Gone with the wind? Tall smokestacks, transboundary air pollution and US acid rain politics in the 1980s
Milena Wazeck | University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
Acid rain emerged as a major environmental problem in the 1970s. When tall smokestacks were invented in the mid-20th century, sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels were dispersed over broad areas, crossed national boundaries and affected areas far away from industrialized regions.
The question of how emissions of specific sources are related to acid deposition at specific sites (source-receptor relationships) was at the intersection of basic research, modeling, and U.S. policy making in the 1980s. Are source-receptor relationships linear, so that a reduction of emissions at a specific source leads to a proportionate reduction of acid deposition in a specific area? Scientists faced high uncertainty related to atmospheric chemical reactions and their effect on source-receptor relationships. At the same time, source-receptor relationships became the center of the heated political debate on U.S. acid rain regulation during the Reagan administration. Why did scientists disagree about linearity? How did they cope with the political context of their debate?
My talk analyzes how U.S. scientists evaluated source-receptor relationships during the 1980s. I show that the scientific controversy about source-receptor relationships was shaped by disciplinary differences between atmospheric chemistry and ecosystem sciences, and I point out the ways in which scientists attempted to draw boundaries between the scientific and the regulatory debate about the linearity of source-receptor relationships.
