Volume 142, No. 44 covering the 2nd Session of the 104th Congress (1995 - 1996) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE EPA STUDY ON ACID RAIN” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Senate section on pages S2927-S2928 on March 27, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE EPA STUDY ON ACID RAIN
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, New York State, or upstate New York, has been shocked--I think that is a fair term--and finds itself in near disbelief to learn that the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] has closed the Ithaca station, which is part of a broad network of monitoring stations that collect data critical to understanding the impact of acid rain on the Adirondack Preserve. There is little enough institutional memory around Washington, but one should think the EPA would know that the concern about acid rain began with the disappearance of trout from a number of lakes in the higher Adirondacks. This was a puzzle and, in the end, it was resolved by a fish biologist at Cornell University, Dr. Carl Scofield, who traced the cycle: acid rain caused by increasingly acidified air released aluminum from the granite surrounding the lakes. That aluminum leached into the lakes and was absorbed into fish gills. The fish died.
In 1980, I obtained approval of legislation--the Acid Precipitation Act--which was based on a bill I introduced here in the Congress the year before. My bill was incorporated as title VII into the Energy Security Act of 1980--Public Law 96-294--and directed the EPA to study, over a 10-year period, just what was going on--not to panic, not to go screaming to high Heaven that the skies were opening with awful substances that would burn holes in our children's heads, and things like that--but just to say, ``What is this?''
Some longitudinal work obviously was in order. The effort was to last for 10 years, at $5 million per year.
During the Reagan administration, as demand for action grew and knowledge was needed, money was collected from research budgets around the country, such that our project, in the end, became a half-billion dollar research project, the largest of its kind. We ended up knowing more about this subject than any of the other industrialized nations. It is a real enough subject, but if our understanding of it is to progress confidently, we need more data, such as can be collected by normal scientific inquiry.
In the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments--Public Law 101-549--we made the best use we could of our research on the subject. We called for large reductions in emissions in the Middle West. Winds blow those emissions toward the Adirondacks, of course. And just to see that we continued along this track, as the then-ranking member of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works--in the conference committee on the bill--
I included certain provisions. One was designed so that the lay person could understand what was going on. The provision directed the EPA to compile and provide a registry of acidified lakes. Now, in Florida, that could be all lakes, of course; but it would not be in Pennsylvania or in New York. With the registry, over time, we would see how many lakes were being added, how many were being subtracted; how might we measure, essentially, the effect of our legislation? That has not been done.
I asked for other research measures in law, in statute, that have not been followed. And now the EPA has the arrogance and the insolence and the stupidity to close the research facility at the site where this whole subject was first understood, brought to national attention, and was addressed with national legislation.
Mr. President, I regret to say this, but I hope the administrator is hearing. I am not surprised that persons are calling for the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. If it will not obey the law, and if it will not follow elemental common sense, do we in fact need it, or is it an obstacle to the environmental concerns we share?
Mr. President, I thank the Chair.
I yield the floor.
Ms. SNOWE addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
Ms. SNOWE. I ask unanimous consent to proceed as in morning business for 5 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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