Volcanic origin, however, is not the only alternative. Another mechanism has recently been pointed out by the late Herman Kahn's collaborator W. M. Brown, whom AtE readers may remember for his report on the vast amounts of methane in the geopressurized water along the Gulf Coast [May 77]. In "Maybe Acid Rain Isn't the Villain," Fortune, 5/28/84, he makes a strong, though not conclusive case for the acidity of lakes being due to forest run-off; forest humus may contain as much as 1,000 times the acid that falls from the sky in a year.
But what, then, has changed in the last decade or so?
Smokey the Bear has been overzealous, that's what. Among the natural phenomena neutralizing this acidity are forest fires, whose ash is alkaline, and Smokey has been too successful in eliminating this natural antidote.
[In Ecohysterics and the Technophobes (1973), now out of print, I pointed out that "Smokey is not on natures side." However, I was not then referring to acid rain, but to the fashionable wisdom that "the checks and balances of nature are fragile and delicate." Setting a forest alight with lightning is natures crude and random way of rejuvenating overgrown and disease-ridden forests, which statistically have a better chance of burning down to make way for healthy seedlings growing from the ashes
¾a process as delicate as a street demonstration by the Dykes against Nukes (AtE Oct 78). In the past decade, the US Forest Service has begun to set controlled fires to counteract cases of an overly successful Smokey.]Meanwhile the Clean Air Coalition, whose lobby, for its own reasons, joins the lobby of Eastern coal companies in urging Congress not to press for Western low-sulfur coal (see B.A. Ackerman, Clean Coal/ Dirty Air, Yale Univ. Press 1981), has announced that rain in the southern states has the same pH factor as battery acid. Capitalizing on peoples ignorance of what the pH factor actually measures [see AtE Aug. 80], they imply that the rain is so acidic that it will burn holes in your clothes. This implied lie, however, is on a superficial level of sleaziness.
On a much deeper level of the brainwash, CBS includes this hoax as a lengthy first item in their news bulletin, commenting briefly that "an Edison Electric spokesman called the report misleading." It thus feigns fairness while implying that the Clean Air Coalition charlatans are to be believed because they are the unbiased underdogs, whereas the utilities have an axe to grind.
The very opposite is true. Ten or twelve billion is a temporary inconvenience for the utilities, for only the more retarded among deaf-blind infants do not know that sooner or later the utilities will pass the cost on to you and me. But what would the Clean Air Hucksters do without dirty air and acid rain? What would a fish do without water?
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Vol. 11, No. 11
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 11, No. 11 Date: November 29, 2004 12:18 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Small-time politics
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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