Reprinted from April 15-16, 1992.
The Michigan Review.
by Chetly Zarko

What happens when you combine all the evils of bureaucracy with the apparently positive goals of environmentalism? EPA bureaucrats and special interest groups have answered this question through their manipulation of scientific evidence regarding the effects  of acid rain.

Acid rain first became an explosive issue in the late 70s when some scientists and environmentalists claimed to see a link between sulfur dioxide emissions from coal burning power plants and the acidification of Northeastern lakes and forests.

Congress responded to this perceived threat in 1980 by commission a $500 interagency governmental study known as the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (NAPAP). NAPAP's primary goal was to document the extent of damage acid rain was doing to lakes, rivers, streams, crops, forests, and buildings.

The issue was so politically charged that legislation was passed even before Congress had authorized research to determine the level of damage resulting from acid rain. In 1977, according to Robert Crandall, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, amendments were attached to the 1970 Clean Air Act that "required western and southwestern utilities to install expensive stack-gas scrubbers on all new boilers even though enormous deposits of very clean coal were nearby."

The economic reality of the situation was that coal burning power plants could and were shifting to cheap low sulfur coal mined in the western US. Even with transport costs, eastern and midwestern coal plants found it cheaper to buy low sulfur coal to reduce sulfur emissions than to install expensive scrubbers. Once companies were forced to install scrubbers, they no longer had any incentive to pay the extra transportation cost of low sulfur coal since the only way to meet government standards was to ins tall scrubbers. The switch back to eastern high-sulfur coal was so profound that by 1979 estimated emissions of sulfur actually rose. Apparently the higher sulfur content more than offset the cleansing effect of scrubbers.

Why was such an inane policy adopted? According to Crandall, "the environmentalists struck a deal with eastern, high-sulfur coal miners." It was this policy that "kept several thousand eastern miners at work in potentially dangerous, underground mines" ( western mines are generally at the surface).  Special interest politics glued together a policy that produced a result both economically and environmentally counterproductive.

As the 80s wore on and evidence from the NAPAP study began to come in, the necessity for further acid rain legislation increasingly came into question.

The mineral titration theory, which is summarized by William Anderson, Professor of Economics at the University of Tennessee, was the key to environmentalists claims that acid rain was a serious threat. This theory asserted that acidic soils "have little buffering capacity against acid rain.

Because much of the soil in the Northeast and eastern Canada is acidic, many scientists simply assumed that acid rain ran off directly into streams and lakes and made them acidic. ... Scientific models based on the mineral titration theory predict that eliminating half of the acidity of rain could raise the pH level to a more neutral and life-supporting " level over 50 years.

The theory also predicted that the sulfur-dioxide in acid rain was destroying forests by stripping soil of nutrients, eroding tree bark, and leaching soil metals into the groundwater.

The NAPAP study, led by Edward Krug, a specialist in soil chemistry, quickly dismissed all of these predictions (with the exception, according to Anderson, of a less than one tenth of one percent effect on red spruces in the Southern Appalachians). The study found that soil composition was independent of the acidity of rain, that large scale dyings of trees was caused by disease and insect damage, and that acid rain might even "act as a mild fertilizer."

Krug, questioning the validity of a theory with no predictive power, went on to challenge the entire mineral titration theory. In 1983 Krug and colleague Charles Frink published a paper in Science entitled "Acid Rain on Acid Soil: A New Perspective."

Krug and Frink studied the historical land use patterns of the US, Canada, and Scandinavia and found that the content of soil was more important than the acidity of rain in determining the acidity of lakes and streams. It was the acid contribution of plants and other natural substances that resulted in the acidification of lakes and streams and not acid rain.

Krug and Frink pointed out that the existence of fish in most of the Adriondack lakes is just an historical aberration. Core samples taken from the bottom of these lakes show that they were acidic and fishless before the 1800s. According to Anderson, fish survival in the late 1800sand early 1900s was attributable to "extensive slash-and-burn logging.

Eliminating the acid vegetation caused the soil to become more alkaline (a high pH), reducing the acid flowing into lakes and streams. In turn, the lakes became more hospitable to fish. After 'forever wild' legislation stopped the logging in 1915, the watersheds reverted to acid soils and vegetation, and the lakes became acidic again." Krug also pointed out that the Iroquois word 'Adriondack' means 'bark eater.' A review of Indian history reveals that the lakes of the region produced no fish.

To cap this off, Krug also showed that lakes in Florida, Australia, and New Zealand all have pH levels below the average 5.0 of Adriondack lakes. These areas all have similar soil compositions and experienced almost no acid rain. The region with the US's highest acidity in rain was the Ohio Valley, and it has no acid lakes.

By 1987, when NAPAP released its Interim Assessment, Krug's theory of acidification had gained widespread acceptance in the scientific community. Politically however, Krug was about to take some heat. The report was attacked by some Congressmen, including Rep. James Scheuer, (D-N.Y.) as "intellectually dishonest." The EPA, feeling the heat as well, had both Krug and the original NAPAP director, Lawrence Kulp, removed from their jobs.

Krug was later attacked in January 1991 by William Rosenberg, the EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, as being "on the fringes of environmental science" and of "limited scientific credibility." According to Anderson, these at tacks were based on "selected damning quotes from [a] secret review."

The EPA's allegations were off base since Krug had not only gained acceptance from the majority of the scientific community but he had survived the traditional rigorous public peer review that is typical of the scientific process. After receiving consider able opposition for this stance later in 1991, Rosenberg's spokesman, David Cohen, retracted the attacks.

Along with these personal attacks on Krug, the EPA moved to cover the NAPAP report up. Anderson says, "NAPAP was ready to release a final findings document in 1989. Under congressional mandate, the document was supposed to guide priorities for the Clean Air Act." The EPA, under the direction of William Riley, "refused to approve it. After much revision, the EPA finally allowed the document to be released on July 27, 1990 -- long after Bush, who in his 1988 presidential campaign had promised to be the 'environmental president,' signed the new" Clean Air Act.

Perhaps Riley said it all when he declared the Clean Air Act of 1990 "the environmental flagship of this administration" and said that "we will do nothing to embarrass it." As Anderson astutely points out, "they won't do anything to 'embarrass' the act because the cost/benefit provisions written into the law could force its repeal."

The Clean Air Act of 1990 represents an improvement over the counterproductive regulations of the 1970s in that it has a more flexible system of transferable pollution reduction credits which allows the market to adjust to the most efficient pollution control techniques. Yet the EPA cover-up of the NAPAP reports and the delay of its release until after the signing of the Clean Air Act show clearly how the politics of environmentalism can work to the detriment of the nation.

Crandall estimates that the cost of the Clean Air Act will be over $4 billion annually. A problem obviously exists when Americans pay that much for no other reason than to keep 'environmental votes' coming in. Both Congress and the President ignored the facts when considering this legislation and as usual their mistake will be paid for by the people.