THE phenomenon known as acid rain has become one of the environment's worst blights. For almost forty years scientists have issued reports on its devastating effects, and the public has watched as this by-product of the industrial age has destroyed forests and lakes throughout the world. Despite the controversy, very little has been done to implement solutions to the problem. In this regard, acid rain is no different than the multitude of other environmental problems we now face: The evidence is in, the public demands action, but the political factions continue to engage in specious debates designed to deny the all too obvious effects of the problem and to thwart initiatives that offer viable solutions.

WHAT IS ACID RAIN?

Acid rain results from certain kinds of air pollution that mix with precipitation, such as rain or fog, and then fall to Earth as an acidic solution. Its major components are oxides of sulfur and nitrogen that are primarily the by-products of coal-burning power plants, copper smelting, and factory and automobile emissions. These oxides are chemically altered in the atmosphere and return to the earth as rain, snow, fog, or dust. In the United States, the most popularly recognized form of acid rain results from sulfur dioxide emissions, which are converted into sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. When this is mixed with precipitation and falls to Earth, the effect is precisely like pouring a diluted acid solution onto everything it touches. Although the effects of acid rain are most drastically felt and seen in the delicate ecostructures of our natural surroundings-the lakes, forests, farmlands, and oceans-its corrosive properties are now recognized to cause significant damage to even the man-made parts of our environment such as monuments and buildings.

In lakes, this acidification process can change ecological structures full of freshwater life into sterile, atrophied dead zones. Particularly susceptible are those lakes with a low alkaline content or those that lack alkaline rocks and vegetation in their surroundings that can neutralize the acidic rainwater. Many of the nation's best trout-fishing spots have simply disappeared as a result of excess acidification. Once a lake has become too acid, bacteria and plankton die off, and little by little the entire food chain of the lake dwindles. Eventually frogs, fish, and other insects perish as well, leaving the lake itself barren and dead.

The Canadians, whose lakes in Quebec and Ontario have been particularly hard hit by acid rain, have been conducting unusual scientific experiments that enable us to see for the first time how acidification really works. By purposely releasing an acidic solution into a number of closely observed lakes in western Ontario, scientists are able to document the process on freshwater ecosystems. These studies are significant because they not only provide us with a time frame for the acid-rain damage, but also furnish the irrefutable correlation between an increase in the acidity level and the destruction of lakes and streams.

Some of the scientists' important findings include:

* The destruction of a lake's ecostructure can take place early on in the acidification process.

* The disappearance of adult fish is not an accurate measure of damage. Prey fish and reproductive dysfunction are the first indications that acidification is upsetting the lake's ecosystem.

* Lakes can begin to regenerate soon after acid input ceases, but it may be many years, perhaps even hundreds of years, before the original structure of the lake is restored.

* Wetlands can serve as buffers for lakes by filtering out acid causing substances and thus can help protect lakes from acidification.

The National Audubon Society has monitored the pH levels in thirty-nine states since July 1987. In January 1988, Audubon's Citizens' Acid Rain Monitoring Network issued its monthly report, which showed that almost half of the states experienced an average pH of 5.0 or less (on a scale of 0 to 14, with 0 being most acidic), even during winter when the water is generally at its least acidic. According to Audubon's senior staff scientist, Jan Beyea, this level of acidification is solely caused by air pollution stemming from man-made sources. Of all the states surveyed, Tennessee had the worst pH average with 4.2, while nine states (including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia) showed readings of 3.2 or less.

HOW MUCH DAMAGE IS ACID RAIN REALLY CAUSING?

For a number of years, much of the debate around acid rain in the United States centered on the freshwater lakes and streams in the Northeast that were quietly being destroyed in areas like New York's Adirondack Mountains and the Appalachian plateau of West Virginia. Much of the blame was laid on the sulfur dioxide from the industrial centers of the Midwest, which traveled often hundreds of miles before returning to Earth as acidic precipitation. We now know that acid rain is not merely confined to sulfur dioxide emissions from a limited geographic area that affects another limited geographic area. It is an international problem that honors no boundaries, that results from a wide variety of air pollutants, and that has repercussions on our environment that we are only beginning to understand.

Acid rain has been around for just about as long as we have been polluting the air. In the 1800s, when large amounts of coal were being used, scientists in England first began to make the connection between sulfur oxide emissions and damage to surrounding plant life. In this century, it was not until the 1950s, in Norway Sweden, that scientists began to publicize the correlation between acid rain and environmental damage. Today, acid rain is known to be prevalent in much of the industrialized world. In Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States whole geographic areas of once-fertile natural resources are being doomed to a slow death by the sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides spewing forth from society's energy plants and factories. This damage is resulting in a great diminution of the world's heritage, for the destruction of the Swiss Alps or the corrosion of France's Gothic cathedrals deprives not only the countries in which these natural and historical treasures are located, but impoverishes us all.

Thirty years after the Scandinavians began documenting acid rain, the subject made its first major headlines in the United States when Time magazine reported in 1980 the disappearance of fish in about a hundred lakes in the Adirondack wilderness and labeled acid rain a "newly recognized and increasingly harmful kind of pollution, invisible and insidious." By 1982, there was sufficient uproar about the devastation caused by acid rain to warrant congressional discussion of amendments to the Clean Air Act and a study by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). The OTA report revealed that in the twenty-seven-state region covered by the study, one of every four lakes and streams in the northeastern United States has been damaged by acid rain. More specifically, the report stated that one out of every six lakes and one in every five streams had been damaged by acid rain, and that of seventeen thousand lakes in the area, more than nine thousand are endangered. In short, the report concluded that in the Northeast and upper Midwest, up to 80 percent of the lakes and streams are threatened with extinction by acid rain.

Notwithstanding the frightening message of the OTA report, little has been done to stop the proliferation of damage due to acid rain. In fact, it appears that, if anything, the situation is worsening. A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report shows that acidification of freshwater is much more widespread than was previously known.

The EPA previously found serious acidification in only several hundred lakes in New York State's Adirondacks and in parts of New England. An EPA survey of streams in the eastern 1!~nited States revealed that about 4.4 percent of the sixty-six thousand miles of stream in the middle Atlantic coastal plain stretching from New Jersey to North Carolina were acidic, and roughly half of the streams in the area were found to have a potentially low capacity to neutralize acid rain. This indicates a statistically proven basis for demonstrating a broader geographical extent of environmental effects from acid rain than was heretofore acknowledged. it could be just the beginning.

Scientists in California are finding that pollution from automobile exhaust and industries is endangering the lakes in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. A team of scientists recently issued warnings that Sequoia National Park's Emerald Lake had almost no capacity to neutralize future increases in acidity. In the past the lakes in the High Sierras have been relatively safe because, while rainwater has been about 10 percent more acidic than normal, snow, which constitutes more than 90 percent of the Sierran precipitation, was within the normal range. Now, scientists are discovering that the spring melt can send "acid pulses" into the lakes, as most of the toxic chemicals are contained in the first 20 percent of the melt water. These acid pulses send the lakes into temporarily acid conditions, which most are now able to neutralize. Once a lake's natural neutralizing compounds are exhausted, as is the case with Emerald Lake, the acid levels can rise sharply and damage will ensue.

Nor is it just our freshwater lakes and streams that are being destroyed by acid rain. Instead of sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, a secondary component mainly produced by automobiles and electric utilities, is another culprit. Nitrogen oxides are converted into nitric acids and nitrates in the atmosphere. The damage to coastal aquatic life is the result of eutrophication, a greenhouse like effect in which excessive growth of algae, stimulated by nitrate salts and other nutrients, chokes off the oxygen supply and blocks the sunlight required by other plants and animals. According to the Environmental Defense Fund study, airborne nitrates issuing mostly from automobiles, power plants, and factories accounted for about one fourth of the nitrogen that is polluting the Atlantic Coast by fertilizing the excessive algae growth. Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist and coauthor of the study, said that the study was significant because acid rain had previously been thought to affect only "a+-w hundred or a few thousand acidified lakes in remote areas." Now, he says, people will be really feeling its effects. "It is choking off the ocean's nurseries. It is shutting down the playground for millions of Americans. It is a region-wide problem, and it is only going to get worse because of the projected growth of nitrogen emissions."

More and more evidence is accumulating about the damage done by acid rain. A 1985 study prepared by the EPA, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Army Corps of Engineers revealed that acid rain was responsible for an estimated $5 billion in damage to houses and other structures annually in an area comprising seventeen states. The study surveyed one thousand one hundred buildings in selected cities and also utilized previously existing data on pollution in a region that stretched south to Kentucky, west to Illinois, and northeast to Maine. The study's estimate of damage was based on the cost to repair or replace building materials damaged by acidic pollution. Signs of damage include breakdown of exterior paint (including chipping, blistering, and peeling), deterioration of roofing materials, and erosion of stonework on public monuments, statues, and decorative elements on buildings. What the report did not include in its damage estimate was at least as significant-automobile paint, roofing materials, the value of esthetic losses to cultural or historical structures, and, as Oppenheimer points out, it "did not include the costs of proved destruction of freshwater life and probably the much greater costs of damage to forests and public health."

The report also showed there was widespread damage not just in the states on the Eastern Seaboard but also in the Midwest. States like Ohio and Illinois, which are big emitters of the acidic pollutants, are also feeling the effects. Scientists now acknowledge that the problem affects all areas, not just a few high-altitude lakes in the Adirondacks.

Oppenheimer drew another important conclusion from the report: "Government estimates of the damage caused by acid rain to buildings and visibility were at least as high as the estimated costs of suggested acid-rain control programs." In fact, Oppenheimer estimated that "seven billion dollars was probably only a fraction of the costs to society caused by acid rain." He included an extra $2 billion in the cost figures to represent loss of visibility, which causes "loss of tourist income" and "increased delays and congestion at airports."

Another 1985 U.S. report also examined damage to forests; in this case, the Green Mountains of Vermont. According to scientists, in one area 50 percent of the red spruce trees at high elevations died in the last twenty years. One University of Vermont botanist who surveyed the region said, "It looked like a forest fire hit the area." The study's findings added to the mounting evidence indicating that pollutants can affect distant areas in the form of acid rain. The study's data showed the damage to be largely on western slopes that would be more vulnerable if, as some experts believe, the pollution is blown from as far as the Middle West.

In 1986, forestry experts began issuing reports that acid rain was threatening the sugar maple trees in Vermont and Canada with extinction. One forestry researcher from McGill University says that industrial pollution is causing such a rapid decline in the number of trees, that "the delightful taste of maple syrup will remain but a memory." According to one maple-syrup producer, production has been dropping steadily-a 26 percent decrease from 1985 to 1986 in New York, a 38 percent drop in Vermont, and more than 50 percent in parts of Canada. Aerial surveys of the maple forests in Quebec began in 1982 and showed that about 32 percent of trees were seriously injured or dying. By the summer of 1986, the aerial studies showed that up to 82 percent of the trees were on the decline.

The decline of the sugar maple provides a clue as to how acid rain may be affecting all of our forests. Acid rain acts to weaken the trees, leaving them vulnerable to pests, diseases, and bad weather from which they are normally well protected. Parasitic insects called thrips spread rampantly through the maple groves during 1988, but there were signs that the trees were already soft before the thrips began to invade. "The big question," says sugar producer David Marvin, "is whether the pest problems are happening by themselves or whether opportunistic insects are attacking weakened trees."

A connection can be drawn between the infestation of thrips in the maple forests and other epidemic outbreaks that have recently occurred:

* Virus wiped out more than half of the harbor seals along North Sea coasts. Researchers believe it will continue to WI animals whose immune systems have been weakened by toxic chemicals.

* West German forest damage, probably from acid rain, rose to about 50 percent from 34 percent between 1983 and 1984, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

* Researchers at North Carolina State University have found an epidemic aphid infestation of southeastern U.S. fir trees.

HISTORY AND POLITICS: LESSONS IN AVOIDANCE AND DENIAL

Acid rain is part of a much larger problem, that of air pollution in general. Its solutions will only be found once the government begins to align its loyalties with the American public and the preservation of this wonderful country, instead of selling out to the powerful few who have all too long been calling the shots in Washington. The history of inaction on environmental issues by the Reagan admininistration was a tragedy for the nation and a disgrace to us internationally. We can only hope that the Bush administration will hold true to its stated commitment to the environment rather than auctioning it off to the highest bidder.

Why has there been so much foot-dragging on the part of politicians to clean up our environment, particularly when there is such a large body of evidence as to the damage being caused by pollution? Part of the answer to this question lies in what has been called the "Foul-Air Lobby," an army of lobbyists who for years have blocked legislation designed to control acid rain. Between 1980 and 1988, neither house of Congress voted on, much less approved, any pollution-control bills. One of the reasons for this conspicuous lack of action is the organized efforts of the industrial forces opposing clean-air legislation.

Among the leading lobbyists is Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain, formed by a group of electric utilities and coal companies that has contributed $6.1 million to the effort.

The group hired public relations firms to address constituents' correspondence to legislators, urging them to defeat bills on acid rain. In 1986, this organization spent $3 million, more than any other registered lobbying group in Washington.

Also figuring prominently in this campaign is the Clean Air Working Group. Contrary to what its name suggests, this association is composed of chemical manufacturers, Shell Oil, and General Motors, among others.

In addition to their lobbying activities, these groups are also involved in national publicity campaigns that include their views about the impact of current air pollution control laws. They predict an end to American business if antipollution legislation is passed. Another well-favored tactic is to overestimate the costs of environmental cleanup as well as the resultant rate increases for utility users. While lobbies like these cite estimates of up to $110 billion for cleanup and 30 percent increases for consumers in their utility bills, most other sources place the costs of cleanup at about $4 billion and the rate increases at 2 to 3 percent.

The strength and vehemence of these campaigns are playing a large role in slowing, if not altogether stopping, any significant inroads to the acid rain problem. Another roadblock comes from the nature of acid rain itself.

Since toxic emissions can travel up to one thousand miles, depending on weather conditions, finding solutions to acid rain often involves factional and regional debates. What is good for the factory in Ohio is not good for the lakes in New York. The same, of course, applies between nations-American's economy depends upon the efficiency of its industries. How can an American politician support legislation that would benefit Canada, but in the meantime increase costs to industries here at home?

it may very well be that international pressure has a more coercive effect on administration policy than does domestic dissent, for it was also under pressure from the Canadians that the Reagan administration made another shift in policy, albeit a cosmetic one. In an attempt to appease Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who had been vociferously expressing his outrage to the international community at Mr. Reagan's laxity on the issue of acid rain, Mr. Reagan finally yielded to international censure and announced that he would endorse a $2.5 billion acid rain fund, one month prior to a planned meeting between the two heads of state.

In 1988, the United States made a first significantly constructive step toward curbing its toxic emissions, again in the international arena. The United States agreed with twenty-four other nations, including the Soviet Union, Canada, and most European countries, to freeze the rate of nitrogen oxide emissions, starting in 1994, to levels no higher than those of 1987. The United States refused, however, to join twelve of the other signatories of the protocol in decreasing nitrogen oxide emissions by 30 percent over the next ten years. The administration also refused to ratify an earlier protocol, endorsed by sixteen of the participating nations in in 1985, to decrease sulfur dioxide emissions, claiming that the United States had already made significant inroads in cutting this type of pollution.

While the signing of the protocol is certainly a step in the right direction, one looming question still remains: Why is the United States in the rear rather than in the forefront of the effort to make this world a better place to live? The Canadian government, fed up with the foot-dragging of the EPA under the Reagan administration, followed the example of the northeastern states and took the EPA to court in April 1988. Before the U.S. Court of Appeals, the Canadian government petitioned for an order directing the EPA to enforce the Clean Air Act of 1970 and requiring American acid rain polluters to clean up after themselves.

Cause and effect are often difficult to determine with any certainty. One thing seems definite, though: The move to curb acid rain is both strengthening and making inroads. In June 1988, the wrangling and factionalism that have plagued the negotiations between the states for so long took a new and exciting turn: Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, a state considerably hard hit by acid rain, and Governor Richard Celeste of Ohio, one of the biggest sources of the pollution causing acid rain, signed a "peace plan" that proposed an annual line item to decrease toxic emissions and help industry pay for the cleanup. The plan was significant for several reasons. It showed that an accord is possible even between parties with very opposite interests. It came from the states, and not the federal government, and may be an indication not to count on the feds when it comes to environmental issues. Finally, it offered at least one positive and viable solution to the acid rain problem. The proposal would cost about $1.8 billion annually, which would be spent to reduce pollutants and provide subsidies to industries for the cleanup. Most of the program would be funded by fees on polluters and on imported oil.

7he New York Times heralded the plan as "an important break in the deadlock over Congressional legislation on the issue." But the Times admonished that "the deadlock over acid rain is only one element of a legislative stalemate that has persisted through the 1980s over proposals to amend and strengthen the Federal Clean Air Act."

Other encouraging news came in March 1989, when more than 100 members of the House of Representatives supported legislation that would roll back sulfur- and nitrogen-oxides emissions by 40 percent. Representative Gerry Sikorski, a Democrat of Minnesota and a supporter of the legislation, declared, "This is the year for clean air."

It is impossible to tell whether these moves toward problem solving and away from subterfuge and avoidance are due to the removal of the stumbling blocks set up by the Reagan administration during the past decade Representative Sikorski cites the "new attitude" of the Bush administration as one of the factors facilitating the changes-or whether the outstanding efforts of Governors Cuomo and Celeste have finally given Congress the impetus it needed to proceed with much overdue legislation, or whether the acid-rain problem has finally just reached that stage of critical mass in the conscience of America. Whatever the cause, for those of us who cherish and appreciate our environment, all we can say is that it is about time!

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