I had lunch last week with Rick Ness, President Director of Newmont Mining in Indonesia, and his son Eric. They were in Australia very briefly and took time to visit us at the IPA when I was in Melbourne.
Journalist Mark Hawthorne from The Age was there and wrote about it the next day with comment that:
“A SMALL group gathered at the Institute of Public Affairs office in Collins Street yesterday to hear the tale of woe of former Newmont executive Richard Ness.
The mining boss is being tried in Indonesia for alleged arsenic and mercury pollution at a mining operation at beautiful Buyat Bay, home of a fishing village and a popular scuba diving spot.
“Government cracks down on polluting miner” made plenty of headlines around the world, but the only problem for green groups and the non-government organisations (NGOs) behind the investigation into the mine is that all the evidence now seems to clear Ness and Newmont of any criminal pollution and, indeed, has revealed a high-level conspiracy to incriminate Ness with falsified evidence…
“Ness’ best advice was to fight fire with fire — especially when tainted evidence was presented by NGOs showing how mercury had “polluted” the food chain. “We went though the data and found they had assumed the average family of two adults and two children under 15 kilograms eats 77 cans of tuna per day,” Ness said.
“I turned up to court and put 77 cans of tuna on the table in front of me. That made my point.” [end of quote]
Eric had visited, and dived, at Buyat Bay just before coming to Australia and describes the experience in a recent blog post:
“It’s actually hard to describe how great the diving is in Buyat, which was one of the first things we did. I’ve been diving since I was about 14 years old and I’ve been fortunate enough to dive in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Thailand, the U.S. and a number of different areas throughout Indonesia and I can unequivocally say that Buyat Bay has the best diving I have ever seen. It’s no surprise that Jerry and the North Sulawesi Tourism Office has recently put out a dive book to promote the area as a dive destination. Read the rest of the blog here:
http://www.richardness.org
You’ve seen Rick on a motor bike, remember this blog post: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001697.html
Well, here he is underwater:
Rick Ness diving at Buyat Bay, February 2007
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Eating that much tuna would kill hundreds of dolphins and reduce the IQ of Mr. Ness’ children. I learned all about that sort of thing from environment defenders. They have research staff and things. Even Greenpeace has researchers. Someone told me that Greenpeace even bought some test tubes and petri dishes once.
What did Greenpeace do with the petri dishes and test tubes? Break them into sharp pieces to harm anti-Greenpeace people?
I am forever amazed by the gullibility of people who see Greenpeace as a positive good. Can any bloggers enlighten us as to individual Greenpeace actions that have produced positive monetary or social gain, and how much?
Surely Greenpeace overall fail a simple cost:benefit analysis.
But back to the tuna. When I owned a large lab in the 1970s we did some pioneering work on mercury in people. Among our lab workers there was a good correlation between mercury in hair and length of time spent as a chemist in a lab. One cannot simply take a few spot measurements of alleged contamination and draw log bows about pollution from a mine.
One again, it’s proper science versus quack science. For the former, one needs actual experience and peer review. For the latter, one needs broken petri dishes and test tubes.