If you read science fiction from the 1970s through the early 1990s (the Apocalypse Wow period: Ecogeddon and Cyberpunk) you get the distinct impression that all the works of man’s hubris should be melting like sugar in billowing clouds of unstoppable acid rain by now. Additionally, our eyes should be running down our cheeks and our lungs should be bubbling out our noses, just like the poor saps who lived downwind from Vesuvius.
So, what happened? Did the EPA actually have an impact on something? Was the problem never real to begin with?
Improved regulation of emissions certainly helped, but the problem was also overstated to begin with. Mildly overstated by the scientific community, moderately overstated by policy committees, greatly overstated by policy makers, wildly overstated by environmental activists.
Acid rain had some health effects, but nothing terribly significant, and these have been addressed by the legislation. The environmental effects remain debatable. Some water bodies in some areas were affected but the vast majority of cases of acidification attributed to acid rain were either unrelated or only partially attributable. Some area of forest died, but the area was limited by geology and unlikely to have spread further than it already had. The jury is still out on how much (or even if any if any) environmental benefit the legislation has had.
Basically it was a minor problem that activists beat up into a calamity assisted legislators. It didn’t become a calamity but there is no reason to believe it could ever have been so.
Yep, cheap apocalyptic fiction is like that. Take the trendy social concern of the day and extrapolate. In the 50s it was nuclear war, in the 60s it was overpopulation, in the 70s it was running out of oil, in the 80s it was acid rain and the ozone hole in the 90s it was global warming. I’m not sure what the current disaster du jour is. Global warming is still big but seems to be competing with terrorism.
I’m not sure if we should read anything into the fact that zombies seem to be making a comeback for some reason. :eek:
Photochemical smog and acid rain was mainly caused by car emissions. During the late 80s-early 90s cars with catalytic converters running on unleaded gas started replacing the old tech ones and that practically eliminated the problem.
If cars today were still running on leaded gas maybe the scientists would be proven right.
OK, that makes sense. I didn’t know nitrous oxide was a major pollutant.
… and taken to ludicrous levels by the people writing such depthless classics as ZPG and Soylent Green.
But that’s the problem: There’s no way to revert the changes and commit a different set of actions. “Good driving is bunk: I’ve driven well my whole life and I’ve never had to narrowly avoid an accident!”
And the Japanese. Don’t forget that the Japanese were going to eat us alive.
(Interesting parallels between the Cyberpunk genre and ‘yellow peril’ books and movies a half-century older.)
Terrorism was pretty big in the 1990s, too. Remember the whole ‘nukes without an owner for terrorists without a cause’ subgenre?