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PROFESSOR: Let's get started.
How about the spring weather?
AUDIENCE: Oh, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
PROFESSOR: Tomorrow.
AUDIENCE: Someone needs to tell New England
that it's the end of April and it's got to warm up.
PROFESSOR: Yes.
It's getting boring now.
We need the spring weather to come quickly.
Right.
Good.
Great.
So let's see.
So today we have the pleasure to have Professor Noelle
Selin to lead the lecture.
And Professor Selin is not only a professor
of [INAUDIBLE] systems division, but also
the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary
Sciences.
So Noelle previous was on modeling of air pollution.
And has been doing lots of work on how
to develop an understanding of policy related to air quality
and pollution, specifically of mercury.
And through work, she has observed
firsthand international negotiations of policy--
basically how this [INAUDIBLE] is done, I guess.
A policy meeting, where you really
see all the parties getting together.
And they the role off science and ultimately
how these effects how to look at a global scale.
And as we have been talking throughout the course,
one of the aspects that is new from a business perspective
as you get into environmental topics
is you have to interface more with stakeholders
or in other traditional ways.
So last lecture we had a chance to hear from EDF, NGOs.
EDF is of the nice kind of NGO.
From a business perspective, they want to engage,
but [INAUDIBLE] attack.
On opposing front, as a company you also need to understand
what kind of shape could policy take in the future,
and what is the role of business?
How could this impact business?
Especially how it impacts supply chains are global.
So with that, Noelle, the floor is yours.
And thank you for coming.
NOELLE SELIN: Great.
So I want to right off that I don't know much
about supply chains.
So I'm hoping that this can be very much a discussion.
I'm hoping to learn from you guys
as well as talking to you a little bit about mercury.
AUDIENCE: Switch your microphone.
NOELLE SELIN: How do I do that?
Can you hear me now?
All right.
So why is the case of mercury interesting in the context
of sort of international business supply
chain regulation?
Well, mercury is the latest, the most recent
global environmental treaty.
So the Minamata Convention, which
is an international convention on Mercury,
was signed just this past October, 2013.
And it is widely thought of as it's
the first real new global environmental treaty
in over a decade.
The previous one was also on a chemicals related topic,
the Stockholm Convention.
So it's an example of international environmental
cooperation of which we don't have a lot.
We don't have a lot of concrete stuff coming out of the climate
negotiations right now.
But this is a brand new agreed global treaty.
And it's widely thought of as the first entire life
cycle international convention.
So I'm going to talk about that in that context
and how it emerged, what some of the science behind it is,
and how it might influence thinking about chemicals
regulation in a product context, because products
are a core area-- mercury in products
are a core area of mercury regulation
under the convention.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the interface
as well between domestic regulation
in the US, international regulation
in the European Union context, which
sort of is a sub-global regulation,
and how that interfaces with the global context.
So that's sort of where I'm planning to go.
Please feel free to interrupt me if you have questions
or want to go in different directions.
So what I'm going to start with is just
a little bit about the scientific backgrounds.
And we're on the same page on why
we're concerned about mercury, why
we're having a global treaty on mercury in the first place.
The reason that mercury is a global problem
is the mercury that we're emitting
doesn't stay within our borders.
So the main criteria for having an environmental regulation
internationally-- there's a general principle
of international law that you can do whatever you
want within your own borders.
If you're ruining your own environment,
it's kind of your problem.
But the minute you start ruining other people's environments,
that's when it's subject to international concern.
So if you just emitted mercury deposited right next
to your power plant or something and contaminated
your local environment, it wouldn't necessarily
be subject to international regulation.
But mercury in the atmosphere is in a pretty volatile form.
And mercury when you're emitting it's to the atmosphere,
lasts for about half the year to a year.
So that means it blows around.
And it blows around pretty much globally.
If you think about watching the weather map
and about how far weather goes in different winds,
you get about 7 to 10 days to go across continents basically.
So in about six months, you can imagine that something
that lasts in the atmosphere that long is going
to mix pretty effectively.
Intra-hemispheric mixing time is about half the year to a year
as well.
So anything emitted in the northern hemisphere
is going to go to the southern hemisphere too.
So mercury all over the world in the atmosphere.
Now the reason it's a problem is because of what
happens when it rains out.
When it rains out, it accumulates in ecosystems.
It turns into methyl mercury.
Methyl mercury is even more toxic than mercury.
It builds up in food chains-- goes into little fish,
big fish eat the little fish.
In the Arctic, there's a really long food chain.
Polar bears eat the big seals, people eat seals,
you get high levels of a neurotoxin of concern.
So methyl mercury is a neurotoxin.
It has effects on people's IQs-- in particular, pregnant women
who consume things high in mercury, particularly fish,
during pregnancy, their offspring
have neurological impacts even at of background doses.
Lower IQ outputs.
So this comes from a range of epidemiological studies.
More recently, lest you think all of you might be off
the hook, cardiovascular impacts in the general adult
population.
Some mercury is bad for everyone, not just
pregnant women and kids.
I'll talk a little bit about gold mining communities.
Mercury's used in artisanal and small scale gold mining.
And mercury itself, at really high levels,
can also be very dangerous if you breathe in too much of it,
but not really acutely toxic in the concentrations
that we might likely be exposed to.
So although it's a concern to break a thermometer
and you shouldn't go and sniff it,
you're not going to expect to see
effects at that kind of a dosage,
and particularly not at the dosage of ambient air
concentrations.
But once it gets into methyl mercury,
once it gets into the food chain, you have a problem.
Now think about sort of what's happened
over the last several decades in terms of where
mercury is coming from.
So you have mercury that's used in products.
Mercury has been used for millennia.
In cinnabar ore, which is the really red rock, used as a dye,
mercury was used in hat making.
It was used in mining all the way back to the Roman times.
So it's a very useful substance.
But one of the really recent things that's happened
is that mercury is also a contaminant in coal.
So if you look at what's happened in the Arctic,
you can look at the concentration--
this is kind of squished.
This is sort of normalized to levels
you can look in various different archives.
So what happens when they find the unfrozen polar bear,
they can actually look at what the concentrations are
in the unfrozen polar bear that died
in the 1200s over here that was stuck in the ice
and they found him, as opposed to current day polar bears,
as opposed to the museum polar bears
that they killed in the 1800s.
And you can track that with things like falcon feathers
and ringed seal teeth and various things.
AUDIENCE: What exactly does the percent concentration mean?
Surely, human teeth are not pure mercury.
NOELLE SELIN: Right.
So it's normalized to present day levels at 100%.
So because the concentration just
to show everything on the same scale,
because the concentration in polar bear hair
is obviously different from feathers,
is different from teeth.
So with 100% present day concentrations,
this is how much it would have increased relative to.
So we can do modeling of what happens in the atmosphere when
you emit mercury and it blows around all over the place.
This is what the global cycle looks like.
It comes from some of my modelling work.
But again, you're looking in the Arctic
where there aren't a lot of sources.
You have a lot of increases.
You have health effects that you can
estimate hundreds of thousands of new ones every year.
So there's growing scientific concern about this substance.
So now what you do about it?
You've got mercury used in a whole range
of different products.
You've got mercury coming out of coal.
You want to figure out how it gets into the atmosphere.
So you do something like an emissions inventory.
And this is what the UN Environment
Program put together on anthropogenic emissions
to the air.
Coal being about a quarter.
This is this artisanal and small scale gold production.
I'll talk a little bit more in detail about that
and how they get their mercury later.
The really interesting part about this
is we didn't realize that that was such a big chunk.
I've been working on mercury for over 10 years now.
10 years ago, that wasn't even in our inventory.
So realizing how much mercury was actually
admitted to the global atmosphere
from these gold mining communities
was actually a big step.
And you've got a bunch of other different all kinds
of uses of mercury, uses in the chloralkali industry.
Disposal of waste for mercury containing products
is a chunk of emissions to the air.
Also important in emissions to water, releases to water.
Cremation is always an interesting one.
You got mercury in your teeth.
Guess where that goes?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Being a heavy metal, what's
the mechanism by which say someone mining for gold-- I
assuming it has to be highly atomized to be
able to go into the atmosphere and travel a ways.
NOELLE SELIN: So mercury's a funky heavy metal.
It's the only one that's liquid at room temperature,
so you've got elemental mercury that you can-- basically
thermometer kind of elemental mercury.
And if you put that in a pan with gold, it'll form amalgam.
And then all you have to do, you take that amalgam,
you burn, and mercury will burn off.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
NOELLE SELIN: Yeah.
So sometimes that's done in gold shops.
And I'll have a slide later about the process
and where the mercury goes.
But that's essentially the principal.
And that's why it goes to air.
Of course, there's going to be some rinsing.
And that's why that numbers are all uncertain, because again,
this is a sector that's not very regulated
where the mercury ends up.
AUDIENCE: Why was it overlooked?
What changed that made it show up in the rater again?
NOELLE SELIN: So it was whether it
goes to air was the question, and what fraction,
and how much is used.
So there weren't very good estimates
because this is generally kind of an illegal sector
in a lot of places, or at least an unregulated informal one.
So it may actually have increased over time
because of the price of gold.
There's more money to be made in mining
gold, so more use of mercury.
And then what fraction you assume of how much people
actually keep versus how much they burn off
has changed over time.
And just the difficulty in-- it's
pretty easy to get coal statistics.
Actually, I was one of the first ones
to actually put an estimate into a global model of artisanal
and small scale gold mining.
And what I did is I just took the total amount that
was used, which we had estimates of, and I said,
these are the countries in which it's used.
We're going to assume 30% goes to the air
and I'm just going to grid it, because I
didn't know what to do with it.
Now we have a little better of a handle on it.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: What is [INAUDIBLE] major discovery that
will change [INAUDIBLE] that you have showing on the site?
NOELLE SELIN: Probably.
I think that artisanal and small scale gold mining
we could learn a lot more about.
And the uncertainties are huge.
So we're doing some work with the modeling
and also looking at measurements in the atmosphere
to try to back calculate what the emissions are.
One of the key uncertainties in emissions
is-- the key is that when you emit mercury, it doesn't stay,
because it's a volatile heavy metal, weirdly enough.
So when it goes into the soil, something like lead
will stay there.
But mercury pops back up.
And because we've been emitting mercury
for decades, centuries, millennia,
there's mercury enhanced in the surface ocean, enhanced
in the soil, it keeps popping back up.
We don't have a good handle on what that source is
and how much of it is human versus natural.
So this actually I did the human in red,
and then it's technically pre-industrial.
But the problem is-- so there was a recent paper that
came out that said, yes, mercury circulating in the system
has gone about a factor of three since pre-industrial
and we can use lake sediment cores to figure that out.
But again, the Romans used mercury.
So labeling pre-industrial equals natural
is kind of problematic, because although we've
had a real big spike from coal, there's
probably human mercury that's been circulating
that we don't have a good idea.
So they're saying maybe it's a factor of seven
now as opposed to a factor of three.
But regardless, current emissions play a role,
and if you look at deposition to the US,
this is mercury actually coming down
in rainfall entering the US environment.
What you see is you see a bunch of patterns.
So the highest wet deposition in the US is actually in Florida.
And that comes from global sources.
But you can see that there's also
deposition in the northeast that comes directly
from the coal power plants.
So not going to go through all the chemistry of this
because it has to do with chemical
reactions in the atmosphere.
But the upshot is that if you want to reduce deposition
over the US in all these different places,
you have to tackle both the local sources-- because some
of it actually deposits right near the source, and some of it
circulates globally-- and the global atmosphere deposits.
And then actually affects you.
So this is really one of the motivating things for the US
to get involved both in mercury policy
nationally and mercury policy globally.
So just giving you a little bit of the history.
I'll talk a little bit about what happened in the US
as well.
But this is something that's come up in the last 15 years
or so.
The first global scientific assessment
of mercury that gave this idea that mercury is a long range
problem-- global action is necessary to address it
was the main conclusion that came out in 2002.
So you get this group of scientists
together under the UN Environment Program Chemicals
Division and they say, mercury's a problem, global action needed
to address it.
Now, look, what do we do?
And so the global treaty as I said was last year.
Now that's a long, long state.
That's 11 years difference.
So what happened during that time.
Well, what happened was a lot to do with the US.
And this shows sort of the influence
of domestic regulation in the international context.
Those of you who remember 2002 in the US, thee US
administration wasn't so pro-internal environmental
regulation.
Didn't really like the idea of signing up
the US to something that might be questionable in terms
of its cost benefit ratio.
And you know, why mercury?
International cooperation wasn't necessarily a priority.
International environmental cooperation even less so.
And the idea that we shouldn't waste time getting everyone
on board, we should just do what we
want to do with the willing partners
was an idea that was sort of widespread
in the administration.
So they applied that to mercury as well.
So what they have is the global mercury partnership.
They said, let's get together various coalitions
that are going to attack different aspects
of the mercury problem.
So they had a task force on artisanal and small scale gold
mining.
They had a task force on coal fire power plants.
And they did some voluntary activities,
capacity building in different countries
to try to reduce emissions.
But there was an ongoing discussion about
whether that's actually effective at reducing
the mercury problem or not.
It's pretty much keeping the mercury
levels constant at this point.
And the European Union in particular
was very in favor of a global legally binding treaty
and had been since 2002.
So every two years the UN Environment Program governing
council meets.
The governing council is the environment ministers
of all the nations.
And they're the ones really that would set a mandate actually
negotiate a global treaty.
It would be done under the auspices of the UN Environment
Program.
Every two years they met.
And in 2000, 2003, US said now let's do a program.
2005, not so much, US.
Now let's strengthen the program.
2007, still nothing, although a couple of other countries
are on board by that time.
Latin America's actually really interested in doing something
particularly because of the concerns on artisanal
and small scale gold mining.
Canada also has its phases of liking or not liking
international regulation.
In the organic pollutants example, the last convention,
Canada was very much in favor of negotiating something.
Canada mines a lot of metals.
Not necessarily mercury, but Canada
was a little afraid that this was going to be a global metals
treaty and didn't want to really push for it so much.
So Canada wasn't pushing.
Australia, again, up and down, but likes its metals too.
So you didn't have a lot of developed countries pushing.
You had some developing country blocks getting on board.
So you think about what countries
and what their different motivations are.
And then we get to 2009.
And suddenly in 2009, you have the European Union still saying
we need a global treaty.
By then Latin America's on board.
We need a global treaty.
And now you have the US saying, hey, let's not such a bad idea.
Guess what?
We had a administration change.
One of the things that is important to note about the US
is that President Obama has made mercury a pet issue.
The US-- and I'll talk about mercury in products
and how it relates to the treaty--
has a mercury export ban.
That came in the mid-2000s, when entry enforcement was
passed I'm not 100% sure.
But the sponsor of that legislation in the US Senate
was Senator Obama.
So he had a interest in mercury in general.
And also the US had gone through about eight or nine
years of trying to regulate mercury from coal fired power
plants under a court order, under the Clean Air Act,
and had kind of messed it up under Bush.
And when Obama came in, the clean air mercury rule
had been thrown out of court and they
had to go back and do it again.
And so Obama, being interested in mercury,
said let's regulate again.
And the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards
came in 2012 in the US.
But that was well under way.
So the US starts saying, hey, this isn't that bad an idea.
Because if we want to solve our mercury problem domestically,
we need both international and domestic action.
This is kind of a win.
It's also a political win because protecting babies
and not having mercury in our food
is a kind of clear public message as well.
China-- yeah?
AUDIENCE: Can you speak a little bit more
about the cost benefit analysis and what type of decisions
a politician and some of these people
are making to make them more attractive for this type
of law?
NOELLE SELIN: I can't.
I'm actually doing a lot of work on that in my group right now.
So what they did for the cost benefit analysis
for the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards,
it was a little bit of an end run around the idea of cost
benefit analysis.
Because what they said was, we're
going to regulate mercury.
It's going to have benefits particularly
on sensitive groups.
So in terms of overall economic benefits,
it was hard to get that number up,
in terms of a strict cost benefit analysis.
Because the people who are most harmed by mercury
are the people like subsistence fishers,
who eat a lot of local fish, particularly for the domestic.
A lot of general public gets their fish from cans of tuna
from the Atlantic, the Pacific.
That's going to respond to global emissions and not
local emissions.
So in the US context where you have to do a cost benefit
analysis, they ended up showing the cost benefit
of-- the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards passed
the cost benefit analysis because
of the particulate matter benefits.
Atmospheric particulate matter contributes
to cardiovascular impacts, respiratory impacts.
You can show a lot of deaths if you reduce it.
Multiply that by a value of statistical like you
paid for almost anything, and that's
what they did for Mercury and Air Toxic Standards.
Now are group is actually doing a more thorough benefits
analysis of the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards out to 2050.
And we get some reasonably big numbers
because we look at both the Minamata and the Mercury
and Air Toxic Standards, the global and the regional.
But that work's in progress right now.
But as far as what they needed for the regulation,
that's what they did.
Globally, they didn't really do a cost benefit analysis.
It was we need to regulate where we're kind of agreed
that this is a problem.
Let's go with it.
Partly that's because a lot of other countries
don't have the tradition of requiring cost benefit
analysis that the US does.
So hopefully that gets to your question.
Yeah.
So again, China-- China is about half
of global emissions of mercury right now.
China wasn't particularly thrilled
about this whole thing.
But China came around.
Again, the US and the EU and Latin America,
you get three major blocks.
Canada came around, too.
Australia came around.
Africa didn't really have anything against it.
They probably a net gain of resources
from this kind of analysis.
So it's China and India really who are the most worried
about what they have to do.
And in response to China, it delayed a year
when negotiations were going to start.
So they didn't start till 2010.
China wanted to delay them a year
because China was putting in its own mercury
regulations for its power plants as part of their next five year
plan.
So China does have mercury regulations.
They're not particularly binding.
They're not particularly strict.
But they copied Germany's and said let's put mercury
in our regulations.
They do you actually have quite a bit of technology
on their power plants.
Whether it's operating or not is another thing.
But in terms of build out capacity, they're there.
So actually negotiating the instrument
took five negotiating sessions.
It was signed in 2013.
Now once an international agreement
is signed by countries, they have
to go and ratify it, make it consistent with their US law.
That in the US usually has to go through the Senate.
In this case, it did not.
The US accepted a procedure equivalent to that
of ratification, the Mercury Treaty
becoming the first party because it
was so consistent with US law that it essentially
was an executive decision.
The administration said, we don't actually
need to do anything.
It's pretty much an embodiment of US law.
Because we're doing so much on mercury,
this does not go much further than the US already goes.
So that's one particular lesson is
that the US and the EU in particular, and you
can see this also in the reading about the EU,
these national laws often are sort
of leading the international standards.
So it's actually predictable in the sense
that you're not going to get countries like China, countries
in Africa, to do the same kinds of end of pipe expensive power
plant controls that you might expect in the US
when they don't even have the basic controls
or maybe don't even have power plants to begin with.
So again, thinking about what it's
sort of a lowest common denominator
that you often get in these international agreements.
So one emphasis of the agreement was emissions.
And I'm not going to talk too much about emissions given what
you guys are interested in-- again,
that's the power sector part-- but that was only one
component of the tree.
Another is mercury in products and processes,
which I think is of probably more interesting to you guys.
So I'm going to talk about products and processes.
And I'm going to talk about what they did with artisanal
and small scale gold mining, because those both have kind
of supply chain type issues.
So where do you see mercury in products and processes?
So one that is pretty familiar is thermometers.
So again, phasing out in places like the US.
You don't see them that often.
But thermometers, blood pressure measuring devices,
some of the old thermostats have mercury.
So this whole idea of electrical control and switching,
measuring and control.
Batteries, older batteries.
Again, phased out in the US and the EU,
but common elsewhere sometimes still.
Lighting.
Fluorescent lamps.
Both regular fluorescent lamps, the tube versions,
and compact fluorescent lamps.
So save energy on balance, but use a small amount of mercury.
LEDs don't have mercury.
But again, with people encouraging more and more
compact fluorescent and fluorescent use in lighting
because of their energy efficient properties,
mercury becomes an issue, and safe disposal becomes an issue.
The other is your teeth.
Dental amalgam.
So again, some countries have phased out the use of mercury
in fillings.
Others don't.
It's pretty cheap.
Even in the US, if you actually go to the dentist
and you need a filling and they say,
do you want the silver one or the white one,
and the white one's a lot more expensive even here.
So think about if you're in a developing
country what your option is.
Your option is probably no dental care at all,
but the silver filling is probably much better
to have-- you save your tooth-- than the white filling,
the composite, which is much, much more expensive for you.
So use of mercury in dental amalgam
was, are we going to keep using it or not?
Again, can be an environmental issue
when people get cremated and get across.
And then there's a bunch of other things.
Chloralkali plants-- so use of mercury in industrial processes
that are phased out in some cases, but not in others.
Vinyl chloride monomer, particularly in China,
mercury is used.
So you've got a substance that you think, mercury,
it's a really concrete thing to regulate.
But then think about all these industries
that you've now involved.
So you've got a group sitting in negotiations.
I actually took a group of 10 graduate students
to the final negotiating session, which was in Geneva.
And you've got a group of maybe 75 people
in the room, representatives from all
the different countries.
Industry could come in as observers.
But again, if you're an industry that does this,
think about how long and how intense
your observation had to be.
You're going to send a person to every week long meeting
during five negotiating sessions through 2010 to 2013,
spending a week in Geneva each time just to think about,
if you're in the electrical control and switching industry,
to raise their hand every time electrical control
and switching comes up.
And they're not really even allowed to raise their hand,
because the only people that are technically
allowed to talk on the floor are countries.
So what you can do as an electrical control
and switching person is you can go and lobby
your friendly countries.
You can put out a poster in the lobby and say, hey,
this is how these regulations would affect us.
There's probably somebody next to you that says,
we have the mercury free version.
Come buy it.
And so depending on your country and where you are,
this is what it looks like.
In the products group, it became a little bit more informal.
There were companies that participated in discussions
as observers.
They talked about thresholds of where mercury
would be restricted or not.
And the companies started saying, well,
there's an alternative for this, but there's not
an alternative for this.
So as you think about the major categories,
you have ones that are a lot in developed countries
and then ones that are primarily in developing countries.
And these are things that used to be in developed countries
quite a bit but have often phased out.
So how do you think about regulating something
internationally?
Now there was two different approaches
and they refer to them as positive and negative lists,
which is a little bit confusing because it meant the opposite
of what you might think.
But the idea is that you either say,
I'm going to list all these things that are banned
and you can't use mercury in them,
or I'm going to ban mercury in all products
and I'm going to make a list of the ones you can still
use mercury in.
So the idea of banning mercury in all products
was kind of a nonstarter because, again,
things like compact fluorescent lamps
had benefits that were greater than the cost of mercury.
Actually no one was really suggesting that you go back
to incandescence because they've actually done on the assessment
that if you actually have a very heavy coal load in your power,
the mercury that you save by going to a compact fluorescent
is much larger amounts than the mercury that's actually
in the light bulb.
And there's a move to get less and less mercury
in that light bulb.
So the idea that they came up with
was-- there was a lot of discussion.
Do you have the blanket ban with the exceptions?
Do you just list the ones that you're phasing out and banning?
And they came out the latter approach.
But then they had to negotiate which
of these things on this list was on there, which was exempted,
and if there were thresholds to each of these.
So what kind of level of mercury would you
accept in these or not?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: I'm just wondering why they
would go about it that way trying
to create an exhaustive list when they don't know
future technology that's going to come out
rather than setting out a set of criteria
that's saying if thee product meets a, b, and c,
then you can it?
NOELLE SELIN: Who decides on those criteria?
Or actually reviews whether you actually met those?
And part of that is transparency.
So what countries have to do is then go back to their countries
and say, what am I allowing?
What am I not?
You have to know what you can put mercury in and not.
So there's kind of a transparency approach
that happens.
I think the two options that came up,
the either blanket ban plus exceptions or the we
list the things that they we're banning,
were kind of the two approaches that they most looked at.
Because again, that would make it even more wishy-washy,
I think, because then you could show, oh yeah,
well I fulfilled these three requirements.
So that wouldn't be that stringent
in international context because there's no body that can really
certify those requirements.
So the key with international regulation
is that there's no enforcement essentially.
It's an environmental treaty.
You can barely enforce the ones that actually involve weapons.
You're not going to go bomb someone that
is using too much mercury.
What's going to happen is you're going to say,
hey, you're using too much mercury.
We're going to caution you.
We're going to shame you in the international context.
We're not going to let you vote.
Maybe we'll actually give you more money,
because probably the reason you're not complying
is because you can't afford it.
That's what really happens.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
So I've heard from friends that we
have an island in French Polynesia called New Caledonia.
The island basically has a lot of copper.
And so copper is an industry there.
And to say the only industry.
And basically the rivers that were blue
once have turned red because of mercury.
The level of contamination of the rivers and the island
is-- it was a paradise.
It's extremely high.
And it's still the only industry.
So it's the main and only sort of employment in the island.
And there's nobody who will say anything about it,
or nobody pretends to do anything about it because I
feel that if it's not a consensus,
there's still an understand that it's
the only way the island can have any income.
And there's nothing to develop.
The [INAUDIBLE] is not developed.
There's really [INAUDIBLE] except for this.
So how would you go about it?
Because when I was there it there
it was really sad to see that such a beautiful place could
be damage with nobody really wanting to do anything.
NOELLE SELIN: I think that's really the larger challenge
that you see in these global environmental negotiations
because you have a lot of places like that
with various different specifics.
But the idea is, how do you balance benefits
to people-- like building energy--
versus environmental damages?
And the solution that the international community
does-- I wish I had a better solution-- but it's basically
throw money at the problem.
Capacity building, different techniques,
try to get cleaner processes, build awareness.
That's pretty much the--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] allowed to the big countries or--
NOELLE SELIN: A lot of it's local awareness, too.
So in mercury--
AUDIENCE: Seek a solution locally?
NOELLE SELIN: Yes.
So in the mercury negotiations, there
was a lot done-- so a lot of the nongovernmental organizations
have banded together internationally
into a more mega group.
So you have some local nongovernmental organizations
who have kind of partnered across in mercury action
network or something.
I forget exactly what it was called.
But that was an umbrella group of a bunch
of different very local nongovernmental organizations,
a lot of whom work in these artisanal and small scale gold
mining communities, which is actually
very similar to this kind of issue,
which I'll talk about next.
But yeah, the idea is that you can do awareness raising
workshops.
So they bring in international experts,
national experts, talk about the damages of mercury,
talk about what you could potentially be doing about it.
That's sort of where the state of art
is, I think, at this point.
But yeah, so you had to go through these major categories
of mercury use.
And then I just want to flip ahead a little bit to actually
what happened.
Again, you have different phase outs and phase downs.
And then there's this very legalese exemption period
where you can have either general exemptions
or specific exemptions.
Another area where mercury was generalized exemption
was mercury used as a preservative in vaccines.
So that was one that, again, this sort of cost benefit
analysis-- there's no evidence that it's harmful.
Again, other than the general sense that we
want to phase down mercury.
But it's been phased out for precautionary reasons
and also because, again, don't want
to use too much mercury in developed countries.
But what happens is in developing countries,
you have vaccines that it means it doesn't need refrigeration
if you use a mercury containing preservative.
So again, you're getting vaccines
to places where you don't have refrigeration if you use it.
So that's why that ended up in a general exemption.
AUDIENCE: I do go through this process.
And when does the science get into the discussion.
Because you have at some point to decide [INAUDIBLE].
They know exactly what levels to be allowed
and they want to just being reflected.
So I'm wondering where does this get in.
NOELLE SELIN: It's a lot less technical than you think is.
So where the scientific analysis came in
was really in that global mercury assessment 2002
and the updates of that.
And then the negotiator said, yeah,
the scientific case is made that we ought to reduce mercury.
There is no particular substance by substance sense of when they
actually thought to phase out.
No one did an analysis of what the benefits of phasing out in
switches and relays versus linear fluorescent lamps.
That just wasn't even on the radar screen.
There were assessments that said where are the sources?
Where does mercury go?
But then it was really a horse trading kind of thing.
I'll give you switches and relays
if you give me cosmetics.
Because each country wants to sort of
protect its own interests there.
Some might have mercury free alternatives
that they might want to sell.
Others it might be a particularly pressing issue,
like this cosmetics.
It might be a particular public health issue
in countries and in regions.
Mercury is a component of some skin lightening
creams which have been-- people have tried to ban them.
But again, countries with less of a regulatory infrastructure,
it actually-- again, putting mercury directly
on your skin, not a good idea, and can be a big public health
problem in some communities where there's
an interest in using these things culturally and also
in cultural practices, like use of mercury
in religious types of practices that can be dangerous.
So those cosmetics again, greater than one PPM.
Also topical antiseptics, pesticides, biocides,
that kind of thing, use mercury to toxic kill the bacteria.
There's other ways to do that.
But again, in countries where you can't really control import
very well in terms of your capacity,
international regulation can be an end
run around that to think about.
And again, for dental amalgam there was a goal of phase down.
But again, no set date.
So to the extent that you can, use
the more expensive but more environmentally friendly
alternatives.
And that actually ends up getting into the environment
quite a bit.
Story in Massachusetts when they required dental separators
in dental offices-- it used to be that they just flushed
the stuff down the drain when they changed your filing--
they required dental amalgam separators.
You can actually look at that date
and look at the mercury level in fish
in the waterways of Massachusetts
and it goes dramatically down right after that.
It actually does wash right into the waterways.
Again, it's a lot of mercury that's in a particular filling.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
When they pick a date to phase this out,
2020, is this just sounds good or is there some--
NOELLE SELIN: It just sounds good.
AUDIENCE: Let's make it far, far, far away.
Not next year, not two years.
Something that--
NOELLE SELIN: And it's negotiated.
So people that want-- again, a lot of these things
are phased out in Europe.
And so the companies have figured out a way around them.
Europe has an interest in getting these things globalized
because they have very strict regulations like we
and like rows that talk about what
you need to sell products in Europe.
And to the extent that becomes a global regulation,
that obviously favors-- Europe thinks it's the right thing
to do, first of all.
But also it makes it a global standard
as opposed to different standards throughout the world.
So you've got European countries often
pushing for earlier and earlier phase outs.
Now maybe China for example, which actually produces
a lot of these compact fluorescent lamps,
probably wants later phase in dates.
So 2020 emerges as a compromise.
Again, thinking about the timing of actually entering
into force for a treaty, I think you need 50 parties ratifying.
US ratified really, really quickly, because again,
it just said rubber stamped it.
It's the only country to ratify so far.
So conservatively at least 2015 before it enters into force.
So setting a day before that would be kind of weird.
So yeah, you have to phase it out
before you actually signed it.
So 2020 is a relatively early date in this area.
Mercury mining is phased out also under the treaty,
and it's 2035.
Or no-- I think it's 15 years after entry
into force for that particular country or something like that.
So it can be quite a long time.
So going back a little bit talking about mercury trade--
so this just gives you a sense of where mercury is flowing
and where it's going-- again, since we've
had the mercury export ban act.
But this is actually just of commodity mercury.
So this isn't mercury in products.
So the compact fluorescent bulbs that we import from China
are not included in these flows.
Yet primary mercury mining in Kurdistan,
they're actually closing their mine partly because
of US assistance.
China has no interest in actually closing their mine,
although they will have to under the treaty if they ratify it.
But China's mostly using itself.
So the mercury that gets used in products--
so you don't see much of an arrow there coming out of China
because it's not internationally traded.
But again, a lot of flows for a lot of this mercury
is coming from recycled mercury, mercury stocks, mercury in use.
So you've got mercury flowing as mercury,
then getting incorporated into products.
You get obviously the trade in products, and then trade
in wastes.
So once the product is no longer useful, what do you do with it?
I said that the mercury is a full life cycle convention.
It does is actually sort of yield
a lot of the waste issues to the Basel Convention,
which deals with wastes internationally.
So it has sound guidelines of trans-boundary movements
of hazardous waste.
And that pretty much covers the mercury.
So they tried to make that consistent.
Problem is that it doesn't have the same set of parties.
In particular, the US is not party to the Basel Convention.
But pretty much does the required things
that the Basel Convention does in the sense
of being able to deal with hazardous waste
in a reasonable way.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] if they cut off the influx of mercury
then they will only be stuck with trying to manage
their own creation of mercury?
NOELLE SELIN: Right.
And to the extent that they actually use mercury--
I'm not sure exactly what the use of mercury will be.
But again, trade is restricted under the treaty.
US already has an export ban.
EU has an export ban.
Mercury trade will only be allowed for exempted uses.
So if you're making one of those exemption
processes like dental amalgam-- that might be Australia.
It might just be importing for teeth.
Who knows?
But again, if you're using it for an exempted use, it's OK.
If you're not, it's not.
And that sort of actually is a really good segue
into the artisanal and small gold mining story.
Because again, thinking about where mercury goes
and where mercury is in trade, artisanal small scale gold
mining is a really big deal in a lot of countries, big emission.
But the question is, how do they get their mercury?
You're a small scale gold miner in a developing country.
You need to buy mercury to figure out how you actually
mine your gold.
So this is a figure from a paper that
looks at what the artisanal and small scale gold mining
process is and how that relates to the gold supply chain, which
I thought would be interesting for you guys.
So you started at the top with mercury exporting countries.
And a lot of those exporting countries
think they're exporting to dentists.
So one of my colleagues works in the artisanal small scale gold
mining area and he showed this picture
of an artisanal small scale gold mining community.
And it was mercury dental shop.
Like yeah, right.
You're a mercury dental shop.
You're in a gold mining community.
But in a lot of cases, they'll buy mercury
from dentists or a dental middleman
and actually sell illegally to the miners.
So then you're the miner, and miners over here,
they dig your pit.
You get the ore.
And then mix it altogether.
So then what you're left with is you're
left with some mercury amalgamated with gold.
And you've got some waste.
And that's where you have this amalgam ball
and you have the waste.
Now the waste is going to have some rock in it,
it's going to have some water, it's
probably going to have some mercury in it,
because you couldn't get all of it to stick to the gold.
And what do you do with that?
You just dump that.
So you release mercury laden byproduct
into the waterways, which could have local impacts.
But probably not going to enter the global pool.
Because again, you just rinsed it out into your local place.
It might.
We don't know the science on that.
But you've got amalgam ball, which is
must your money, with your gold.
But it's bound up with the mercury.
So what do you do?
You can do a couple of things.
You can burn it yourself.
So this would be the artisanal part.
You're actually going to just get a pan,
you're going to light a fire under it,
and you're going to let the mercury burn off.
Now that's not particularly efficient,
but it's probably the cheapest way you're going to do it.
Now one of the ways to minimize the mercury loss
is to have a retort.
So basically you have a little cap on it.
The mercury condenses and then you drip the mercury back
into a little cup.
You could use the mercury again.
It saves it from going into the atmosphere.
It also saves you some money because you
don't have to go back and buy more mercury,
or buy less of it.
So that's been one of the things that
has come up in trying to minimize the mercury lost.
But again, as you think about it,
not the most healthy place in the world to be,
breathing over a burning mercury pit.
Again, lots of local issues.
So you've got this AGSM product.
Sometimes that burning can happen in local shops as well.
That's more of a small scale.
So you take your amalgam ball to your local shop.
More efficient.
That guy's going to get a cut.
So you think about that depending on the community.
That might happen.
Usually a buyer, who can double as a mercury dealer,
buys that intermediate gold product, does a final burning
step that makes it more pure gold,
then you enter the regular gold supply chain.
And you end up with, on the market, about up to 30%
of artisanal and small scale gold mining gold
that then goes to a combination of jewelry and investors
in industry.
So it really is not a insignificant amount
of gold on the market that comes out of this process
and involves mercury.
So again, with the price of gold the way
it is, this is something that has
a lot of influence on the livelihood of people
who are involved in this.
So it's a development issue.
It's a local community issue.
It's also an international market issue.
So there's a lot of different certifications
that come into gold, some of which--
at least one, I forget the-- I don't have it
in my notes, the particular ones.
But one of which does incorporate mercury
into the certification standards and one doesn't.
So there's a difference in-- there's a couple of different,
like fair trade, fair mine, the talk
about the conditions of the miners and various things.
Whether or not-- and how-- they cover mercury
is an open question.
So will that help if you have more of a certification
process?
Not sure.
Now how does the treaty deal with this?
Well, it has a number of provisions
that really boil down to essentially capacity building,
suggests that to the extent possible these sectors be
regulated and sort of formalized,
because they're often informal sectors.
Again, illegal mercury, black market mercury essentially,
that's from dentists.
The types of technologies that can
prevent the releases of mercury and make it a little safer
be adopted in a more widespread basis.
But again, it's not eliminating artisanal small scale
gold mining because that is a livelihood for a lot of people.
It's trying to make it less mercury dependent and less
toxic, both for the miners and for the environment.
So they've basically estimated that they could probably
have the amount of mercury based on these estimates.
So there's a lot of opportunity for reductions, again,
because a lot of these processes are really inefficient.
So I want to just end with talking
about sort of the general context
in which this mercury regulation is happening,
which is the overall international regulations
and what's happening globally.
Because obviously these producers and people
who are dealing with mercury related issues
aren't just dealing with this as an international environmental
issue.
There might be other chemicals, other different kinds
of considerations.
So this is a figure that one of my students
put together after going through the negotiations of all
the different international organizations that had
a roll in the mercury treaty.
And one really obvious link is through the existing chemical
treaties and institutions.
So the Stockholm Convention is on
persistent organic pollutants.
So a lot of pesticides-- DTP, PCB, industrial chemicals
like PCBs, also regulating dioxins and furans
internationally.
The Rotterdam Convention is on trade in hazardous chemicals.
It's a prior informed consent provision,
so it mandates that countries that
are taking imports of hazardous chemicals
must give their informed consent prior to that chemical being
exported.
This is trying to prevent the idea of something's
banned in the US.
The US decides you guys will take it,
so let's just export it to you.
The idea is it shifts the burden to the exporting country
to make sure that that country knows what it's getting
and knows that you think it's dangerous.
So there's a list of chemicals on that convention.
Again, that's similar to the prior informed consent
process that's in the Basel Convention that
deals with wastes.
So again, there's potential synergies there
because Rotterdam and Basel also have
things potentially containing mercury
and also this issue of trade.
Funding often comes from the Global Environment Facility,
which is basically donations from the rich countries.
Minamata Convention has an additional new
designed specific funding mechanism
to be negotiated fully.
But that has to do with issues that developing countries
in particular have with the Global Environment Facility
and its responsiveness.
So that was negotiated as kind of a hybrid compromise.
Possibly some multilateral funds that
actually influence other environmental negotiations.
But you have a bunch of other international organizations
like World Health Organization that sets guidance
for mercury levels in fish and also
is involved in the vaccine thing,
related to the dental thing.
So thinking about connections with that because you
get very health relevant issue.
International Labour Organization--
obviously in particular the miners,
and what people are exposed to in particular factories is
often in ILO.
Food and Agriculture Organization, to the center
that involves pesticides.
That's one that comes up.
So that's the international bits.
You've also got a bunch of guiding principles that
come out.
The idea that you can do whatever
you want to your own environment but you
have to watch out with others comes out
of the Rio Declaration.
That's 1992.
There's the general discussions over a sustainable development.
These all kind of inform in a general way
the kinds of regulations that are developed
under the Minamata Convention.
Things like the precautionary principle
come out of these principles.
And then, of course, you have multilateral regulations--
domestic agreements, bilateral agreements,
regional agreement-- that are also
dealing with mercury but on different levels
and among different countries that may or may not
be consistent or not.
Again, domestic governments try to make
it as consistent as possible in the negotiations.
But everyone's trying to do that,
so it might not be possible.
So that's all I had for prepared slides.
I was told to keep it to about an hour-- I think I made it--
and open up for discussion after that.
AUDIENCE: I was just wondering what
happens to mercury once whoever's doing
the proper disposal gets it.
Do they convert it to some safe chemical?
Do they put it barrels and bury it under a mountain in Nevada?
NOELLE SELIN: The latter.
Mercury's an element.
You can't get rid of it.
So not much you can do about it.
The nice thing is, the quantities are pretty small.
So again, encapsulating it, burying it barrels
is pretty much what you want to do with it.
Again, you're talking about tons per year.
When you're talking about carbon it's gigatons per year.
Mercury is in actual tons per year.
And mercury is pretty dense.
So this is also why your clump of mercury in your tooth
or in the thermometer is actually pretty significant,
because there's a lot of mercury there in comparison
to the global budget, whereas the amount of carbon
is teeny tiny.
But yeah, I'm not sure about Nevada specifically.
You could put it in a trailer.
I've seen mercury trailers.
The strategic mercury stockpile was in trailers for a while.
AUDIENCE: Sounds pretty secure.
So do you see a company that you thought
was doing something right, in terms of understanding
the role that they could play?
Because this seems pretty out of my hands.
So as a company at the end of the day,
there's nothing I can do.
I just probably can go to local state official,
voice my concerns, hopefully get him elected,
and let the whole thing just kind of--
NOELLE SELIN: There were definitely companies
involved, but in a limited way.
The lighting manufacturers were there a lot.
But mainly I saw them talk about their products
and their minimization and really kind of get the message
that we are trying to take the mercury out of our lighting
and we're doing a good job, so don't ban us.
And I think to that extent there was
a lot of awareness raising of technologies
and available technologies that was done by companies
in these international fora.
Again, it's an opportunity to trumpet
your green technologies.
So that would be sort of the positive end of companies
advocating-- mercury free alternative companies,
definitely.
If you had a mercury-free something,
you definitely were waving the flag for it.
There were other companies that were there
to make sure that their interests were protected.
Oil and gas.
Mercury is a small contaminant in oil and gas.
Mercury is mostly a concern on site.
So because of the way oil is distilled in the final product,
there's not of mercury.
If you have the unfortunate location
of being near a mercury deposit when you're drilling your oil,
you've got a problem.
But you've got a problem there, and you
have to deal with it there.
Because if you get mercury into your oil distillation process,
it really gums up the works as far as I understand.
So the companies were saying, hey,
this is not really an international problem.
This is something we deal with.
We would really prefer that you not
regulate mercury and oil and gas in an international way.
And there were a lot of countries on that bandwagon,
too.
Once it was clear that mercury emissions regulations were not
going to be applied to oil and gas,
Saudi Arabia decided that they were going to go to lunch.
So things like that.
And again, awareness raising of the kinds of things
that international industries do.
So even if it's not subject to the regulation,
you have assessments that come up
that say, what are best practices?
Because your multinational companies might know
this is what you do when you hit mercury in your gas deposit,
but not all companies might be aware of that.
So again, that comes into the capacity building, awareness
raising, making toolboxes to figure out
how much mercury you're emitting in your process.
These things come out of international negotiations
a lot.
AUDIENCE: The other observation-- we
we're going through the importance of US
and European relation to set the way-- so in some sense,
if you do what Europe is doing, you're
in pretty good shape in terms of anticipating
what could become global.
Is that a fair assessment?
NOELLE SELIN: I think that's fair,
and I think that's a strategic choice.
So one of the things that that's changed over the years--
it used to be that the US was really
the global standard leader in international environmental
things.
And the US was kind of a first mover
in a lot of things like the Clean Air Act,
pesticide regulation, et cetera.
And in the last decade, decade and a half or so,
it's really been the EU.
The EU is really the global standard leader
in the international environment,
particularly in the chemicals area.
And I think there's a clear effort by the EU
to actually globalize these kinds of standards.
A strategic goal, in a sense.
And part of that's competitiveness, part of that
is, well, we think it's the right thing to do.
Because it makes everybody safer,
and if we think something's too dangerous for our population,
why should it be OK for others?
But again, with these kinds of chemicals regulations that are
going in the EU, you see that.
Now, you do see push back on that.
The US saying, hey, this is too far.
And it ending up in trade disputes and various things.
You see that with CO2.
But I think you do see chemicals versions of that.
But again, it's a multi-level thing, too.
In the US traditionally how a lot
of these environmental regulations came to pass
was that you have a leading state.
So the US regulation for the Toxics Release Inventory,
where you have to report if you release toxics,
came out of really a state initiative in New Jersey first.
So you get a few leader states.
California does a lot in terms of leading
environmental regulation.
The interaction between California and the EU
is actually really interesting because you
see California now copying a lot of the EU regulations.
You do see a lot of copying as well.
A lot of developing countries when
stressed with the idea of doing environmental regulations says,
gee, what's Germany doing?
What's the US doing?
Can we just go with that?
Because again, the capacity to do
these kinds of real technical analyses of, well,
do we set it at five?
Do we set it at seven?
What does really make sense?
A lot of developing countries don't have that,
so they say-- that's really how China
developed their mercury threshold is
took the one from Germany.
I talked to the Chinese researchers
that have informed that.
And there's a lot of research on Mercury in China.
But we've interviewed them and they said, yeah,
basically took Germany's.
Seemed reasonable.
And also that's going to be where
we're going to buy our emission control equipment until we can
figure out how to make it, so if they're going to make it
for German market, we're not going
to set a more stringent one and then
we're not going to be able to buy the equipment
and meet it until we can make it.
It just makes sense with a globalized market
for those things.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned that the Basel
did the same for [INAUDIBLE], copy just like that.
They just didn't-- no local analysis, no country--
same thing.
NOELLE SELIN: Yeah.
But that's something that you really start
to see in these negotiations.
So it's even more prevalent in climate.
But even in mercury you see this,
that a lot of developing countries
have one person at this negotiation.
US delegation was about 20 people.
so US would have someone from the EPA,
and someone from the State Department,
and someone from the US Trade Rep's office,
and they had some health experts,
they had people that did vaccines.
So they had a broad range of expertise-- the emission
control, the products people, they
were all in different groups.
And even in mercury, which is a fairly small area,
you could assemble that team.
Now, you've got people from African countries
and you've got one person.
You've got two or three groups going at the same time.
You have to deal with emissions from power plants.
You have to deal with products.
And the way it works in the US is--
I know the people who work on mercury-- mercury's
almost their whole job, because they're dealing with mercury
in Air Toxic Standards, they're dealing with scientists,
there are scientific assessments going on.
The person in a developing country in mercury,
they're probably running the whole environment division.
They might be running environment
and labor and health.
Especially smaller island states,
you've got a couple of hundred thousand people
in your population.
How much can you environment ministry?
So a lot of these regional consultations
become very important.
But capacity really, really comes into play.
When we were at negotiations, this negotiation to exhaustion
comes in, too.
Because like you would expect, no one
wants to compromise till the very last minute.
So when we were there at the final negotiating session,
the deadline was-- the meeting was scheduled
through Friday, 6:00 PM.
We got to agreement Saturday morning at 8:00 AM
after negotiating all night.
So if you have a couple people on your delegation,
you can take naps.
If you don't, you're kind of challenged.
AUDIENCE: Take naps.
NOELLE SELIN: Yeah.
And you miss something.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So again, you have to rely on other friendly countries
in the region.
And a lot of that is done to try to facilitate--
in a sense, a lot of the African countries
have a lot in common in the negotiation and sort of bond
together.
But again, countries that have a very particular interest
might not get that represented.
And then they have to go back and figure out
what it means for their own legislation
in the context of all the other things that they're doing.
AUDIENCE: So will you please talk again
about this pace of negotiation?
Because I remember I saw in one of your talks about basically
how exactly the dynamics of the negotiation--
so this kind of explains--
NOELLE SELIN: So yeah, nothing happens
until the very last minute, which is interesting.
It's sort of like grad school.
But there's a lot of spinning wheels
for we have to discuss things, we have to be deliberate.
Again, 2002 was when there was a global scientific assessment
that says we ought to do something about it.
And then years and years.
Mandate for negotiations was 2009.
So then you schedule a meeting.
Usually scheduled meetings may be
for a negotiation like this every six months or so,
five or six day meeting.
Everyone has to get there.
You've got interpretation issues.
So the six UN languages are simultaneously
interpreted in the main room in main plenary discussions.
Most of the in the card discussions
are in English because everyone speaks English
except for a few.
And if you're one of the few that doesn't speak English,
that's a problem.
We try to avoid sending those people.
But some countries don't have a great English speaking
capacity.
That's been mostly a problem in my experience
with French-speaking African countries,
have the most problem with finding the person who speaks
English.
Lately it's been a little better.
The older people often didn't speak English.
Younger people are actually sort of taken over now
in a lot of these countries.
And so the idea of the 65 year old person that didn't quite
get the message that English was-- wasn't taught
English in school is no longer at the head of the delegation.
It's now the 40 year old that basically
went to school in an English speaking
country in a lot of these countries.
So that's one issue.
Again, if your country's language is not
one of the six UN languages, you've
got to speak on that language on the floor.
So if you're from Brazil, you're probably
speaking English on the floor because Portuguese is not
a UN language.
So again, if you're from Japan, you're
probably speaking English on the floor unless for some reason
you know French.
But you've got to pick one of the six.
So English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.
So that's another thing that makes
things go fairly slowly, when you have
simultaneous interpretation.
And it means that it can kind of be a glacial pace for awhile
while people say, hello, I'm going to thank
the chair for negotiations.
And I want to respectfully say that I
disagree with paragraph two.
But in a 10 minute speech.
And then the next person says I also
disagree with paragraph two.
And you have to go through everybody in the countries
before they actually say, you all
go talk about paragraph two in the room over there.
Once that happens and you get to a deadline,
you can agree on paragraph two relatively rapidly.
But you need that whole process of getting to agreement there.
So again, writing the text-- the secretariat
supports a lot of that.
But again, you're drafting in a big group
of people with 160 countries going word
by word through a document that has legal force.
It's a tough thing.
And that's why the science, I think, doesn't really come in.
Because the complexity of the negotiations, it's part
of the reason why I think the chemicals program has set
up this process pretty well, is that they say,
we're going to do the scientific assessment.
We're all going to agree.
We're going to stamp it.
We're going to move on.
If you have a question on the science,
we'll kick it back to the scientific group,
we'll do an assessment, we'll agree, we'll move on.
So it's kind of like the science sets the basis
and then we're going to negotiate,
which means it's not always the optimal outcome.
But it gets done.
Something gets done.
Now I did some analysis actually of what
would happen in mercury in the environment
as a result of this treaty with the best guesses of what
it would involve.
And pretty much the conclusion was avoided increases.
So without the treaty, our business as usual
would be mercury increasing in the environment.
With the treaty, probably pretty steady.
So again, if you want mercury to decrease in the environment,
you've got to then go through and look at your technology
regulations for emissions and probably
ratchet those down through the treaty process itself.
Otherwise, you're not going to actually improve.
It's also more legally and politically
important at this point then environmentally important
because it sends a pretty clear message that mercury
is a pretty bad thing internationally,
and that has a really big signaling mechanism.
If you're a company and you're thinking about using mercury
in a process-- which might be the easiest way to do things,
because mercury has some really neat chemical properties--
this kind of thing will make you think twice about it.
So that idea that there's sort of a consensus around mercury
is bad, and they're increasing amounts of regulation,
and countries are beginning to figure out that mercury is now
going to regulate more has a strong political force,
whereas the technical regulations might not
be the operative part.
So again, legally and politically important.
Not so much environmentally yet-- but
might be in the future as amendments come in,
as the technical requirements-- there's
a lot to be decided on exactly what technologies
might be considered in terms of emissions regulations.
And that's an open question right now.
And it's going to be decided by the technical groups
and by conference of parties negotiations.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So after ten years of working on this,
do you eat fish?
NOELLE SELIN: I do eat fish.
There are fish that are relatively low in mercury.
So the key in dietary advice on mercury
is you don't want people not eating fish.
Fish high in omega 3s, but low in mercury-- unfortunately,
that's the herrings of the world.
And I don't want herring.
But again, I also figure there's lots
of things that are going to kill me faster, like French fries.
So you've got to take them one at a time.
PROFESSOR: Any more questions?
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
All right.
So we're not going to go through today your deliverables.
Tony may have mentioned, or Alexis last time,
that we divided your groups.
Did they tell you?
Yeah?
So we're going to be meeting with you independently
over the next few days to go over
where your project is in preparation
for the final report.
And then next week we're going to be talking about strategy.
So we're going to try to get everything we have covered
and try to frame it in a more concrete discussion.
So what are we going to do with everything we've learned.
You're going to eventually want to make--
drive a change in a company.
How should I start with all these inventions,
the technical side, now the political side, the NGO side,
the complexity of the networking you have to deal with.
And we're going to have a discussion
around that next time.
And we're going to probably bring
some of the things you have already worked
on your specific case studies.
And Wednesday we're going to have the head of EMC
to decide to actually tell us how they did it.
It's very interesting.
Today I was meeting this morning with-- the last few days
I have met with P&G, Intel, and Nike sustainability heads,
and how they have been thinking through this process.
So it strikes me they're as confused as probably you
are at the point.
Exactly what do I do about it?
At the end, you have to make some specific actions.
So we're going to at least bring some of the ideas to the table
over the next two sessions.
With that, I that I will see you on Monday.
Thank you.