Page 36 - Fundamentals of Air Pollution

V. The 1990s 15

and water quality, sold waste sanitation, noise abatement, and control of
the hazards associated with radiation and the use of pesticides. This is
paralleled in industry, where formerly diffuse responsibility for these areas
is increasingly the responsibility of an environmental protection coordina-
tor. Similar changes are evident in research and education.
Pollution controls were being built into pollution sources—automobiles,
power plants, factories—at the time of original construction rather than
later on. Also, for the first time, serious attention was directed to the
problems caused by the "greenhouse" effect of carbon dioxide and other
gases building up in the atmosphere, possible depletion of the stratospheric
ozone layer by fluorocarbons, long-range transport of pollution, prevention
of significant deterioration (PSD), and acidic deposition.

V. THE 1990s

The most sweeping change, in the United States at least, in the decade
of the 1990s was the passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments on Novem-
ber 15, 1990 (29). This was the only change in the Clean Air Act since 1977,
even though the U.S. Congress had mandated that the Act be amended
much earlier. Michigan Representative John Dingell referred to the amend-
ments as "the most complex, comprehensive, and far-reaching environ-
mental law any Congress has ever considered." John-Mark Stenvaag has
stated in his book, "Clean Air Act 1990 Amendments, Law and Practice"
(30), "The enormity of the 1990 amendments begs description. The prior
Act, consisting of approximately 70,000 words, was widely recognized
to be a remarkably complicated, unapproachable piece of legislation. If
environmental attorneys, government officials, and regulated entities were
awed by the prior Act, they will be astonished, even stupefied, by the
1990 amendments. In approximately 145,000 new words, Congress has
essentially tripled the length of the prior Act and geometrically increased
its complexity."
The 1990s saw the emergence, in the popular media, of two distinct
but closely related global environmental crises, uncontrolled global climate
changes and stratospheric ozone depletion. The climate changes of concern
were both the warming trends caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere and cooling trends caused by particulate matter and
sulfates in the same atmosphere. Some researchers have suggested that
these two trends will cancel each other. Other authors have written (31)
that global warming may not be all bad. It is going to be an interesting
decade as many theories are developed and tested during the 1990s. The
"Earth Summit," really the U.N. Conference of Environment and Develop-
ment, in Rio de Janeiro during June 1992 did little to resolve the problems,