An American Tragedy

The next move is up to Congress. Of all those who have addressed the issue, Oppenheimer of EDF says it best: "We have taken a basic parameter of nature, snow and rainfall, which touches everything, and we have changed the acidity by a factor of 10 to 100 times over normal in the last half-century. Nature operates on a long time scale, but we have been making a host of changes at once, and all the cumulative effects of these changes on this country cannot be understood at once. This is a matter of grave concern. Acid precipitation is an incipient disaster of the first order, and if we don't do anything, within 10 years we'll start to see seriously significant effects beyond already manifest fishless lakes."