Month: March 2011

Mercury is NOT TOXIC to anyone…

… at ambient exposure levels in the U.S.

Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental over-Protection Agency proposed “the first-ever national standards for mercury, arsenic and other toxic air pollution from power plants.”

The EPA stated,

Toxic air pollutants like mercury from coal- and oil-fired power plants have been shown to cause neurological damage, including lower IQ, in children exposed in the womb and during early development.

This statement is false. There is no such evidence from any credible scientific study.

Mercury is known to be toxic only at extremely high (i.e., poisoning) exposure levels that have been rarely experienced in the real world.

In addition to the lack of credible positive evidence linking typical mercury exposures with adverse health effects, studies of Seychelles Islands children have failed to link mercury exposure with developmental or other health problems.

It is the dose that makes the poison — and ambient exposures to mercury in the U.S. are simply not high enough to cause any harm.

If we were to consider mercury as a neurotoxin, as the EPA does, then we would have to consider water as a neurotoxin, too, since overhydration can cause fatal disturbance of brain function.

For more on mercury visit JunkScience.com’s Debunkosaurus.

Recall the Surgeon General

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin said today it was appropriate for West Coast residents to buy iodide tablets as a precaution in light of the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.

This is ridiculous. Americans will not be exposed to significant amounts of radiation from Japan and so there is no need to scare people.

I’m not sure whether she’s just scaring people in order to help kill off nuclear power in the U.S. or whether she is really that ignorant. But whichever, Regina Benjamin needs to go.

EPA owns the American Lung Association

At today’s House Energy and Commerce Committee mark-up of the Upton-Inhofe bill to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) tried to defend the EPA by offering a recent American Lung Association poll that purports to show public opinion favoring the EPA.

What Congress needs to know, however, is that the American Lung Association is bought-and-paid-for by the EPA. In the last 10 years, the EPA has given the ALA $20,405,655, according to EPA records.

The master-servant relationship between the EPA and ALA extends back to at least the early 1990s. As John Merline reported in Investors Business Daily (Jan. 28, 1997), between 1990 and 1995, the EPA gave the American Lung Association $5 million — even though the ALA was suing the EPA at the time. Although not many grantors give grants to organizations that sue them, at least in the regular world, the EPA likes to be sued by its buddies because such lawsuits invariably expand the agency’s powers.

So it’s not really surprising (or meaningful) that the ALA issued a poll supporting the EPA.

Study: Greens’ red tape costs GDP, jobs

A first-of-its kind study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that stalled energy projects are costing the New York economy $36.2 Billion and More Than 60,000 Jobs. (Progress Denied: A Study on the Potential Economic Impact of Permitting Challenges Facing Proposed Energy Projects).

EWG chromium scare debunked

“A report released Tuesday on the city of Norman’s website shows that Cleveland County’s rate of stomach cancer is lower than the state average and that of other key areas in Oklahoma… The findings, culled from the Oklahoma Central Cancer Registry, were reported because of a study released in December 2010 by the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group, which found that Norman’s drinking water had the highest levels of chromium-6 in a 35-city study.” (Norman Transcript) For more on chromium-6, visit JunkScience.com’s Debunkosaurus.

EPA: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently claimed that it is saving millions of lives and making the U.S. trillions of dollars through the Clean Air Act. These claims are false. Continue reading EPA: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is

EPA GHG regs put biomass plant at risk

Thanks to EPA’s new greenhouse gas permitting authority, a proposed Wisconsin biomass plant has come under fire from green activists. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report:

It doesn’t make sense to issue a permit for the project because it would add emissions of carbon dioxide at a rate much higher than a natural gas-fueled power plant, said Mary Booth, an ecologist who is researching biomass projects for a national coalition called the Partnership for Policy Integrity.

“We looked at the permit numbers, and the emissions of greenhouse gases are six times higher from biomass than in the natural gas boiler,” she said. “It’s right there in the numbers, and yet they say we’re not going to consider any further use of natural gas as a way to make this facility cleaner because this is a biomass project.”

EPA has apparently not yet granted the biomass industry an exemption from its rules, and the enviros are making hay in the meantime.

Africa’s killer dares to criticize

Check out this galling interview of William Ruckelshaus, the EPA administrator who banned DDT. While Ruckelshaus is correct in criticizing Members of Congress for essentially being willfully uninformed on environmental issues, his criticism is astonishingly arrogant given his own willful (and genocidal) ignorance of facts.

During 1971-1972, the EPA held seven months of hearings and produced 9,000 pages of testimony on DDT. In the end, the presiding EPA administrative law judge ruled that DDT use presented no danger to humans health or the environment. Without having attended a moment of the hearings or reading a page of the transcript, Ruckelshaus banned DDT in the U.S. anyway. The ban was then exported to the rest of the world, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions, including millions of children under the age of 5 years.

The willful ignorance of the unapologetic Bill Ruckelshaus is still killing millions today. He’s the 20th century’s only mass murderer to survive and thrive (as a venture capitalist) in the 21st century.