Acid Rain: A Business-as-Usual Scenario

Abstract

Acid rain dominated the environmental policy agenda during much of the 1980s and, for the UK, it became the defining issue of the decade. Environmental groups dubbed the UK the ‘dirty man of Europe’ because of its reluctance to participate in the ‘30 per cent club’ agreement to reduce acid emissions. The position on acid rain came to symbolise what many saw as a wider weakness in environmental policy making. The agreement of the EC’s LCPD in 1988 signalled the end of an era marked by debate about whether and by how much emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, the main precursors of acid rain, should be cut.

Jim Skea is British Gas/Economic and Social Research Council Professorial Fellow of Clean Technologies and Industry in the SPRU at the University of Sussex. He is grateful for the support of these two bodies. This chapter was improved by discussions which took place during the Colloquium ‘UK Environmental Policy in the 1990s’ in the Department of Politics, University of Newcastle, in December 1993. Subsequent correspondence with Nigel Haigh was particularly helpful. Tony Ikwue of SPRU also provided helpful input. However, the author remains solely responsible for the views expressed and for any residual errors.