Bernie Sanders wrote:WRONG!
It's the anti-scientific community of Republicans that wants us to stay in the 20th Century of burning coal and oil. Thank god, we had the EPA and a Democrat/Republican Congress and a President in the 70s that helped clean our air and water.
I remember Lake Erie being DEAD! I remember Calumet River in Illinois being a foam and bubble bath of a river, due to all the phosphates in the water. I remember smog being so bad in LA that if you were in the higher elevation at the Hollywood Sign, you could not see the streets below. I remember flying over the steel mills in Gary and seeing a huge orange plume in Lake Michigan.
Funny Republicans and a few Democrats are being bought by special interests to ignore science.
NO Bernie, you are the one who is WRONG. But when you get that old, it's easy to forget the important key details.
First and foremost, Republicans are not anti-scientific - but that is a completely different issue.
Secondly, Republicans these days tend to want us to stay in the 20th century of turning corn into fuel. They have more loyalty to ethanol production than they do to coal. Democrats abandoned their union brethren (UMWA) decades ago (or perhaps back stabbed them is a better term) when they realized that rural people simply don't matter and that all power was in the cities.
Now let's talk about LAKE ERIE. I mean if you want to talk about ACID RAIN, you are talking about something I paid quite a bit of attention to. I'm afraid your timeline is a bit off here. Decades in fact. Here is a quote from the EPA itself about the problem.
In 1980, the U.S. Congress passed an Acid Deposition Act. This Act established a 10-year research program under the direction of the National Acidic Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP).
In 1991, NAPAP provided its first assessment of acid rain in the United States. It reported that 5% of New England Lakes were acidic, with sulfates being the most common problem. They noted that 2% of the lakes could no longer support Brook Trout, and 6% of the lakes were unsuitable for the survival of many species of minnow.
Meanwhile, in 1990, the US Congress passed a series of amendments to the Clean Air Act. Title IV of these amendments established a program designed to control emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Title IV called for a total reduction of about 10 million tons of SO2 emissions from power plants. It was implemented in two phases. Phase I began in 1995, and limited sulfur dioxide emissions from 110 of the largest power plants to a combined total of 8.7 million tons of sulfur dioxide.
On March 10, 2005, EPA issued the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR). This rule provides states with a solution to the problem of power plant pollution that drifts from one state to another. CAIR will permanently cap emissions of SO2 and NOx in the eastern United States. When fully implemented, CAIR will reduce SO2 emissions in 28 eastern states and the District of Columbia by over 70 percent and NOx emissions by over 60 percent from 2003 levels.
Now let's talk about phosphates, a subject I also tend to remember fondly. The first president to start to tackle that problem was Nixon in 1970 (yes right year, wrong political party) when he created the National Industrial Pollution Control Council but that only lasted one year. But it wan't the federal government that ended phosphates, it was the states ...
In the end, local needs for immediate action to curtail eutrophication coupled with scientific, judicial, and popular support resulted in the patchwork of legislation the Industry had feared. By 1985, jurisdictions which had enacted phosphate bans included New York, Michigan, Indiana, Vermont, Minnesota, Dade County, Florida, Akron, Ohio, and Chicago Illinois (footnote 257 in Fleming et al. 1986). Typical are state statutes which limit phosphate content for certain types of detergents and in certain areas. For example in Pennsylvania, the Water and Sewage Phosphate Detergent Act of 1989 and amended in 1992 (PA ST 35 P.S. §§ 722.1 - 722.3) affects "all counties partially or wholly within the Susquehanna River Watershed or in the Lake Erie Watershed." This Act prohibits the manufacture, sale or distribution of any cleaning agents containing any phosphate, except contained incidentally during manufacture. But excluded from this ban are cleaning agents used in dairy, beverage and food processing equipment, in hospitals and health care facilities, in agricultural production, by industries for metal cleaning, in biological and chemical research facilities, and those used in the household for cleaning windows, sinks, counters, stoves, tubs and other food preparation surfaces and plumbing fixtures. Dish washing detergents are allowed to be up to 8.7% phosphorus by weight.
I remember quite fondly growing up on Long Island in the 80's where the joke was to make "runs" by the ferry to Connecticut to buy the washing detergent because the non phosphate stuff was clogging the pipes to the cesspools.
