Friday, April 22, 2011

UPDATED: The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth - but only after the right has polluted it so badly it is uninhabitable

Updated April 23, 2011.
From the EDF which partners with business, governments and communities on solving environmental issues:
"Now, to actually cause poisoning or a premature death you have to get a large concentration of mercury into the body. I’m not a medical doctor, but my hypothesis is that’s not going to happen! You're not going to get enough mercury exposure or SO2 exposure or even particulate matter exposure! I think the EPA numbers are pulled out of the thin air!"

Congressman Joe Barton in a Congressional Hearing, April 2011


On a conservative web site, the validity of the EPA's statistical claims were challenged.  No, no one actually had a legitimate basis for claiming the numbers were inaccurate, not any more than Joe Barton did.  Their objection boiled down to because the EPA in their summation didn't go into elaborate detail explaining the sources for their numbers.

So far as I can tell, they were not asked to do so.  I don't see any video anywhere showing Joe Barton actually ASKING anyone from the EPA for an explanation; he just launches into an assumption, so far as I can tell, completely unjustified, that their numbers are inaccurate.  How can he be so certain they are inaccurate, if he doesn't know how they were derived? He doesn't actually KNOW anything of the kind; he just wants to use any pretext, any occasion to justify the big bucks that big oil pays him to act as their agent, their representative - rather than the representative of his constituents, human being citizens not corporations.

So I took a look at how mercury is measured, and evaluated as a hazard to human beings in the U.S.  I looked at the EPA - 'Human Exposure to Mercury', http://www.epa.gov/hg/exposure.htm; and I looked at the Center for Disease Control's resources on Mercury poisoning, where they break it down into elemental mercury poisoning, organic and inorganic mercury poisoning.  I looked at the NRDC web site on Mercury poisoning, http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/effects.asp,.  I looked at the mercury pages on the web site for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which is also part of the CDC, http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tf.asp?id=113&tid=24.  I looked at quite a few sites, and quite a few sources of academic and other research data on the subject of mercury - too many more to list here.  The EPA numbers seem reasonable and fact based, consistent with the literature on the subject of mercury hazards.

You know what I found?  There is an awful lot of data available from which the EPA appears to have drawn their conclusions.  More than that - those other qualified sources DON'T, so far as I could find, have any significant problems with the conclusions of the EPA.  In fact, there wasn't anything on any of those sites that I could find that seriously challenged the validity of the EPA's conclusions.  There is some minor questioning of the conclusions of the CDC over the effects of minute amounts of mercury in vaccines.

But no, not about the conclusions of environmental mercury dangers as reflected in the EPA numbers. Nada.  Joe Barton is making up, out of his backside, his objections to those numbers.  He has no scientific basis for his crackpot hypothesis.  In fact, he bends over like a cirque de solleil contortionist to ignore all of the many ways in which our exposure to mercury is cumulative - and dangerous.

Sadly, like other Republican members of Congress, along with Republicans at the state legislature level, their numbers are the ones pulled out of thin air - or in the case of pollution, thick air; THEIR numbers are the ones which lack any credible empiric value or scientific merit.  Whether it is Michele Bachmann making incredibly ignorant AND stupid statements about carbon dioxide, or Barton making ignorant, stupid, ill informed statements about sulphur dioxide and mercury, or media whore Ann Coulter misleading her followers about the very real, very serious risks of radiation - and that's just from the beginning of the alphabet - the pattern is consistent.  The right promotes an anti-science, anti-reality, anti-knowledge world view that promotes pollution and fawns obscenely at the feet of big business while worshipping at the feet of more profits for the rich.  They consistently ignore their own self-interest, or any community concerns; all they see is money, all they have is some vain hope they will some day have those big bucks too - with little hope of that happening, and less probability of it all the time.

How dumb is that?  Let me demonstrate.
Sulphur Dioxide - cardiovascular / blood toxicant, liver toxicant, developmental toxicant, neurotoxicant,  respiratory toxicant
This is a high volume chemical, occurring in significant quantities in at least 4 major industries; production exceeds 1 million pounds annually in the U.S.
Mercury - developmental toxicant, cardiovascular / blood toxicant,  endocrine toxicant, gastrointestinal and liver toxicant, immunotoxicant, kidney toxicant, neurotoxicant, reproductive toxicant, respiratory toxicant, skin and sense organ toxicant; it is ranked as one of the most hazardous compounds to human health and ecosystems
This is what the right doesn't want regulated; this is what the right falsely assures people won't hurt them or kill them.  This is the information that the right LACKS when they criticize the EPA.  The right will look the other way on ANYTHING, no matter how harmful, so long as someone waives money under their noses.

And no one is more crooked than Joe Barton in so far as he takes HUGE amounts of money from industries like big oil, and with bravado and bone ignorance, he will say anything to benefit them, regardless of how it harms YOU.
thermal image of pollution
Happy Earth Day 2011.  Stop putting the stupid in charge, vote against the right in 2012.

4 comments:

  1. A Happy Earth Day to you ... I just don't know if there will be many more to come.



    FYI ... looks like Mr. Barton has a friend in our area, as Centerpoint Energy is listed as one of his contributors this quarter. In total, Mr. Barton got $254,286 this quarter which trails the Energy Committee Chairman Fred Upton who logged in $355,337 plus $281,175 from PACs.



    Coincidentally, while your commentary focus on Joe Barton and the "Meek inheriting the earth", there is a post on MN Political Roundtable about David Barton's anti-tax Biblical interpretations ... and the Ryan budget cuts to programs like food stamps.

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  2. Isn’t the question here : Who listens to Joe Barton ?

    In Minnesota, there should be concern with five members of the House.

    The House approved HR 910 which legislatively repeals EPA's scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. This determination was made in 2009, when the EPA Administrator found that the current and projected concentrations of the six key greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)--in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

    So who opposed this bill ?
    The bill is opposed by: the American Lung Association; American Public Health Association; American Thoracic Society; Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America; Physicians for Social Responsibility; Trust for America's Health; Natural Resources Defense Council; League of Conservation Voters; Center for Biological Diversity; Environment America; Conservation Law Foundation; National Audubon Society; The Wilderness Society; Earthjustice; U.S. Climate Action Network; Center for American Progress Action Fund; American Rivers; Sierra Club; Defenders of Wildlife; Environmental Defense Fund; and Union of Concerned Scientists, among others.
    Plus more than 2,500 scientists; more than 1,800 doctors, nurses and other medical professionals; and a number of retired high-ranking U.S. military officers.

    So who listened to Joe Barton and voted for HR 910 :
    John Kline (R-MN-02)
    Erik Paulsen (R-MN-03)
    Michele Bachmann (R-MN-06)
    Colin Peterson (D-MN-07)
    Raymond Cravaack (R-MN-08)

    The legislation has been sent to the Senate where Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will “educate” his members.

    IMO, this should be a good campaign issue in the 2012 Senate contest. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is a co-sponsor of S. 847. S. 847 The "Safe Chemcials Act" responds to increasingly forceful warnings from scientific and medical experts - including the President's Cancer Panel - that current policies have failed to curtail common chemicals linked to diseases such as cancer, learning disabilities, infertility, and more.
    The Safe Chemicals Act would overhaul the 35-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which is widely perceived to have failed to protect public health and the environment. Specifically the Act would:
    - Require EPA to identify and restrict the "worst of the worst" chemicals, those that persist and build up in the food chain
    - Require basic health and safety information for all chemicals as a condition for entering or remaining on the market
    - Upgrade scientific methods for testing and evaluating chemicals to reflect best practices called for by the National Academy of Sciences
    - Generally provide EPA with the tools and resources it needs to identify and address chemicals posing health and environmental concerns.

    At a time when autism and ADHD are rising and various studies link brain development and learning with chemicals, this is just the type of issue that the Pro-Life people should embrace … but here’s the hook … the legislation could prevent States from adopting requirements that are different from or in addition to EPA regulations.
    Thus it becomes a States Rights issue as well as a Regulation issue.

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  3. Sadly, apparently too many conservative blog readers DO listen to the likes of Barton - and the five anti-science conservatives in Minnesota - rather than asking the question I did. That question, "Is the EPA correct" is answered in the affirmative.

    The right will believe anything, no matter how distorted, how contorted, or just plain false, in order to prevent regulation to make their corporate donors to campaigns happy.

    Witness Barton who apologized to BP for their being held accountable for loss of lives and massive enviormental damage, all of which could have been avoided.

    Thank God we have more responsive representation in the Senate.

    As is so often the case, MC, your comments exceed the information in my original post - thank you!

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  4. Please forgive my computer illiteracy as I do not know the procedure for posting a cartoon, but click this link, which IMO is a statement in truth.
    FYI : the actual url is imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=85c5f5891e38cf3639ae60df9a158236

    ReplyDelete