Thank you for the comments, but if it wasn’t me, it would be someone else. Our business has exploded by nearly 1000%, yes 3 zeros, in recent years from coal plants trying to reduce their acid rain component (and mercury) emissions through various means. 
Which means more trips for me. 
I’m not much of an expert on climate, but I don’t think it’s that difficult to solve. AFAIK, it’s largely a matter of shifting energy use away from major contributors, like coal, to cleaner alternatives. We don’t need to burn coal, but we do it because it’s so cheap. Taxing or quotas will make other alternatives more competitive, and will encourage investments into alternative energy sources as they become profitable. One solution could be nuclear power plants. Obviously, nuclear energy has problems on its own, but it don’t emit greenhouse gases. There are many proposed solutions.
I think the biggest challenge is that the current situation is created by the 2 billion people in the industrialized world. There are another 5 billion who wants to consume (and thereby pollute) as much as we do. I don’t think they will agree to stop industrializing just because us in the rich world has “used up” earth.
People in the industrialized world, OTOH, except in the US, seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of doing something now.
Wow, I didn’t know that. We really need a submission smiley … ! 
No, but it is concentrated hydroxic acid.
Now that our mega-expert on powerplant matters has arrived, I have a question for you, Una. I’ve read that powerplants under a certain size are not covered by the same rules that govern the big ones; that is, a community can start a small one without having to go through all the hearings and the fights with NIMBYist neighbors. What I don’t know is, are these small power plants dirtier than the big ones, or are they “good citizens?”
Well, it was raining today in Manhattan, and I forgot my umbrella. After my hair had dried, it felt stiff, like there was hairspray in it or something. There was nothing in it but rain. I don’t think that’s supposed to happen…
I have. Sort of.
In Minnesota, along highway 52/55 south of the Twin Cities on the way to Red Wing or Rochester, you pass the Pine Bend Refinery, where they have plumes of gas burning all the time. You could be riding by with your eyes closed and know when you’re passing there – the smell makes it obvious. There are many pine trees along that road, in farm groves, etc. (Pine trees are fairly common in Minnesota – they are effective windbreaks/snowbreaks all winter long.)
It’s been at least 25 years since I noticed that the pine trees just downwind of that plant looked poorly compared to other pine trees just a few miles earlier. They were scraggly looking, with a lot more dropped needles and brown branches.
So I’ve always seen that as a real-life example of the environmental damage of pollution.
I agree 100%. Unfortunately, there seems to be an awful lot of overlap between the groups that holler about global warming and greenhouse gases, and the groups that protest nuclear power (and for that matter, the groups that protest the dams that produce the clean, cheap hydroelectric power we use in the Pacific Northwest, too). The “anti-people” people, I call them.
Well, there are often sometimes fewer restrictions on power plants of less than 25MW in size, which in the power world is a very small power plant. A 25MW plant, for instance, doesn’t have to monitor pollution as closely, and can be exempt from some emissions regulations. However, this isn’t universally true. A coal power plant of about 20MW size I worked on a few years back had State regulations which were every bit as strict as Federal ones - moreso in some areas, which is why they called me up.
But there are really not that many of them built, and I don’t think I can name a single coal power plant under 50MW being seriously considered (except for waste coal) because the economics don’t work out at all. It could be that people are thinking of simple-cycle gas turbines, which, because their fuel system is simple and they can essentially be delivered on a truck near ready to go, require much less siting requirements. But then, gas turbines are generally the cleanest fossil power available (if outfitted with an SCR), so they don’t have nearly as much trouble with New Source emissions because they’re already at the top. I guess you’ld have to give me a specific example for me to comment further.
I guess they might also be talking about industrial boilers, used to power just a single factory, such as a paper mill or something. Because they don’t sell electricity to the outside world they fall under different regulations, but to tell the truth I’d have to ask one of my lawyers what the practical difference is.
Of course, I’ve noticed huge stands of pine trees all over the US that suddenly (in the last few years) started to look really bad, and discovered that it was pine beetle outbreaks that were the main cause. I’ve toured some woods in the South and East, and Colorado, and seen the horrific damage from the pine beetles. That’s not saying that any specific case might not be the result of acid rain deposition, but that pine beetles are clearing out large areas of forest in a bad way.