Six upstate coal-burning power plants recently signed an agreement with New York to curtail smokestack emissions that have for decades been in violation of the 1970 federal Clean Air Act. This is the first tentative step by power plants anywhere in the nation to lower deadly neurotoxic, carcinogenic, gaseous stack emissions that have long polluted air, water and soils. This won't help Long Island or New York City directly because our predominantly westerly winds blowing eastward carry upstate aerial contaminants mostly into New England. But we'll eventually benefit when this milestone pact fosters similar agreements from over 100 coal-burning plants and factories in the Midwest, which is where most of our noxious coal-burning contaminants originate. The major pollutants that would be reduced are mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates. At first, belched out from normal-sized smokestacks, these contaminants took a heavy toll of illness and death in nearby Midwestern areas until state laws mandated 600-foot chimneys that vented the poisons into high fast winds to be carried out of state toward the northeast coastal region. This protected them by shifting the problem onto us.

And it is a huge problem. Mercury occurs naturally in coal and is relatively harmless until the coal is burned. The released mercury vapors then leave the chimneys as gasses or aerosols (microscopic droplets) to be transported downwind. Mercury causes Minamata disease, a horrible illness that attacks the nervous system and can cause total paralysis. It is insidious in being able to enter the body through food, drink or the skin. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides cause smog and acid rain which harms humans, corrodes paint and metal, damages soil and vegetation, acidifies surface waters, and kills fish and other animals that feed on aquatic organisms. Particulates are microscopic dust particles that can be trapped in lung alveoli to interfere with normal respiration and that exacerbate bronchitis, asthma and emphysema. The federal administration had recently attempted to get the EPA to declare mercury to be a less hazardous substance, but the EPA, to its credit, held fast.

Mercury poisoning became known as Minamata disease in 1972 when the former Life magazine published an article and extremely graphic pictures by the great photographer W. Eugene Smith about the terrible effects mercury was having on thousands of Japanese who were eating fish taken from Minamata Bay in eastern Japan. The most evocative photo is of a limp, totally paralyzed 17-year-old girl who's been poisoned by mercury in her mother's womb, after the latter had long been eating fish from nearby Minamata Bay which was heavily contaminated with mercury industrial wastes from a factory. The girl's thin, bare, seemingly lifeless body was cradled in her mother's arms as the latter, with a loving compassionate expression on her face, was carefully washing the daughter in a square, half-filled tub.

The six upstate power plants had agreed to curtail their poisonous smokestack emissions only after New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer organized the attorney generals in other states and began suing many power plants outside New York whose noxious coal-burning emissions were violating the 1970 Clean Air Act. The Act had allowed the nation's coal burners to delay installing air pollution controls until they undertook major renovations. The wily, greedy, profit-motivated plant and factory owners literally got away with murder for 35 years by claiming their major renovations and expansions to meet growing demand were merely minor ones that did not mandate installation of air pollution controls that met Clean Air Act standards.

Another landmark pact that will also improve America's air quality and get coal burners to comply with Clean Air Act, was signed Jan. 27, 2005 by the Justice Department and 13 oil refineries - with one being fined $54 1/2 million and having to spend $135 million on pollution controls.

Professor Kane received an Air Pollution Control Association award in 1969 for research and publications on particulate air pollution.