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Acid Rain Cap And Trade

Question 1. CAP AND TRADE – ACID RAIN SOLUTIONS

In the 1980s, policymakers in the United States faced a difficult problem: Acid precipitation. For years, Midwestern lawmakers had the "whip hand" in the debate over whether to impose acid rain controls on the big, coal-burning utility plants in the Rust Belt (Hager, 1989). Acid compounds and their precursors in the atmosphere and in deposition from the atmosphere represented a major national and international threat to Earth's resources, ecosystems, materials, visibility, and the public health (EPA). Congress and the Executive used scientific information based on multiple studies, recommendations, and findings from the scientific community that identified the major principal sources and precursors of acid precipitation. It was found that the problem originated from emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides as byproducts from the use and combustion of fossil fuels (EPA). Unfortunately, when the problem was first uncovered, President Ronald Reagan, aligning with the coal industry and utility companies, only decided to study the problem. During the 1980's, citing uncertainties about the science of acid rain and concerns about jobs and utility rates, Midwesterner lawmakers, policy formers, and interests groups, managed to bottle up and kill bill after bill. They infuriated environmentalists and frustrated congressional colleagues, who tried to "mollify the Midwestern coalition with offers of national electricity taxes to help ease the heavy expense - and to prevent the job losses - of cleaning up coal-burning utilities" (Hager, 1989).
Eventually George H.W. Bush was elected president along side his Midwestern vice president, former Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, and pushed a clean-air rewrite package (HR3030) with acid rain provisions. Congress laid out its purpose in Title IV of the Clean Air Act: The purpose of this title is to reduce the adverse effects of acid deposition through reductions in annual emissions of...