Acid Rain

Mike tells Sarah how an environmental problem became a national rallying cry, a sticky diplomatic issue and, eventually, a conspiracy theory. Digressions include “Alien,” Field & Stream and NRA public service announcements. Both hosts are recovering from colds and one spends the episode under a blanket. 

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Transcript

Sarah: So you can call someone alkaline, and that's a nice shady way of calling them basic nowadays.

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we watch people make the same mistakes over and over and over again. 

Mike: Oh my God. Your taglines are always so good. How do you do this? 

Sarah: Well, I've been thinking about this one for a while and I've been in the car, which is where I do my best thinking.

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes, I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah: My name is Sarah Marshall. And I'm a writer for The Believer, and Buzzfeed, and The New Republic. 

Mike: And today we are talking about acid rain. 

Sarah: Yeah. I'm so excited about this because I have truly literally no idea where we're going. 

Mike: What are your memories? What are your acid rain memories?

Sarah: I feel like I have a sense that acid rain was something that existed in the seventies, and then it stopped existing. Because I certainly never heard about it when I was growing up. I've never experienced it as a phenomenon. 

Mike: Really? 

Sarah: Yeah. I’ve never had the pleasure. I assume that it's rain that’s hyper acidic and it's bad for living things.

Mike: Yes. 

Sarah: And patio finish probably. 

Mike: Yes, we're done here. 

Sarah: Okay.

Mike: I must've just been right on the cusp then, because I remember hearing about it all the time when I was a kid. 

Sarah: This is one of the other determinants for the different grades in our generational trifle.

Mike: Yeah, between old millennial and new millennial. 

Sarah: Cause you're an elder millennial. You're one of the millennials who lives in a hollowed out oak tree and who the young millennials have to climb up a mountain to see.

Mike: As an old millennial, I remember when I was a kid hearing about acid rain all the time. But as a kid my understanding of it was basically just the two words in that order, that it's rain that it’s acid. So I thought it was big balls of steaming goo that were raining over in the sky. 

Sarah: Ooh, like Gak. 

Mike: Yes, exactly. So one of the things that I did not know about acid rain until I started researching this episode, is that acid rain plays a starring role in climate change denial.

Sarah: Oh!

Mike: It's one of those problems that people in the American left talked about constantly for ten years throughout the 1980s, and then once it went away, once it got fixed, everyone sort of stopped talking about it. And so now the only people talking about it are the weird climate change people, who have this whole elaborate theory about how every decade the environmentalists come up with some fake crisis that they freak the country out about and then they forget about it. 

One of the things that they use is they say, “Well, in the 1980s it was acid rain. In the 1990s it was a hole in the ozone layer. In the two thousands it was global warming, and now it's climate change. 

Sarah: All right. 

Mike: All of these things were big panics, and we didn't do anything about them, and they all went away on their own. They all turned out to be over-hyped. 

Sarah: All of that roll-on deodorant really worked. That's amazing. 

Mike: Yes. This is a good place for us to do this episode because we've done a lot of episodes in a row with some similar themes and some similar characters. 

Sarah: And that are all hella depressing.

Mike: Yes. And the nice thing about acid rain is that everything that we've learned in the last couple of episodes gets totally flipped on its head. So, in this episode, Sarah… 

Sarah: Everyone listens to the nice man? 

Mike: No. George H.W. Bush is the good guy, and capitalism solves everything. 

Sarah: Woah.

Mike: Yes. This is going to be very challenging for both of us.

Sarah: This is going to be a real red pill situation for me. But all right, Morpheus. Let's do it. 

Mike: Okay. So, as somebody who majored in basically the opposite of STEM, I was not aware previous to researching this that the rain takes on the identity of whatever sky that it's in.

Sarah: That's very poetic. 

Mike: So, are you familiar with the pH scale?

Sarah: I know that the pH scale is acidic to base, and that acidic is lemon juice and base is Maalox. 

Mike: So basically, it's just a scale that measures how acid something is. So it goes from zero to fourteen. Seven is the middle, which means it's just neither acid nor basic. 

Sarah: Solid seven.

Mike: And a really important thing to know about the pH scale is it is logarithmic. So a six is ten times more acidic than a seven, and a five is ten times more acidic than a six. So, it doesn't sound like that big of a deal to say that something goes from seven to five on the pH scale, like, whatever, it's only two numbers. Right? Seven to five. But that means it's 100 times more acidic.

Sarah: Yeah. It's quite alarming. 

Mike: So the line between lemon juice and battery acid is only one tick on the pH scale. 

Sarah: Oh.

Mike: Lemon juice is two and battery acid is one. So that's the first thing you need to know. The second thing you need to know is that rain takes on the characteristics of the particulates that are in the air. So whenever water evaporates from the ocean or evaporates from a swimming pool or a sink or whatever, it evaporates pretty pure. It evaporates at around six on the pH scale. But then what happens is as the water vapor goes up into the sky, it touches other chemical compounds. When it comes back down, it brings those chemical compounds with it. So if it touches sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide, it comes down as a little bit more acidic than when it went up. Does that make sense? 

Sarah: Yeah, because it gets up and attaches itself to all of the weird shit it finds in the air and then that all comes down together. 

Mike: Yes. 

Sarah: Everyone makes friends up there. 

Mike: So, acid rain is a naturally occurring phenomenon. When volcanoes go off, they blow a ton of sulfur into the sky and that causes the rain to take on the sulfur and then the rain gets acidic. So, there's an extinction event that happened before the dinosaurs all died out about 250 million years ago that might actually have been caused by acid rain.

Sarah:  Wow. 

Mike: So 90% of the life on earth died 250 million years ago and it might be because of these giant volcanoes in Siberia that went off and made the rain so acidic that fucking everything died. 

Sarah: Well, it makes sense that we would be so concerned. 

Mike: Ants also produce a ton of acid. 

Sarah: Ants? 

Mike: Yes. Ants also give off this sort of cloud of acid when they're threatened. 

Sarah: Oh, I’ve threatened an ant before. I know all about, yeah, the weird smell.

Mike: So all of this stuff about sometimes rain is basic and sometimes rain is acid, all of this stuff was known in the 1800. 1852, they realized that rain is slightly more acidic in some places than in others. No big whoop. It happens.

Sarah:  Okay. And so as places like Pittsburgh come into existence, people are like, “Well, it makes sense that the rain is a little different around here.”

Mike: So then we fast forward about a hundred years and in the 1950s and 1960s scientists in the U.S., Canada, and Europe start noticing all of these dead lakes. Lakes that when you look at them, they look totally normal, but there is no life in them, and they start to get really concerned about what actually explains this and so there's all these studies that go on and they take a million samples and whatever and what they realize is over time the rain has been getting more and more acidic. So, since the 1940s the rain has been getting 2% more acidic every single year. 

Sarah: Hmm.

Mike: In this way that, of course, it's invisible. Nobody really notices. It doesn't cause any health effects. It doesn't taste any different. There's no reason why you would notice this, and they figure out that the acid rain is essentially like spraying a lake with pesticides or like a forest or a field. You're essentially changing the entire balance of an entire ecosystem without any thought to what you're doing. 

Sarah: And it's gotten to the point where it's bad enough to start killing off the whole ecosystem. 

Mike: Yeah, and what’s really interesting is you think of acid, and you think of the blood of the alien in Alien, like it burns through your skin.

Sarah: That's exactly the first thing I think of. 

Mike: And it's much more subtle and much more interesting than that in that a lot of fish can survive in bodies of water that are under five on the pH scale, but they can't reproduce. They can lay eggs, but then the eggs just never hatch.

Sarah:  So the fish are going through this Children of Men type experience. 

Mike: Yes. And this is one of the reasons why it takes so long to figure out. You look at the fish and you're like, “Well, this is a normal fish. There's no reason why it shouldn't be able to reproduce.” And it's not even that every fish their eggs don't hatch. It's just like the hatcheries are dwindling. It's less and less every year. So it's one of those things that because it's so slow and because it's so invisible you’re like, “Is this a thing or is this just a freak event? What's actually going on?” They also later on figured out that all kinds of fish use chemical signals to warn other fish of predators. Like, if you run from a predator, like a shark is about to attack you or whatever, you give off this cloud of chemicals that warns other fish, “Hey, there's a shark in the area.” Acid waters mess with those signals. So again, in this very invisible way, more fish are getting eaten by predators.

Sarah: So it is like the fish are living in this long period of terror and confusion and gradually dying off. 

Mike: Yes.

Sarah:  Partly because of physical mutation and also partly just because life becomes so much more stressful. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, the impacts of acid rain are massive. Like, it affects the soil, like, the worms in the soil. There's then in 2010, actually, they figured out that that was messing with the birds. So the birds are eating acid worms and the birds are laying eggs with, I think the shelves are too thin or too thick or something and then all these bird species started disappearing in the sixties and seventies and again, we didn't really know why until thirty years later. It messes with the coatings on leaves of trees. Soil is really important for all of these forest ecosystems, and once the soil gets more acid then things grow differently or don't grow or grow more rapidly. It just sort of throws this half steroid, half weakening agent into all of these organic life forms that just start to change and mutate in ways that profoundly threw them off.

Sarah: Throws everything out of balance.

Mike: Yeah. The thing that I heard about the buildings when I was a kid was a little bit silly, but they do actually erode buildings slightly more than normal rain. So over time, this is a real thing. It would have been a problem and especially on bridges. 

Sarah: But it's interesting that the memory you have is of everyone being like, “The buildings! The bridges!” when actually the toll on animal life was already very visible and very clear.

Mike: It was the fish and the birds. Yes.

Sarah:  Yeah. 

Mike: Another thing that it does is it erodes rocks around lakes. So again, in this invisible, very subtle way, it causes more erosion, which causes more particles of rocks to wash into the rivers, which changes the chemical composition of rivers even more. So it's this spiraling thing where it just creates weirder and weirder and weirder effects the worse it gets.

Sarah: Right and it's like creating domino effects in all these different directions. 

Mike: Yes. But it's also…  because these changes are so subtle and so small, it's sort of a fight between environmentalists. It's like, “Yes, it's the acid rain.” “No, it's the hole in the ozone layer,” or “No, it's…” Like, there were people that were talking about global warming at this time too. So there's this huge debate among environmentalists and among scientists of what is actually causing these changes and where every issue needs to be on the priority list. It's kind of wrapped up in this much bigger – I don't want to say ecosystem cause I'm going to use that word too much – but this list of other environmental issues that are bubbling under the surface at that point. 

Sarah: And all these things that people are suddenly noticing for the first time. 

Mike: Yes. And one of the things that I love about this is that acid rain was the number one fight in U.S./Canadian relations for like 12 years. 

Sarah: Really? 

Mike: Yes. Because one of the biggest things about acid rain is that acid rain does not fall where pollution is produced. So the chemicals that create acid rain are mostly produced by metal smelting. I don't know why, but that produces a ton of sulfur. Just driving cars produces a bunch of nitrogen oxide, which causes acid rain, and then just coal-fired power plants pump a bunch of sulfur into the world. So based on normal trade winds, all of these particles get taken to other places. 

So for all of the seventies and eighties, we were starting to realize that most of the acid rain causing pollution was being produced in Ohio and the great lakes states from all the power plants there and all the metal smelting that they were doing for the auto industry and then all of the damage of acid rain was happening mostly in Canada. 

Sarah: Oh, poor Canada.

Mike: It's this perfect metaphor of just them having to take our shit.

Sarah: Them just being our long suffering neighbors. 

Mike: Yes. And the same thing is happening in Europe where Sweden and Norway are getting 60% of the acid rain that is being produced by Europe. 

Sarah: Wow.

Mike: Right? And, very importantly, this is during the Cold War. So the USSR, they're the one that are producing all of the pollution. So all of these disgusting factories in Hungary and Poland.

Sarah:  So poor, little Norway is supposed to cross country ski over there and be like, “Um, hello?”

Mike: Yes! So what's interesting is I looked up the archive of the New York Times, everything they wrote about acid rain in the seventies and eighties, and nearly every story was a diplomacy story. 

Sarah: Really? 

Mike: It was like, “Summit Between Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Ends in Scuffle Over Acid Rain” or “Canadian Researchers Send Letter to U.S. Officials Urging Action on Acid Rain.” Canada starts calling it environmental aggression. That's the term for what America is doing, environmental aggression. 

Sarah: That’s so Canadian.

Mike: And so the Canadians start funding all this guerrilla warfare. They start funding documentaries that get released in the U.S. about acid rain and about the government's inaction. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: The Canadian province of Ontario joins a lawsuit by American states that are suing the federal government for not doing anything on acid rain. So Canada gets really aggressive about this stuff. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: It really was seen as a huge national security issue and diplomacy issue, both here and in Europe. It was a thing that countries fought about, but nobody really wanted to do anything about it.

Sarah: Right, because it's like, you don't want to massively piss off your neighbors, but you also don't want to change what you're doing in any way.

Mike: Yeah. And so weirdly one of the first things that changed to start fixing acid rain was basically the U.S. helped orchestrate a European agreement on acid rain because the U.S. saw all this fighting between Sweden and Norway and Germany and the Soviet Union and they were like, “Well, if we can get the Soviet Union to come to the table on acid rain, something that is totally morally neutral, it doesn't require them to do anything about their principles, then we can bring them to the table on human rights and nuclear non-proliferation and all this other stuff.”

Sarah: That's very smart. 

Mike: So the U.S. started pulling strings behind the scenes in Europe to get the Soviet Union to come to the table and be like, “Oh, let's listen to these Swedes. The Swedes are saying, ‘Maybe your factories shouldn't pollute so much.’ Maybe let's just have a little agreement with them. It's not that big of a deal.” And they wanted to get these very easy steps. So the first couple steps of this, there was a 1979 treaty in Europe about acid rain and it was just like, “Let's share our data. It's easy. We don't even care that you're polluting. Let's just get the same protocols on data.” It was these baby steps to get the Soviet Union back into the international community and to start building leverage over them. 

Sarah: So acid rain is like your excuse for texting someone. You're like, “Hey, did I leave my gloves there?” You're just neutrally establishing contact. 

Mike: Yeah.

Sarah: That's adorable.

Mike: And also the U.S. for this purpose is also pressuring Western European countries because Germany, or West Germany at that time, and Britain didn't want to do anything on pollution and so the U.S., because it wants this big treaty between the European countries and the USSR, starts pushing West Germany and Britain, like, “Hey, you know, maybe you guys should take this issue seriously too. Like, you know, it's a really important issue.” Meanwhile, they're doing nothing domestically. 

Sarah: We invited everyone to the acid rain party. It's not nothing. 

Mike: Yes!

Sarah: We can just keep setting the Cuyahoga on fire if we want.

Mike: Yes. And the thing is it did actually work. They did create a treaty in 1979 that had them start sharing data and then it became a vehicle for much stricter requirements. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: And so throughout the 1970s, as this becomes a diplomatic issue and as this becomes an environmental issue, the public starts to get much more mobilized. So I found this list of media stories that were published in the 1970s and they all had… here's some of the headlines: “Scourge From the Skies,” “Now Even the Rain is Dangerous,” “Acid from the Skies,” and “Rain of Terror,” which is pretty good. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Mike: That was in Field and Stream. That was back when Field and Stream had an investigative unit. There start to be storms. There are acid storms. So some storms are more acidic than others, which is just super bad-ass. 

Sarah: That's worrying. Yes. Acidic storm. 

Mike: Which sounds like an X-man. 

Sarah: Like a stripper who kills you.

Mike: So there’s a storm in Scotland in 1974 where the rain is as acidic as vinegar and that, of course, gets tons of press coverage. So as this issue gets more media coverage, a backlash starts to form. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar. So there's two arguments that the acid rain skeptics use to say we shouldn't do anything about this problem. Number one, the science is still being discovered. We don't know if acid rain is a problem. Science is unclear. It's very difficult to know. Why don't we wait until the science comes in and then we'll be able to act?

Sarah: So this is an early instance of, like, a symptom of a polluted climate being brushed off as like, “Maybe it's not a real thing” by people who have a vested interest in keeping the capitalist concerns that are creating that pollution going at the same rate that they've always gone. 

Mike: Oh yeah. I found an article on European diplomacy on this where they mentioned that in Britain the central electricity generation board, basically the people that provide power, would show up at these meetings about acid rain and talk about how acid rain could be a fertilizer because sulfur is an ingredient in a lot of fertilizers and so why wouldn't you want a bunch of extra sulfur falling on your plants? 

Sarah: Why are we all being such whiners about this free gift of nature's own sulfur?

Mike: And the parallels to climate change are really interesting in that, I mean, you hear almost word for word the same thing, right? That it's never clear what the standard of science actually is. I read this book a couple of years ago about the fight over regulating cigarettes and they noted that we still do not know why cigarettes cause cancer. 

Sarah: Really?

Mike: You can zoom in to whatever molecular atomic level and say, “Ah, it's still a mystery at that level. We still don't really know inside the nucleus of the atom what's really causing cigarettes to cause cancer,” right? So you can always find lingering misunderstandings or lack of understanding and that's exactly what they did here. It's like, places that are getting more acidic water have fewer fish and we have trends from thirty years, and we have ice cores from a hundred years ago that show no acid… like, the amount of information coming in was abundant and the amount of information refuting that was– there never was any. It's not like half the lakes were more acidic and they were fine, and half the lakes were more acidic, and they were dead. All the lakes that were acidic were dead. 

Sarah: Right. It was just like, someday we might yet find a super acidic, super happy lake where all the fish are just groovy. 

Mike: Yeah. And it's never clear what you're actually waiting for, right? It's like, “Oh, let's give it three or four more studies. Let's see what we're really talking about here.”

Sarah: We're waiting for the magic thing that contradicts all these previous studies.

Mike: Yeah.

Sarah:  And says we can keep smelting to our heart's content.

Mike: The second familiar argument that they used against it was, it's going to ruin the economy to fix it. It's going to be too expensive to fix. It's not worth it. 

Sarah: In 1979, how much ruined-er could the economy get, to be honest?

Mike: There was a 1977 editorial in Nature, where they called acid rain “a million-dollar problem with a billion dollar solution” and that was the framing that they tried to make stick, that this was going to be a drag on the economy. It was going to be a bunch of do-gooderism making power plants shut down for months at a time. We're not going to have cars anymore because they can't pollute. 

Sarah: Why should we save the fish if the American man is suffering and it's like, no, buddy, you got to take care of the fish to take care of the American man. 

Mike: Yeah.

Sarah:  It's the long game. 

Mike: And one of the things that's really interesting is the distinction between Reagan and H.W. Bush. Reagan didn't do anything. Reagan totally swallowed these two arguments that we don't know the science and it's going to be too expensive to fix. So during the eighties, Congress passed 70 acid rain bills and Reagan vetoed them all. He's like, “Oh, we're still waiting. We don't know. We're going to have to see what the science says,” et cetera and just did literally nothing.

Sarah: The Terminator.

Mike: And the tactics that he used were very Iran-Contra in that there was always something happening that he could point to. He would appoint a panel, or he would have a commission, or he would have an agency doing a survey or he would have a special envoy. There was always something. He was like, you know, we're moving forward.

Sarah:  Pilot program, task force.

Mike: Yes. Like, he was never openly doing nothing, but all of these task forces basically found the same thing and he never did anything about it. So there was this eight year period where, looking back on it, the science was in, but there was all of this manufactured uncertainty. And then what happens, and this is bananas, George H.W. Bush – We have totally forgotten this. I did not know this. During the 1988 primaries, he ran as the environmental president. This was something he wanted to brand himself as, an environmentalist. It's wild.

Sarah: I wonder why Lee Atwater didn't focus more on that.

Mike: No, I actually found a lot of old articles about this, that back during the Cold War, this was actually something that Americans took a lot of pride in, that the Soviet Union pollutes their rivers. They destroy their streams. They throw trash in their grand canyon and we Americans, we preserve our resources. 

Sarah: Well, did you ever see that NRA ad from the late sixties that Sharon Tate was in?

Mike: Ooh, no.

Sarah:  It's like Sharon Tate talking about camping and let's preserve our nature and our wild places in America, because this is something that rifle owners also like incidentally.

Mike: Yeah. It's funny having grown up in this period where environmentalism is just ruthlessly partisan. To think about a period when it was just something that everyone kind of agreed on, but we disagreed on tactics. It was like, well, obviously we need to protect the environment, but I think we should go a little slower, a little faster. I think we should let the free market decide. I think we should regulate. It’s like these fights are about details and not about “Do birds matter?” 

One of the things that I think is nuts is basically the way that acid rain got solved is the 1990 Clean Air Act. So after promising that he was going to be the environmental president, George H.W. Bush follows through and he passes this extremely sweeping, extremely good law that regulates all kinds of air pollutants. It regulates businesses and it passed the Senate 89 votes. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: Everyone loved this bill. There's a quote in one of these old New York Times articles by Mitch McConnell saying, “If I had to choose between cleaner air and the status quo, I choose cleaner air.”

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: It's like one of these platitudes that you would hear from any left wing politician now.

Sarah: Mitch McConnell, who ate his own heart with a dessert spoon years ago, said that.

Mike: One of the things that's so interesting is in the seventies, Jimmy Carter could get elected the governor of Georgia as a Democrat on environmentalism. That was something that the country would let you do. Newt Gingrich's first runs in the early seventies, he ran as an environmentalist.

Sarah: Really? 

Mike: One of the things that I think is really interesting is this law, the Clean Air Act, passed at basically the last possible moment that it could. 

Sarah: Yeah. So talk about what's happened since then. 

Mike: Well, so the Cold War ended.

Sarah: Hmm. 

Mike: There's a lot of academic research on this, of how Americans became so split on environmental concerns. Famously, there's polls from 1989 that show Americans only have a five point difference between Republicans and Democrat, should we do more to protect the environment, where basically the whole country is like, “Yeah, we should.” It doesn't really matter what party you're in, and now there's a 28 point difference. 

Sarah: Yeah, that sounds about right.

Mike: The Democrats say yes and Republicans say, “No, we're doing too much already.” And so, what academics say is that the Red Scare got replaced with the Green Scare, that once Clinton and Gore got elected, they made environmentalism a huge deal and especially this whole thing with the spotted owl, which we should probably do our own podcast about.

Sarah: What's the spotted owl?

Mike: It's basically an endangered species of owl that a judge ruled was endangered under the Endangered Species Act. 

Sarah: Oh, so this was one of those big news stories about, like, this one little spider stole a million jobs from Texans, like, you and me. 

Mike: Exactly. That was a huge reason why the Democrats lost blue collar Americans, because lumberjacks – I come from a very lumberjack-y state, so do you – lots and lots and lots of people lost their jobs because all of a sudden, all this forest was protected. 

Sarah: No, the lumber industry has been destroyed in the Northwest. There are parts of the region that have never recovered. And clearly in the nineties, there were so many reasons why it was no longer possible to basically live as a working class American, right? Like, the working class does not exist in America anymore. You cannot have a solid paycheck to paycheck, property owning, medical expense paying existence anymore. You are either mauled by debt or making kind of too much money. So I'm sure that there was a huge amount of Republican spin that went into that and into fingering environmentalism as the cause of all these lost jobs, when I'm sure that, you know, there were other reasons. 

Mike: And also, a lot of people that worked in the H.W. Bush administration at the time talk now about how Bush thought he was going to get some of these environmental voters back. He thought, “Look, I'm going to pass this sweeping legislation. It's dope. I listened to environmentalists,” and that's true. Like, he tried to produce a watered down version of the law and environmentalists were like, “No,” and he's like, “You know what? Fine. We're going to do the version that you want.” And he passed them with much stricter controls. He thought that would get him some credit, but then he goes into the 1992 election with Clinton and Gore and what happens? The environmental groups just destroy him. They're like, “Well, you tried to pass a watered down version of this legislation. You didn't protect the wetlands.” You know, they don't necessarily look at what he's done. They look at what he didn't do, which, to be fair, there's a lot that he didn't do, and he was really bad about the wetlands. This is a lingering issue. So Republicans look at this and are like, “Well, why should we do anything?” Democrats have that issue. It's actually much easier to just demagogue about it rather than do something and try to get credit for something that we're never going to get any of those voters back. 

Sarah: So they’re just like, “Why should we do anything not for personal gain?” Like, why?

Mike: It's not like we live on this planet and have any reason to keep it nice.

Sarah: Right! I feel like my memorial to George H.W. Bush is like, you know, you tried sometimes. That's something.

Mike: We talked so much on the show about how people contain multitudes and this is someone who is extremely trash in many ways and also did some good things, just like Lorena Bobbitt and just like Amy Fisher. People are complex and really difficult to reckon with sometimes. 

Sarah: I like that you know, like, the best way to get me to empathize with a former president is to be like, “You know those universally hated girls from the nineties that you love? He's like that.” But it is interesting this idea that Bush did something that didn't directly benefit him as much as it could have and the lesson that people learned from that was like, well, never again, not worth it. 

Mike: They're like, fuck this. And so now we're getting to the part where we learned that capitalism was the good guy. So this is the part that's really going to piss you off.

Sarah: Okay. All right, let's do it. So how did we solve it? How did capitalism fix acid rain? 

Mike: So do you know what cap and trade is? 

Sarah: Cap and trade? No, I have no idea.

Mike: The Clean Air Act, this legislation that George H.W. Bush passed, had the country's first cap and trade legislation and what it means is you basically limit how much pollution of a particular substance there's going to be and then you let people trade with each other about how much they get to pollute. So, I'm going to make up this number, but let's say we cap pollutions of sulfur. We say 10 million tons a year. All companies in America can only produce 10 million tons of sulfur pollution per year. So you, who own a giant coal plant in Ohio, I'm going to say to you, you get a million. You, Sarah, can pollute a million pounds of sulfur pollution every single year.

Sarah: Thank you.

Mike: If you go over that, you have to pay a fine, but importantly, if you go under that, you can sell the extra to somebody else. 

Sarah: Oh, interesting. 

Mike: So if you can get your emissions down to 900,000, you can sell a permit to pollute a hundred thousand tons of sulfur to a different company.

Sarah: That sounds fun. 

Mike: So what it does is it gives you the incentive. You make more money if you pollute less. 

Sarah: Yes. 

Mike: So this is what it did with nitrogen oxide and with sulfur pollution, that they set a cap and then they said to companies, “If you can reduce your emissions to zero and you want to sell all of your permits to somebody else, have a blast. We don't care, but this is what the cap is going to be,” and then every single year the cap goes down.

Sarah: That seems like a good incentive because it's like, you get to, as you're treat for not over polluting, go sell something and you get to do business. 

Mike: Yes. I feel conflicted about like, “Free market solutions will save us.”

Sarah:  You know what? One thing I've observed is that businessy people love to do business. They just love it. 

Mike: Yes. And it worked really well. The year that it took effect 3 million tons of pollution got taken out of the atmosphere and essentially what these companies started doing – there already was technology to reduce sulfur emissions. So there's these things called scrubbers that you basically paint the inside of your smokestacks with this goop and somehow as the smoke travels up the smokestack, the goop pulls the sulfur out of the smoke. So it reduces sulfur pollution by 92%. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: Power plants across the country started putting this goop in their smokestacks and by 20 years later, sulfur emissions had reduced by 50% and nitrogen oxide emissions had reduced by 35%. 

Sarah: That also seems like something Homer Simpson would have discovered. Homer stumbles upon a mysterious goop and then they put it inside the smokestacks of the plant and then everything's better forever.

Mike: And one thing that's interesting is this idea of cap and trade, this is one of the reasons why George H.W. Bush wasn't popular among environmentalists. This is an idea that environmentalists love, and a lot of people have proposed this now for global warming, but at the time the environmentalist called it “a license to pollute,” which it literally is.

Sarah: Oh. A license to pollute within reason. I'm proud of Poppy. Sometimes you just have to communicate with the capitalists, especially if you're the president. 

Mike: Another thing that's really interesting about this and is a great parallel for global warming, this technology was available all the time. What a lot of the research on acid rain has pointed out since then is the technological innovation happened after the regulation. Everyone was dragging their feet: “Oh, it's too expensive to install the scrubbers. We can't do it. We couldn't possibly,”  and then he says, “No, you have to reduce your emissions X percent every year” and they're like, “Okay, they'll be in tomorrow.”

Sarah: Right. They're like, “Oh, I just found this scrubber plan in my desk drawer and it's actually going to be super affordable.”

Mike: And so it's a little bit of a refutation to this idea that, you know, technology is going to save us from climate change or technology is going to solve this new problem so we shouldn't regulate. It's basically an argument that once you regulate, the technology comes because it has to.

Sarah: The technology magically appears because people don't want to lose money.

Mike: Yes. The thing I love is in 2010, the EPA did a cost benefit analysis of the 1990 Clean Air Act and found that for every dollar it cost, it saved four.

Sarah:  Wow.

Mike: So this was net positive for the country. I'm going to read from this: “In the year 2010, the amendments of 1990 will prevent 23,000 Americans from dying prematurely, avert 1.7 million incidents of asthma attacks, 67,000 incidents of chronic and acute bronchitis, 91,000 occurrences of shortness of breath, 4.1 million lost workdays, 31 million days in which Americans would have had to restrict activity due to air pollution.” And that's only in one year. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: But then what's really interesting about the aftermath of acid rain, so the legacy of the Clean Air Act and everything else that we've learned about acid rain, is that – I hate to actually say these words out of my mouth – in some ways the acid rain deniers were actually right.

Sarah: Okay. 

Mike: So after a while we haven't had as many sulfur particulates in the air, whatever. People start looking into it and they're like, “These lakes aren't coming back. These dead lakes are still dead.” And so there's this big study that comes out in the 1990s where they discover that a lot of those lakes had actually already been dead and so here, let me, I'm just going to read this. 

Sarah: You've developed this taste for taking my emotions on a David Fincher ride. 

Mike: Well, this is the thing. I still don't know how I feel about all this. So, “Many lakes in Northeastern America dead in the 1980s had plenty of fish in 1900. It was surmised by environmentalists that 20th century sulfur dioxide emissions had choked these lakes to death with acid rain, but the study showed that many of these lakes were acidic and fishless even before European settlement. Fish survived better in these lakes around 1900 because of extensive slash and burn logging in the area.”

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Mike: Basically the period in which these lakes weren't dead was only 80 years long and then they went back to their normal state, which was acidic. 

Sarah: So the fish I mourned we're never even there. 

Mike: Yeah. This report comes out in the nineties that concludes acid rain was a nuisance, not a catastrophe and so this is really central to the climate change denier-acid rain argument, that we did all of this work and we put all this effort into it… 

Sarah: And all we got was a better environment across the board.

Mike: Well, this is the thing. This is why I don't accept this argument for many reasons, but I think that they're narrowly right about those particular bodies of water.

Sarah: They're technically right, but they're not meaningfully right.

Mike: Yes, because first of all, it's not as if we made some big sacrifice as a country and then we banned pollution.

Sarah: Oh no, we did. I've suffered. 

Mike: We prevented 1.7 million asthma attacks every year. 

Sarah: Think of all the asthma we could have had, Michael. All the asthma our children missed out on. All the kids who had to play volleyball when they could have been having an asthma attack. 

Mike: And also one of the things that is really central to this thing of acid rain was a myth all the time is acid rain itself doesn't have any health effects. So we took all this big action, and did we really save any lives from preventing acid rain? No, because acid rain doesn't harm people. But then, of course, acid rain was a symptom of the bigger problem, which was a bunch of sulfur in the air.

Sarah: It's almost like all these things are connected. I feel like if the only way to get the American people to take action about something is to whip them into a frenzy about something highly specific and perhaps somewhat overhyped then that's okay because we need graspable ideas. You know? We need symbols. We do. 

Mike: Yeah. I think maybe it wasn't perfect or maybe the science was out on certain aspects of this, but then when you look at the whole legacy it’s like, well what did we give up by solving this fake problem? Like, we made everyone's lives better.

Sarah: There was inconclusive evidence that brought us under the Gulf War too and I think that of the pursuits that George H.W. Bush began without necessarily having all the information he needed, like, the results of this one are a lot better. Like, we prevented all these asthma attacks. Like, fewer people die. Why is it so bad that we got bilked a little bit into trying.

Mike: But now we get to the actual aftermath of acid rain. It's not necessarily that acid rain went away or that acid rain got solved. It's just acid rain… we understood it as one component of a much larger problem, which is climate change. Right? The reason we don't talk about acid rain anymore isn't because the threat was hyped. It's just we now realize it is one of 10,000 symptoms of exactly the same thing, just tons of fossil fuels being pumped into the sky all the time.

Sarah: Of the dying animal in who's fur we live.

Mike: Yes. And so one of the things that super fucked up about this is, so remember the scrubbers that they painted on all of the smokestacks?

Sarah:  Oh, I loved the scrubbers. I knew that something bad was going to happen with them because you said they were good.

Mike: It sounded too easy. So it turns out that once you paint the goo on the inside of the smokestacks, after a while the goo gets so much sulfur that it doesn't work anymore, so you have to scrape it off the inside and you have to repaint it. And so what power plants have been doing ever since 1990 is every couple of years they scrape off all this scrub juice from the inside of their smokestacks and then they just dump it in the rivers nearby.

Sarah: They're like, “You didn't tell us we couldn't do that!”

Mike: Exactly! Power plants are now the biggest producer of toxic waste in the country. There's a New York Times article on this in 2008 and they found that one of the companies that's just been dumping tons of sulfur, that they paid $26,000 in fines over thirty-three violations. I mean these are like speeding ticket amounts. So, as toxic chemicals have reduced in the atmosphere, they have increased in the water. 

Sarah: Unfortunately you have to keep trying beyond the eighties.

Mike: Yes! Also another super fucked up thing is as the rain got less acidic, farmers started adding extra sulfur to their fertilizers and so fertilizers are one of the greatest factors leading to pollution in the United States right now. 

Sarah: Oh, really?

Mike: Yes, because one of the things about acid rain is that acid rain has now been rebranded as acid deposition because rain falling on the water it turns out is much less bad for lakes than all of the acid coming from the soil. So it's not necessarily that lakes are becoming more acidic from the rain they're getting. They're actually becoming much more acidic from the soil that's sitting underneath them and that they're leeching up and so as the rain got less acidic, the soil got more acidic. These lakes are going to stay acidic because people are still dumping sulfur fertilizers on their crops nearby.

Sarah: So the great debunk for acid rain is like, yes, we might've made a dent in this one particular problem or feel like we've solved this one problem, but it's connected. 

Mike: Yeah.

Sarah: It's one rat in a hundred rat king. 

Mike: Yes, exactly. I don't know how to incorporate this into a broader theory, or I don't know what mistakes were made or what, it just feels like there's this giant problem and we picked one really tiny aspect of it to get really concerned about for ten years when it sort of feels like that whole time we should have just been freaking out about pollution, like industrial pollution generally and let's reduce industrial pollution and it causes acid rain and ozone layer and 50 other things.

Sarah: Here's an actual question. Do you think that the American public is capable of freaking out about pollution generally? Like, this whole connected, fairly complex group of discrete problems and symptoms.

Mike: I mean, clearly we're not capable of focusing on something as big as pollution, right? What's interesting is acid rain is not appreciably different than the problem we have now.

It's all the same problem. The problem is pollution. The effect of that that we've shown concerned about has changed over the years, but it is fundamentally the same thing. I don't really know what the lessons are. I don't know what they are because part of it is, you know, you want to say that it was solved and in a way it's actually, using what they knew at the time, they did something really bold and bi-partisan and great, but it also turns out that the information they had was profoundly incomplete in some way.

Sarah: Maybe the lesson is that we can accomplish things by trying.

Mike: And also, one of the things that I always think has kind of gotten lost is tweaking stuff, right? You pass this whole big thing to fight acid rain and then it turns out, “Well, shit. A couple of our assumptions were wrong. Let's tweak the law and say, ‘Hey, power plants shouldn't be dumping that in the water anymore or maybe there's now some technology that's better than the scrubbing goo.’ Let's amend the law every four years to respond to the new data that we're getting and respond to the new technology that's out there,” but it's like, no. We passed this one big thing in 1990, which is quite a while ago now. You know, you slap your hands and you're like, “Well, we did our best. Let's move on to other things.” 

Sarah: As if we needed it, it's more proof that we're not a country run by empiricists, right? Because there are ideas that we like and we will try them over and over again to the point of insanity and I know that I bring everything back to prisons, but obviously mass incarceration serves no one, but it's still an idea that we like. You know, saving the innocent public by destroying the criminal in some way is just this sort of narrative idea that we like a whole lot and if we try something out that we don't enjoy the kind of role that puts us in as Americans or as legislators or whoever narratively then we'll try it once and it won't be perfect and then we'll have our excuse and be like, “Well, we tried, and we're done.”

Mike: Guess we better go back to doing it the way we've always done it. 

Sarah: Like I keep coming back to this idea of how powerful it can be if we change the narrative that we're in because if you want to have a hero narrative, go fight against pollution. Like, there is no better villain, you know, you'll never vanquish it. You'll never be bored. You'll never weep for there are no worlds left to conquer. 

Mike: I mean, I really liked this quote that I read from this New York Times article from somewhere in the 2010s about just kind of revisiting the acid rain fights and talking about what has and hasn't gotten fixed and he’s one of the scientists that's been working on this for years and he says, “It's not a problem that’s gone away. It's just a problem that's gotten better.” Part of me wants to say, I mean for this podcast, that's as close to a happy ending as we're ever going to get.

Sarah: So we're like fifth season Buffy levels of darkness at this point. It's like the happy endings are the ones where, you know, in the next episode something really awful is going to happen. Not now, not for a minute. 

Mike: We're going to return to the misery next week, but I think for now, I don't know, it still feels like an achievement to me or an achievement for what it was at the time.

Sarah: We're very conditioned against accepting as achievement anything that doesn't conclusively solve something, but I don't think that anyone ever conclusively solves anything. I think that's another way that we trick ourselves into not trying. Michael Dukakis knows he's never going to pick up all the garbage in Boston. That doesn't mean that he doesn't do it. 

Mike: I knew you'd bring him into this.