Scientist Who Testified in Support of Mining Around the Grand Canyon Stands to Make $225,000 From It

[ensho]

http://www.truth-out.org/scientist-who-testified-support-mining-around-grand-canyon-stands-make-225000-it/1320947699


As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, Republican members of Congress have been waging a war to open 1 million acres around the Grand Canyon to uranium mining. Last week Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar took one of the last steps in withdrawing the area from new mining claims. But in response, Republicans have introduced H.R. 3155, the Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011, to keep the decision from moving forward. The issue has become “one of the top legislative priorities of Republicans in Congress” as Energy and Environment Daily reported this morning.

At a hearing yesterday on the bill in the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands, Republicans called a witness to the stand who is a retired United States Geological Survey scientist. Dr. Karen Wenrich noted in her testimony supporting the bill that the Bureau of Land Management has “vastly overstated the environmental harm caused by past and potential uranium development.”

However, under questioning from Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), it became clear through public Securities and Exchange Commission filings that Wenrich stands to make $225,000 by selling 61 uranium claims that she owns only if the Interior Department’s withdrawal does not go forward.

-snip video and text-

This is the third time in the last three years that Wenrich has been sought as a witness by Republicans (she also appeared before the committee in 2008 and 2009). This time around, her financial stake in the withdrawal was readily apparent after a June 2011 report went into the issue more in depth.

-snip-
--------------------------

she is not a scientist she is a greedy guts traitor