Remember Acid Rain?

Back when I was a teenager, “acid rain” was a worrying phenomenon. The term referred to the problem of particulate matter released from factories (e.g. Sulphur etc) mixing with water-vapour in the air. As a result, the rain that fell was a bit more acidic. Acid rain then made the soil more acidic and impacted the organisms that lived in soil as well as the growth of plants. And from them the acidic content would flow up the food chain with damaging consequences at every step. Even worse, the (slightly) more acidic rivers would be a bit more corrosive and wear down rocks faster. In turn, those rocks would release more particulate matter into the water and air, accelerating the whole acid rain cycle further.

 

Sounds scary, right? So why don’t we hear about acid rain anymore?

 

This podcast explains. Remember this was a problem in the 1980’s. The biggest polluter back then was the US (China and India were inconsequential back then on most matters, including pollution). US President of the time, George HW Bush, came up with the “cap and trade” system. Here’s how that works: a “cap” (limit) is put on the amount of pollution each sector of the industry generates. That limit is then split into sub-limits for individual companies within the sector. If a company exceeded its allocated sub-limit, it had to pay a fine. But if it polluted less, it could sell (“trade”) the unused quota to another company who needed it because they were polluting more than their allotted quota.

 

Bush was trying to solve the problem within the framework of capitalism, i.e., not by regulations and edicts but by incentivizing the reduction in pollution (pollute less and you could sell your unused quota for money). Environmental critics were appalled: they called this idea a “license to pollute”.

 

Surprisingly, the idea worked: the carrot was attractive enough for companies to came up with new tech and solutions to reduce their pollution so much so that the entire industry’s pollution went down. And thus acid rain became history.

 

Nice ending, right? Yes. But the podcast points out an unintended side to what had happened. The focus had been on acid rain only, not pollution in general. We had focused on and solved only a small part of a much bigger problem. And the pattern continued: the world focused on CFC’s and their impact on the ozone layer. On leaded petrol and the damage it caused. And today, there’s a push to reduce coal consumption in China and India. Electric cars are an attempt to reduce our usage of petrol and diesel.

 

We seem to continue to aim at individual items that cause pollution. Then again, maybe that’s only because it’s easier and practical to address specific issues than very broad, generic problems.