Poisonous Skies

Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution

Rachel Emma Rothschild

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226634715
• eBook ISBN: 9780226634852
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

The climate change reckoning looms. As scientists try to discern what the Earth's changing weather patterns mean for our future, Rachel Rothschild seeks to understand the current scientific and political debates surrounding the environment through the history of another global environmental threat: acid rain.
 
The identification of acid rain in the 1960s changed scientific and popular understanding of fossil fuel pollution's potential to cause regional—and even global—environmental harms. It showed scientists that the problem of fossil fuel pollution was one that crossed borders—it could travel across vast stretches of the earth's atmosphere to impact ecosystems around the world. This unprecedented transnational reach prompted governments, for the first time, to confront the need to cooperate on pollution policies, transforming environmental science and diplomacy. Studies of acid rain and other pollutants brought about a reimagining of how to investigate the natural world as a complete entity, and the responses of policy makers, scientists, and the public set the stage for how societies have approached other prominent environmental dangers on a global scale, most notably climate change.
 
Grounded in archival research spanning eight countries and five languages, as well as interviews with leading scientists from both government and industry, Poisonous Skies is the first book to examine the history of acid rain in an international context. By delving deep into our environmental past, Rothschild hopes to inform its future, showing us how much is at stake for the natural world as well as what we risk—and have already risked—by not acting.

1

Creating a Global Pollution Problem

Looking back, I would say we entered the acid age in 1952 although we didn’t know it at the time. That is when a “killer smog”—a manmade soup of noxious chemicals—settled over London, England. Four thousand deaths were attributed to the smog. Due to that incident and a number of less dramatic ones around the world, a great deal was done to clean up air pollution. In many cases, the answer was simple. Build a tall smokestack so that industrial emissions could be widely dispersed in the atmosphere. It was a relatively cheap and effective solution. The trouble is that what goes up, must also come down.1

John Roberts, minister of the environment, Canada, 1981

Acid rain heralded a shift from local environmental problems to concern about the impact of man’s activities on a regional or global scale.2

Gro Harlem Brundtland, minister of the environment, Norway, 1974

Air pollution has beset societies for centuries, but it increased noticeably after the Industrial Revolution brought about pervasive use of fossil fuels throughout Europe and North America. Black smoke from steam-engine coal fires darkened the skies and coated buildings with soot. Even the weather in certain areas began to change. Thick smog carrying pollution from factories and power plants blanketed cities for days, at times causing respiratory problems so severe that dozens to thousands of the very young or very old were killed.3

The smoke and fogs of industrialization were visible to any citizen walking the streets of London or traveling the coal rich region of the Ruhr valley in Western Germany.4 Public petitions to reduce soot, dirt, and dust in the air surfaced repeatedly from the late nineteenth century through the years after the Second World War, when a series of severe air pollution incidents spurred governments in Europe and North America to act. Like the destruction of forests and wild areas or the disposal of sewage into waterways, smoke from power plants required no special equipment or knowledge to identify. During the Second World War pollution reached such high levels in some cities that automobile headlights needed to be kept on during the daytime.5 Many governments began implementing air quality standards to mitigate the harmful health effects of air pollution, and industries responded by installing new technologies to reduce smoke from burning fuels or increasing the height of smokestacks to eject pollution higher into the air.6

Although these changes reduced the amount of soot in emissions and decreased the visible smoke from fossil fuel combustion, they did not remove the chemical byproducts. These “invisible” pollutants included sulfur dioxide, which scientists began to identify as the major respiratory irritant in smog episodes. Sulfur dioxide subsequently became the first fossil fuel pollutant suspected of posing a danger to public health during the 1930s.7 The shift toward a more chemical understanding of pollution and its environmental impacts deepened in the years after the Second World War as thousands of new manmade chemicals entered the marketplace. This new way of thinking about pollution raised a number of questions about how to identify dangerous chemicals in our air, water, soil, and food. In contrast to the visibility of black soot in urban cities, sewage in waterways, or the destruction of forests and wild areas, chemical pollutants like sulfur dioxide were not immediately or clearly detectable without scientific documentation and analysis. As evidence accumulated about the potential for these invisible chemicals to damage the environment during the 1950s and 1960s, scientists began to assume new roles as interpreters of potential environmental threats for government officials and the public. Research teams descended upon cities with sampling devices in hand, redefining air quality from the blackness of smoke to the presence of certain chemicals in various concentrations. It was a crucial step in understanding the mounting environmental crisis from fossil fuels, but it was also a transfer of power from everyday citizens and urban residents to scientists and policymakers. The privileging of new kinds of expert knowledge about pollutants would transform our understandings of environmental health and the tradeoffs in relying upon ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels for industrial production.

The identification of particular fossil fuel chemicals as agents of harm, rather than visible smoke, also suggested that their dispersion might prove far more widespread than previously thought. With the introduction of atomic weapons and nuclear testing after the Second World War, the scientific community had begun to document the spread of radioactive fallout to nearly every corner of the planet. The ability to trace radioactive particles through ecosystems and the human body led to several novel scientific insights about the processes of bioaccumulation and showed that it was possible for fallout to affect populations far from nuclear detonations. Yet it wasn’t at all evident that other types of pollutants could travel such great distances and impact the environment in distant regions. The potential for other chemicals to similarly accumulate in locations far from their emission only received sustained scientific attention during the mid-1960s as evidence emerged that pesticides had reached areas as remote as the arctic. The discovery of “acid rain” subsequently played a crucial role in demonstrating that fossil fuel pollution was not only a local issue, but a global problem with the potential to cause long-term, serious harm to the environment.

Swedish scientists first identified acid rain as a continental phenomenon in Europe during the late 1960s, and their findings prompted international debates over whether countries should work together on pollution problems through supranational institutions. The increasing reliance on science and technology to investigate the “chemical” nature of pollution led many countries to first turn to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to facilitate environmental cooperation. As the only intergovernmental body that included the majority of Western, capitalist countries at this time in history, the OECD initially served as the primary forum for collaborative acid rain research as well as projects on a host of other environmental pollution problems.

However, as evidence mounted that chemical pollutants had regional and global effects, many government officials began to question whether a more inclusive institution should lead environmental diplomacy. Acid rain became the galvanizing issue for many scientists, policymakers, and activists who wanted to see the United Nations (UN) serve as the world leader on environmental issues. The problem eventually came to serve as a case study for the famous 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, the first global meeting of its kind, as well as justification for the UN to assume responsibility for negotiations on international environmental problems.

However, a multitude of difficulties with managing the 1972 conference combined with the UN’s limited experience in overseeing scientific research led to mounting objections to cooperating on environmental problems through the organization. Government officials in Western nations were faced with the difficult choice of either working through an organization with limited membership but a historically robust reliance on scientific experts or pressing on with a global institution that lacked experience in managing large research projects. Faced with ongoing Cold War tensions and disagreements with developing nations over which environmental issues should take precedence, Western governments turned to the OECD rather than face the bureaucracy and diplomatic morass of the UN. For work on acid rain, this meant an influx of support to environmental scientists during the 1970s, which united the emerging field and built close relationships with policymakers in the international arena. Scientists’ newfound authority as decoders of nature for government officials and the public thus played a major part in determining how and where future research and policymaking would occur on acid rain, shaping a new era of pollution in environmental diplomacy.

Death-Dealing Fogs

On December 1, 1930, unusual meteorological conditions caused a thick fog to settle across the Meuse Valley in Belgium as factories and power plants released plumes of smoke into the air. Normally, air that is close to the earth’s surface is the warmest and rises vertically, dispersing any pollutants. But with the sun at a low angle in the winter sky, the ground radiated more heat into the atmosphere than it received from the sun’s rays, creating a pocket of cold air near the ground. As a mass of warm air moved across the valley, it reversed the normal temperature gradient of the atmosphere and produced a meteorological “inversion,” which trapped cool ground air within the mountainous terrain. In just a few days, the small town of Liège in the valley was filled with the noxious smell of rotten eggs and more than three dozen fatalities were reported.8

It was the first documented case of a major air pollution disaster and attracted attention from government officials, the scientific community, and the general public across Europe and the US, making the front page of the Sun, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.9 Victims described difficulty breathing and chest pains that would only abate upon leaving the town, leading to suspicion that they had been poisoned by something in the fog. The incident so frightened urban residents that Belgium’s Queen Elizabeth visited the small city to persuade local health officials to investigate the cause of the fog.10 At first, many scientists and doctors in Belgium as well as throughout Europe were skeptical about the role of air pollution in the disaster. Some eminent scientists, such as the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, suggested the fatalities could have resulted from an illness like the Black Death, while others suspected that they were caused by an accidental leak of old, buried German chemical war gases.11 Eventually, however, a scientific investigation launched by the Belgium government concluded that the deaths were the result of “sulphurous bodies, either in the form of sulphur dioxide or sulphuric acid,” and recommended the implementation of pollution control policies to prevent such accidents from occurring in the future during similar atmospheric conditions.12

The possibility that chemicals in fossil fuel emissions could be hazardous to human health had not been extensively studied by scientists at the time of these events. Some research had been conducted on very high levels of occupational exposures, but few of these studies focused on sulfur oxides.13 Although sulfur gases had been identified as a potential byproduct of burning coal since the nineteenth century, discussions of its harmful effects as a pollutant in urban areas were limited to its potentially corrosive effect on buildings.14 Only after the Liège disaster did scientific surveys of air pollution begin to measure sulfur dioxide concentrations and identify the chemical as an important pollutant, and by the Second World War, some doctors had linked exposure to sulfur dioxide as a possible contributor to asthma attacks.15 However, many scientists and public health officials remained unconvinced that sulfur dioxide was to blame for the 1930 catastrophe, and its concentrations in cities were still commonly believed to pose no risk to public health.16 Since the discovery of steam power, most of the general public had viewed smoke as a sign of prosperity, a testament to the economic growth of industrialized nations and the promise of better lives through increasing energy consumption.17

This began to change over the next two decades as more lethal incidents occurred in the US and Britain. In Donora, Pennsylvania, dozens died in 1948 during a meteorological inversion that trapped air pollution around the city.18 Just a few years later in 1952, the most severe pollution disaster to date hit London, Great Britain, resulting in thousands of deaths as well as numerous respiratory illnesses.19 Transportation ground to a halt as the smog grew so thick it became too difficult to drive without flares lighting the streets. Londoners, who had experienced many such “pea soup” fogs since industrialization, reported that this fog was unique in thickness and intensity.20 Some of the city’s elderly population, having already lived through two wars, perished in the months thereafter. But the fog also struck down seemingly healthy young people as well as cattle and other farm animals. A British atmospheric scientist who was five years old and living in London at the time described the smog as being so thick that it permeated his home, leaving him extremely ill. He recalled lying in bed day in and day out trying to breathe, unable to tell which of his parents was checking in on him through the darkened air.21

Research into air pollution surged in the 1950s across Western, industrialized countries as a result of these events. Following the Liège disaster, the number of scientific publications per year on atmospheric pollution doubled, and then quadrupled after the next major disaster in Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948.22 In the aftermath of the 1952 London smog episode, even more scientists across Europe and North America began devoting their research to smog and air pollution. In response to the disaster, the British government created the National Smoke and Sulfur Dioxide Survey in 1953 to monitor air pollution and subsequently enacted the British Clean Air Act of 1956, which introduced federal control over industrial emissions and mandated increased chimney heights to disperse pollutants high enough to prevent them from becoming trapped around cities.23 Several research groups at US universities, such as the California Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois, undertook independent investigations of air pollution in cities deemed vulnerable to a pollution disaster, notably Los Angeles.24

Public protests in areas at risk of experiencing a similar smog disaster also led to several new national programs to collect data on air pollution and to advise on possible industry regulations outside Britain. In West Germany, the government sponsored its own “smog study” in the Ruhr valley, an area heavily populated with coal and steel plants...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction: A Rain of Ashes
• 1  Creating a Global Pollution Problem
• 2  The Science of Acid Rain
• 3  Energy Industry Research and the Politics of Doubt
• 4  Pollution across the Iron Curtain
• 5  Environmental Diplomacy in the Cold War
• 6  An Environmental Crisis Collides with a Conservative Revolution
• 7  Acid Rain and the Precautionary Principle
• 8  A Warning Bell for a Fossil Fuel Future
• Epilogue  The Climate Change Reckoning
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Sources
• Index