How Change Happens

5Break from Business as Usual

“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.”

—Henry Ford

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

—Frederick Douglass

SLASHING CARBON EMISSIONS tops today’s environmental climate action agenda. But rewind just a few decades in U.S. history and recall a time when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides posed the gravest earthly threats. Midwestern coal plants were spewing the stuff, turning clouds—and rainfall—acidic. Foul precipitation corroded everything it touched. Acid rain poisoned lakes. In New York’s Adirondack Mountains, low pH waters killed fish, and in turn, starved loons and other fish-eating birds. Acid leached calcium from soils and robbed plants of key nutrients, choking off New England’s sugar maples; trees that would have lived four hundred years were dying at sixty-five or seventy.¹ The acidic fallout also eroded structures—from private cemetery headstones and mausoleums, to public statues and monuments, to car paint jobs across much of the northeastern United States and into Canada. Frustration ran so deep that Canada’s prime minister bleakly joked about “declaring war on the United States.”²

Today in the United States, acid rain is mostly a problem of the past. Stemming from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which included a cap and trade provision to combat acid rain, by the 2000s, sulfate and nitrate in precipitation had decreased by some 40 percent. In 2007, for the first time, SO₂ emissions from power plants ...