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.