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LISA MULLINS: With all the talk of climate change, it's easy to forget the many other environmental threats the world faces. One is mercury pollution. Last week, environmental officials from across the globe broke a long impasse and agreed to crack down on the problem. The shift came when the United States suddenly changed its position. The World's environment editor Peter Thomson has the story.

PETER THOMSON: Mercury is a potent toxin that can cause everything from hand tremors to cognitive impairment in developing children. A lot of mercury gets into the environment from natural sources like volcanoes, but since the beginning of the industrial age, more and more has been released through industrial processes, especially the burning of coal. Coal often contains mercury. The mercury gets into the atmosphere, and then into the food chain. Much of it ends up in the fish that people eat. The US has slowly been tightening laws on the use and emission of mercury, but the administration of former president George W. Bush had refused to endorse a global treaty to control mercury. That's why negotiators at a UN meeting this month in Nairobi were startled when the US, just a few weeks into the new Obama administration, suddenly changed course.

KEANE: That was a big shock to the rest of the world, I have to tell you. Being there, witnessing it with my own eyes...

THOMSON: That's Susan Egan Keane. She's a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Keane says the US reversal changed the whole tenor of the negotiations.

KEANE: It really created an environment in which other countries could come around, and so other stalwart opponents of a legal framework, such as China and India, did eventually come around.

THOMSON: Over 140 countries agreed to negotiate a binding treaty to reduce industrial use and emissions of mercury. But the process of hammering out such a deal will take several years, so negotiators agreed to try to start cutting mercury emissions right away. In the US, recent court decisions are already likely to force reductions in mercury emissions from power plants. And that's created a circumstance of somewhat strange bedfellows. Some of the biggest industrial emitters of mercury in the US say they're fine with the prospect of an international crackdown on mercury. Jeff Holmstead is a former EPA administrator for air quality who now represents Electric Utilities.

HOLMSTEAD: It is unlikely that a new treaty will have any effect on US coal-fired power plants because they will already be regulated under a separate regime. The question is obviously what will this treaty require of coal-fired plants around the rest of the world.

THOMSON: But mercury is hardly the only unwanted pollutant from coal-fired power plants. Climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions are widely considered a more serious problem, so many environmentalists say the world shouldn't be cleaning up coal-fired power plants -- we should be shutting them down. For The World, I'm Peter Thomson.

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