The mercury used in this photograph was disposed of in accordance with EPA guidelines. Much of what appears to be mercury was in fact replicated using digital imaging techniques. Credit: Mark Weiss
—From the AUG/SEP issue of Seed:
Jim Gibbons and I go way back. Not that we've ever met—but we've been slamming each other for some time now.
Gibbons is a Republican congressman from Nevada and, more recently, a leading gubernatorial candidate in that state. He's a conservative war veteran and former combat pilot who has played a prominent role on the House Resources Committee, where he has pushed a "sound science" agenda on matters of pollution and environmental protection. All too often, unfortunately, this has amounted to doing what industry wants and then finding a scientific-sounding justification for it.
But there's more to say about Gibbons: He's actually a scientist. He has a master's degree in mining and geology and has worked as a hydrologist and as a mining and exploration geologist. So perhaps more than most politicians, Gibbons has a certain stake in having his rhetoric about sound science match the truth.
It most emphatically doesn't.
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Back in early 2004, I wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which I criticized Gibbons' rhetoric about using sound science in political decision making—which often amounts to Republican doublespeak for weakening environmental and public health regulations. Gibbons and his fellow sound science guru Chris Cannon (R-UT) responded with this swipe: "Recently, a freelance journalist named Chris Mooney, an English graduate with no background in science..." Ouch. Gibbons plays hardball.
"For too long, too many politicians have felt that they can simply say whatever they want about matters of science, running roughshod over expert opinion and spewing talking points drawn up by corporate-funded PR firms."
But lately, I seem to have been getting back at him—and Gibbons, with his name likely on the ballot this coming November, has more to lose. In early 2005, Gibbons and House Resources Committee chairman Richard Pombo released a truly staggering report on the subject of mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, which essentially argued that it's nothing to worry about. So all of the regulatory gear-grinding at the EPA, investigations of methods to reduce mercury levels in fish, and all of the advisories for pregnant women to watch their levels of fish intake—according to Gibbons and Pombo, it amounts to little more than a big scare. They had the gall to write that "current, peer-reviewed scientific literature does not show any link between US power plant emissions and mercury in fish." The only problem: The EPA has said otherwise, while the National Academy of Sciences has very prominently underscored the dangers of mercury intake through fish consumption. So in online commentaries and in my book The Republican War on Science, I heavily criticized the Gibbons-Pombo report.
And then something extraordinary happened: The Nevada media caught on. An anti-Gibbons blog written under the pseudonym "Nevada Scandalmonger" had been regularly plugging my critiques of Gibbons for some time; then in January, a journalist with whom I'd been in touch, Dennis Myers of the Reno News & Reviews, wrote a lengthy cover story about Gibbons' incredible mercury report. "If its authors didn't argue that mercury is good for you, they didn't stop much short of that," Myers noted. In his piece, he went on to quote University of Nevada, Reno, environmental scientist Glenn Miller, who, sure enough, confirmed that the Gibbons-Pombo report amounted to utter scientific nonsense. "Mercury is an incredibly problematic material, and whatever we can do to minimize the amount of mercury exposure is appropriate," Miller pointed out.