U.S., Canada Duck Acid Rain Challenge

Acid rain, the airborne pollution threatening thousands of lakes on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, has increased tensions between the two neighbors, as pollution from each country spills over into the other's environment.

Ironically, acid rain's transnational character-pollution particles can travel hundreds and even thousands of miles from their point of origin, crossing state, provincial, and national boundaries-has acted as a disincentive to any joint U.S.-Canada agreement to impose strict uniform regulations on industrial polluters.

Currently, diplomatic efforts to reach an accord have commenced, but the pace is slow, carrying only a dim hope of success.

Formed when sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants and metallurgical smelters combine with natural atmospheric moisture, acid rain has already created a silent ecological disaster.

Contaminated rainfall has eliminated fish from over 100 lakes in the Adirondak region of New York State and 140 lakes in Ontario. A recent study by the Ontario, Ministry of Environment predicts that 48,000 more lakes will become sterile in Ontario by the end of the century if acid rain is not controlled.

While acid rain's dangers are most widely documented as regards the damage to aquatic life, it also may have other deleterious effects, including possible reductions in forest productivity, possible damage to agricultural crops, weakening of buildings and other metal structures, and possible contamination of drinking water.

Canada is particularly upset over this environmental issue, because it receives a disproportionate amount of the North American air pollution. According to a joint U.S.-Canada governmental study released in October, 1979, over 50 percent of the acid rain in eastern Canada results from pollutants emitted within the United States. The report estimated that two million tons of U.S. pollutants find their way across the border each year-four times the amount Canada delivers to the U.S.

Canada's pollution imports arrive mostly from power plants in the Ohio Valley. The bulk of present U.S. emissions of sulfur dioxide come from these plants, most of which were in

Prevailing winds carry the pollutants from the stacks of these plants out over the northeastern United States and into Canada. The higher the stacks, the further the pollution travels.

Even as the problem of acid rain becomes more acute, the Carter administration has ,decided to convert 62 northeastern oil and gas generating stations to coal. This could increase air pollution by 25 percent. U.S. environmental officials admit it will sharply increase acid rain. Canadian -members of Parliament have protested this action, denouncing the Carter Administration's disregard for the Canadian environment and urging the U.S. to reconsider.

U.S. environmentalists have, in turn, complained about Canada's contribution to pollution south of the border, citing in particular International Nickel Corporation's (INCO) Sudbury, Ontario smelter. This plant produces one percent of the world's total sulfur dioxide emissions. Its 1250-foot high "superstack" earns the distinction of being the largest single point source of sulfur emissions in the world.

Americans have also objected to proposals by Canadian utility companies to build power plants without pollution scrubbers near the border.

Given that each country suffers from the other's industrial emissions, a mutual agreement to curb emissions would seem the obvious answer. The obvious, however, is not the actual.

Each country knows that it will benefit from any clean-up program the other one adopts. At the same time, each country does not want to pay the costs of pollution control in its own territory. Result: nothing is done.

One Ontario environmental official, Irwin MacIntyre, underscores this prevailing, and debilitating, mentality. "A unilateral abatement program would entail considerable cost but provide little if any environmental advantage to Ontario, and such abatement would reduce Ontario's bargaining position with the United States."

Other causes contribute to the inaction-most powerful of all, the resistance of" the industrial polluters themselves.

In the U.S., auto, coal and metallurgical companies have fought every pollution control measure that has come up in Congress. "Their lobbying efforts have been extensive," says Phillip Cummings, counsel to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Cummings sees no let-up in sight: "I expect next year's lobbying to be the most heavy of all."

Even when industry cannot stop an environmental law from being enacted, it often manages to circumvent its enforcement. One favorite tactic of U.S. companies is "to raise the height of smokestacks to the point where atmospheric currents would carry the pollution away from the source-and away from the instruments to measure ambient air quality in that area," observes Gus Speth, chairman of the U.S. President's Council of Environmental Quality. One U.S. utility company, he notes, "went so far as to take out newspaper and magazine ads back in 1973, bragging that it was a pioneer in the use of tall smokestacks on its power plants."

Canadian industry has been equally resistant to air pollution controls. INCO, producing approximately 20 percent of all the sulfur dioxide in Canada, is a case in point.

During the 1960s, Ontario came under increasing public pressure to enact restrictions on industrial emissions. As a result, the provincial government slapped INCO with an Environmental Control Order in 1970 calling for a reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions from 5,200 tons per day to 750 tons per day by the end of 1978.

INCO refused to comply with the order. "We believe it is important that there is a balance between potential environmental benefits and their economic costs, particularly when related to small improvements in the environment," INCO vice president Stuart Warner said at the time.

In closed-door discussions with the government, INCO attempted to dilute the original order. The Ontario government conceded in July, 1978, announcing that INCO would be allowed to emit sulphur dioxide at a rate of 3,600 tons per day until 1982.

Public reaction to Ontario's relaxation of INCO's requirements was predictably intense. In recent months the pressure on the government mounted to the point where Ontario proposed a new control order in September for INCO. But the specifics of the new order make it clear that industry has found a sympathetic ear for its complaints about expensive control measures. The new order would allow INCO to emit sulphur dioxide at 1875 tons per day, two-and-a-half times the level lawmakers considered acceptable in 1970 legislation. -

With government shortsightedness and industry opposition prevailing on both sides of the border, efforts to arrive at a meaningful joint agreement have advanced only to the most preliminary stages.

John Roberts, Canada's Minister of Environment, travelled to Washington in August to meet U.S. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie for discussions of the acid rain problem. At the end of Roberts' visit, the, officials signed a "memorandum of intent" indicating that both countries were committed to curbing this form of pollution.

Though Roberts claimed the agreement was "an extraordinary step forward," it does nothing to reduce the massive amounts of acid rain currently falling on Canada and the U.S. The agreement only lays the groundwork for future talks, specifying that technical and scientific working groups will begin preparing for formal negotiations set to commence by June, 1981.

The agreement's hollowness suggests that the "understanding" may have been designed more to reduce the intense political heat in Canada than to reduce acid rain itself.

As government officials on both sides of the border continue to dawdle, industrial stacks billow their sulfur emissions skyward. Seemingly innocuous, even pastoral, rain continues to fall, rendering more and more lakes lifeless, and endangering other aspects of the environment.

John Fraser, former Canadian Minister of the Environment, warned in 1979 that, "there is no point or purpose in either this country or the U.S.A. attempting to go separate ways on acid rain." Currently, Canada and the U.S. seem to be heeding the letter, but not the spirit, of Fraser's warning. The countries are indeed following one path-lip service rather than action.

Jamie Swift, coordinator of the Development Education Center in Ottawa, recently authored The Big Nickel: INCO at Home and Abroad. Phil Weller, a researcher at the Waterloo Public Interest Research Group, recently authored Acid Rain: The Silent Crisis.