Government Measures to Reduce Acid Rain Are Unnecessary
Excerpted from Water: Opposing Viewpoints
J. Laurence Kulp
Former research director
National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP)
In the fall of 1990 Congress amended the Clean Air Act to require a reduction in emissions that produce acid rain by 10 million tons per year by about the year 2000…. The cost of retrofitting older generating plants with scrubbers to meet this requirement is estimated to be about $100 billion over the next 20 years.
This extremely costly “crash” program was based on two false assumptions: (1) acid rain at its current level has produced an ecological “crisis”; and (2) the situation is rapidly deteriorating so that action was urgent. Virtually no attention was paid to the results of a ten year, half billion dollar NAPAP study that Congress had commissioned in 1980. Compared with the $100 billion cost, it is hard to identify $1 billion in benefits, even using the most supportive assumptions….
As such, on all acoounts, the 1990 Clean Air Act (CAA) treatment of acid rain is undesirable. It basically involves “throwing good money after bad.”