plus extremely expensive. I urge we do not repeal this effort.…”