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Acid Rain: An Environmental Problem?
| Article
# : |
19583 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,835 Words |
| Author
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J. Laurence Kulp
J. Laurence Kulp was formerly professor of geochemistry at
Columbia University, vice president for research and
development for the Weyerhaeuser Company, and director of
research of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment
Program. Currently Kulp is an affiliate professor at the
University of Washington and a consultant in environmental and
energy affairs. |
To intelligently allocate our limited resources for the improvement of our environment, we need to understand the causes and effects of any potential threat. We also need to ensure that the benefits derived from the control of that threat significantly outweigh the costs. While research enables us to analyze the damage caused by a given level of pollution, technological development enables us to lower the pollution or lower the cost for the current level of control. Economic study can help us quantify the costs of control or mitigation and the resulting environmental benefits.
There are numerous examples where misguided legislation, regulation, administrative policy, or environmentalist propaganda has resulted in significant financial losses for the national economy. Some examples are: the Alar scare that threatened apple growers; the "endangered" snail darter that delayed completion of a major dam on the Tennessee River; the Seabrook nuclear reactor delayed by antinuclear activists; harmless dioxin in paper products; the trivial improvement in visibility for a few days in winter by spending $2-3 billion in controls on a coal plant near the Grand Canyon; and the PCB scare. In each case science was either ignored or distorted, or the costs of control were enormous compared to the small benefits. And in every instance hundred of millions to billions of dollars were essentially wasted.
Yet all these examples pale into insignificance when compared with the $100 billion required by the 1990 Clean Air Act to solve the acid rain problem. To understand this fiasco let us review the current scientific understanding of the causes and effects of acid rain, and then examine the law and its consequences, and finally look at an alternative.
Causes and distribution of acid rain
Rain has always been acid virtually everywhere, even before the Industrial Revolution. It contains organic acids derived from volatile compounds from plants, sulfuric acid produced from sulfuric dioxide released as a result of volcanic eruptions and dimethyl sulfide generated by plankton, and nitric acid from nitrogen oxides formed by lightning discharges and from soil microbes. In the temperate forested zone of the earth rain has an average pH of about 5.0. (pH is a scale whose values range from 0 to 14 with 7 representing neutrality; numbers less than 7 represent increasing acidity, and number greater than 7 represent increasing alkalinity. A change of 1 unit of pH indicates a change by a factor of 10 in
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