This environmental dark age too shall pass
Among the many warm tributes celebrating the life of former President George H.W. Bush, there were references to his role in the Clean Air Act of 1990. That legislation, championed by the one-term Republican, addressed the growing concern over what was popularly known as acid rain. It provides a lesson for our times.
Lift up your hearts. President Bush’s life reminds us that we have faced formidable environmental challenges before and conquered them. Increasing emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide in the 1980s were causing considerable damage and alarm. Those emissions would rise high into the atmosphere, become more acidic by mixing with other elements in the sky, and then rain down on us. The acid rain would damage “crops, trees, lakes, rivers, and animals,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The 1980s brought a vast in- crease in the public’s knowledge of the threat posed by acid rain. Aging power plants burning coal and oil were a major source of sulfur dioxide emissions. The fastest path to action in public policy was and remains the president. Bush supported putting limits on damaging emissions. A vast bipartisan coalition of members of Congress joined him and acted.
Almost 30 years later, sulfur dioxides have been greatly reduced. The cap-and-trade system of reducing emissions worked better and faster than predicted. New energy plants are being fueled by natural gas, which produces a small fraction of the pollutants created by coal and oil.
Nations with free markets muster intellectual and physical resources in innovative ways that controlled economies — like China’s — fear. President Bush did not act alone. He was spurred by an engaged public and his own awareness of environmental issues that were once the provenance of 20th century Republicans.
There’s a video on YouTube of Robert Kennedy discussing escalating pollution when he was a U.S. senator in the 1960s. Kennedy was not an alarmist by nature, but he saw a trajectory that would have pedestrians needing to don gas masks to walk around New York.
We have enjoyed dramatic improvements in air quality since RFK’s dire warnings. Millennials may not know that our cars and trucks spewed millions of tons of lead particles into the air. The advent of catalytic converters in engines in the 1970s began to change that.
Recycling was a private virtue before it a public requirement. Single-stream recycling (putting all recyclables in one receptacle on wheels) added a convenient method of participating that has become a way of life. You may not be able to remember the last time you put a bottle in a traditional trash can. We can make small changes that in the aggregate solve serious problems.
I was at a community event in Naugatuck earlier this month. I heard the mayor, Pete Hess, talk about the state of the Naugatuck River. While speaking with considerable enthusiasm about a proposal to build an inland port in Naugatuck, Hess mentioned that there are all sorts of fish in the river. That is a man-made miracle.
In the 1970s, as a kid, I remember that if a trip across Connecticut included driving along the Naugatuck on Route 8, it was a notably unpleasant part of the trip. Oy.
The stink coming from the factories along the opposite back of the river was overpowering. You don’t want to spend much time contemplating what was dumped into that river. At the time, dumping toxic substances into our waterways was a way of life. A terrible way of life, but one that for decades no one gave much thought to changing — until they started to in the 1960s.
The government’s recent report on climate change (released on the long Thanksgiving weekend for minimum impact) is a cause for action, not despair. President Donald J. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords and his instinct to disrupt any sensible consensus are obsta- cles to decades of progress of environmental progress. Trump’s obsession with mining coal appears rooted more in his strange nostalgia than in economics.
This dark age will pass. In the meantime, a free society will continue making innovations in technology and changes in our personal routines. What George Bush did to arrest acid rain we will do to global warming.