The Adirondack Council

News Release

For more information:
John F. Sheehan
518-432-1770

Released, Friday, April 4, 2003

WASHINGTON, DC -- On Monday, April 8, 2003, the Adirondack Council testified before a US Senate panel deliberating the fate of acid rain legislation proposed by the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The hearing also featured testimony from US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman, labor officials, energy company representatives and the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group based in New York City.

Click here to read the Adirondack Council's testimony and view the Council's Deputy Director, Bernard Melewski, testifying at the hearing.

"We are honored to have been asked for our opinion. As representatives of the area suffering the most damage from acid rain, we will encourage Congress to take swift action to curb power plant emissions," said Adirondack Council Deputy Director and Counsel Bernard C. Melewski, who testified for the Council at the hearing. "This legislation is being introduced at the request of the President, who asked Congress during this year's State of the Union address to pass his Clear Skies Initiative.

"We fully expect that, like most federal legislation, it will be amended by both houses of Congress before it is approved," Melewski said. "But the President's plan is a good starting point for the negotiations. His first phase of proposed cuts would be sufficient to stop acid rain by the end of the decade. It is nearly identical to the strict, new acid rain rules imposed by New York Governor George Pataki last week, and then goes further.

"Phase two of the plan will accelerate the recovery of our forests and waters," he said. "It will also provide lasting human health benefits," Melewski said. "The sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain also cause, and worsen, lung disease. The nitrogen cuts are year- round, which will prevent the ‘spring shock' problem we have when nitrogen-laced melting snow poisons countless lakes and rivers, making more and more of them toxic to their native life every year about now. The current Clean Air Act can't fix that problem.

"The President's plan is typical of other legislation proposed by members of both parties in both houses," Melewski said. "All of the bills contain cuts at least this deep, and the other bills calls for Phase Two cuts to happen much faster. That is exactly the position we had hoped to be in right now.

"The sooner legislation like this passes, the better," Melewski said. "Every day we wait, more trees and fish die, more birds and mammals are contaminated by heavy metals, more buildings and monuments are defaced, more people develop -- and die from -- chronic lung ailments. This is a scourge to our natural resources and a human health tragedy that must end as soon as possible."

Melewski said that, after more than a decade of lobbying by The Adirondack Council and its member organizations, he believed Congress was finally prepared to act on acid rain this year.

"This is the first time since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 that we have seen the chairmen of the House and Senate environmental committees actually sponsor acid rain legislation and promise to advance it," Melewski said. "We have finally broken through the regional barrier we faced, where only representatives from the Northeast were willing to tackle the problem. That's a major breakthrough."

The Clear Skies Initiative is being sponsored in the Senate by Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., and by Clean Air, Climate Change and Nuclear Safety subcommittee chairman George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

In the House, sponsors include House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tuazin, R- La., and Energy and Air Quality subcommittee Chairman Joseph Barton, R-Texas.

Adirondack Park -- a six-million-acre reserve in Upstate New York where acid rain was first discovered in the United States. It is the most heavily damaged area of the nation in terms of acid rain.

Larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier and Grand Canyon National Parks combined, the Adirondack Park contains the largest intact deciduous forest (mixed hardwoods and conifers) ecosystem in the world. It holds almost all of the ancient, never-logged forests remaining east of the Mississippi River and contains wildlife habitat found nowhere else in the United States.

Prevailing winds carry coal-fired power plant emissions from the Ohio Valley into the Adirondack Mountains, where they fall as acid rain, acid snow, acid fog and dry acidic particles. The acidity alters soil chemistry, inhibits plant growth and releases heavy metals (mercury, aluminum, etc.) that are toxic to plants, animals and fish.
Reports conducted by a host of federal agencies have shown that more than 500 of the Park's 2,800 lakes and ponds have become too acidic to support their native life over the past 40 years. The same is true for 28 percent of the Park's 2,000 miles of navigable rivers, which are fed by 30,000 miles of brooks and streams.

Each spring, the percentage of acidic rivers explodes to more than 58 percent, as the winter's acidic snowpack melts over the course of a couple of weeks. This "spring shock" levels off again in the summer, but gets a little worse each year. Only year-round nitrogen controls, like those proposed in the Clear Skies plan, would cure this problem.

For more information on acid rain, click here to see The Adirondack Council's color publication ACID RAIN: A Continuing National Tragedy, or by calling its Acid Rain Hotline (1800-842-PARK).

The Adirondack Council is an 18,000-member, privately funded, not-for-profit organization dedicated to protecting and enhancing the natural and human communities of the Adirondack Park through research, education, advocacy and legal action.