He was an architect of one of the most important environmental achievements of the past three decades.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney will deliver one of the four eulogies for President George H. W. Bush at his state funeral Wednesday.
This is fitting, and not only because the two men were close friends. Mulroney and Bush were joint architects of one of the most important environmental achievements of the past three decades: the great reduction of acid rain.
In the late 1980s, lakes and waterways across the Northeastern United States and Canada were doused in rain laden with sulphuric acid. Acidic water killed trees, threatened wildlife.
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The New York Times reported in 1988:
Addressing a joint session of Congress earlier that year, Mulroney tallied the damage to Canadian waterways:
The culprit: sulphur-rich coal. Coal-fired electricity generators in both the United States and Canada emitted vast quantities of sulphur dioxide. The gas rose into the atmosphere, reacting with oxygen, water vapor, and other pollutants—especially nitrogen oxides—to seed the clouds over North America with sulphuric and nitrous acids. When those clouds released their rain, the water carried the acid back to the rivers and lakes on the surface of the earth.
This explanation is generally accepted now, but it was fiercely resisted in the 1980s. The coal industry sought to argue that acid rain was not man-made. An elegantly produced documentary from the time cast doubt on environmental concerns. “The serious question though is, how much has nature been producing on her own over many, many years before man really began to influence the pollutant burden in the atmosphere? And that question, that division, between what man has contributed and what nature is contributing has never really been quantified satisfactorily, to say, ‘If I reduce man’s activities by 10 percent, 20 percent, is that really going to make a material change in the chemistry of precipitation?”
Todd S.
