As pollution and sulfuric acid choked North American skies in the 1970s and 80s, a bipartisan, transnational agreement spearheaded by the Environmental Protection Agency combatted acid rain, which greatly impacted the eastern portion of the continent.
Earlier this month, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the roll back of 31 regulations—many of which protect the U.S. from acid rain and other forms of atmospheric pollution.
Speaking with The Guardian, a scientist who helped identify acid rain in the 1960s expressed fears that these changes could bring about the return of this once deadly environmental threat.
Most would agree that having clean air and clean water is an overall benefit for a species that tends to breathe a lot of air and drink a lot of water. But even that simple biological truth—which garnered both bipartisan and transnational agreement back in the 1970s and 80s—is now in question as the Environmental Protection Agency rolls back 31 regulations that director Lee Zeldin gleefully admits is “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” AccordingtoThe Guardian, these changes could cause 200,000 deaths from heart, lung, and other diseases in the next 25 years, as estimated by the EPA’s own assessments of the impacted rules.
A part of this massive bout of deregulation is changes to rules restricting the pollution of mercury, air toxins, soot pollution, and a general weakening of what’s known as the “good neighbor” rule, which restricted smokestack emissions to protect downwind communities against smog and acid rain. Yes, acid rain. Similar to how once-eradicated diseases like measles are making a comeback, so too are long ago climate threats plotting a similar sinister sequel.
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“Acid rain is an example of a major environmental success story—the public spoke up and the politicians listened,” Gene Likens, whose work helped identify acidic rainwater in the 1960s, told The Guardian earlier this week. “If the Trump administration starts releasing controls on emissions we are going to destroy that success story.”
With a more permissive regulatory environment and a lack of catalytic converters on vehicles (a rule enforced by the EPA), acid rain threatened the entire continent, but particularly impacted the eastern U.S. As smokestack and tailpipe emissions across the Midwest gathered in the atmosphere, acid rain poured onto communities as storms passed over the Appalachian Mountains, the Adirondacks, and other northeastern mountain ranges. By 1980, average rainfall was 10 times more acidic than normal.
With bipartisan leadership and cooperation between the U.S. and Canada, acid levels slowly reduced, and recent samples suggest that levels of acidity in the White Mountains of New Hampshire have dropped 85 percent from acid rain’s peak in the 1970s (though, some soil in the region remains degraded, Likens admits).
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Thankfully, even Zeldin’s self-described “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” won’t transform America’s skies into an acidic nightmare overnight. New vehicles will still ship with catalytic converters—a huge benefit compared to the pre-1975 era—and many of these deregulatory actions will likely be held up in court for years. However, with other major cuts to agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—which runs monitoring systems designed to measure acid rain—the continent could lose a lot of progress that’s been made over the past 50 years and turn one of the EPA’s greatest successes into a dismal, life-threatening setback.
“We know improved air quality is good for the public,” Richard Peltier, an environmental scientist at the University of Massachusetts, told The Guardian. “There is a viewpoint now that scientists are the bad guys, that the science is corrupt—things that just aren’t true.”
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.