Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
air pollution problems caused by coal-burning and other activities in industrial towns
and cities. The impacts of less visible atmospheric pollutants, however, were also
becoming conspicuous to some contemporaries. Indeed, the British government had
enjoyed some early success in regulating hydrochloric acid gas emissions from the
alkali industry, based mainly in Merseyside, Tyneside and Glasgow, which pro-
duced soda ash and caustic soda for use in soaps, detergents, dyes, bleaches, and
glass and paper making. Landowners living in close proximity to alkali works
complained that the environmental damage they caused was severe, with acid
deposition destroying both agricultural crops and woodland. The Alkali Act of 1863,
overseen by the country
rst Alkali Inspector, the aforementioned Robert Angus
Smith, compelled manufacturers of soda ash to reduce their acidic emissions by
95 % using a simple and inexpensive condensing technique.
41
But the act did not
control other gaseous pollutants from factories, most notably the sulphur dioxide
'
s
—
a
key component of acid rain
—
that was released when fossil fuels were burned.
uence on the environment in
and around urban-industrial centres during the mid-nineteenth century (see previous
section). But it was not until the 1960s that acid rain began to attract signi
Acid rain had
rst been identi
ed as a deleterious in
cant
public and political attention. While smoke pollution had declined in the developed
world from the mid-twentieth century, the problem of acid rain persisted and spread.
Legislation designed to control visible coal smoke did little to curb invisible emis-
sions of sulphur dioxide, largely because the economic costs of tting preventive
ue-gas scrubbing systems were high. In Britain, for example, long-standing ideas
about employing the
of pollution abatement meant that
solutions still had to be both technically and economically feasible. Worried that
low-level concentrations of sulphur dioxide posed a threat to human health, regu-
lators instead insisted on another
'
best practicable means
'
'
technical
x
'—
raising the height of industrial
chimneys
—
to better disperse and dilute this harmful pollutant. Coal-
red power
stations, providing
in the form of electricity to homes and industry,
produced much of the sulphur dioxide that reacted with moisture in the atmosphere
to form acid rain (solving one environmental problem can often exacerbate another).
By 1960, Britain had built more than 60 new power stations and greatly extended the
generating capacity of many older installations, with their chimneys reaching heights
in excess of 135 m. These tall chimneystacks, intended to reduce local air pollution,
transported sulphur emissions over hundreds and even thousands of kilometres. By
the end of the 1960s, Scandinavian scientists had shown that enormous
'
clean energy
'
ows of air
pollution from Britain, carried by the prevailing winds, were causing lakes and rivers
to acidify in Norway and Sweden. The ecological consequences also included the
widespread decline of forests (although acid rain is just one of a number of cumu-
lative stresses that can cause die-offs).
42
For a long time the impacts of acid rain were
mainly local or regional, but new scienti
c research gradually revealed that it was
causing environmental damage on an international scale.
41
Ashby and Anderson (
1981
), Dingle (
1982
), Hawes (
1995
) and Garwood (
2004
).
42
Osborn (
2004
), Sheail (
1991
), Brimblecombe (
2008
) and Lundgren (
1998
).
