The trend making an unfortunate comeback.
Hey Reader,
When people think of the 80s, they think big hair, acid rain, and neon. So much neon.
You were very “extra” that decade. A real testament to the unnatural.
AquaNet was punching holes in the ozone layer. Acid rain was dissolving buildings. Neon was an assault on the senses, but it made you more visible in the smog. So, tradeoffs.
While two of those things have stayed safely in the past, one is making a comeback. And this time, there won’t be any awkward yearbook pictures to console ourselves with.
Originally Scheduled Programming
I built rain to clean and replenish. Water falls through the air, picks up a little dust on the way down, fills the rivers, and smells amazing.
Then you started burning sulfur-rich coal, and my rain — my rain — started dissolving things.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Marble statues. Building facades. The Adirondacks, which I had just spent 300 million years getting right.
Weird Science
When coal burns, it releases pollutants including sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxides (NOₓ). Those gases drift upward, mix with atmospheric moisture, and return to earth as acid rain.
Sounds like a horror flick, but I assure you, this is reality.
It’s not easy being green when you’re a frog in an acidified lake.
In the 1980s, the U.S. was releasing nearly 19 million tons of SO₂ per year from power plants alone. Winds carried it from the Midwest and deposited it in the forests of New England and eastern Canada.
(The diplomatic term was “transboundary air pollution.” The Canadian term was unprintable.)
Back to the Future
Acid rain made the front page of the New York Times. Congress acted swiftly, passing the Clean Air Act Amendments just 16 years later. The Acid Rain Program created a cap-and-trade system — the government set a hard cap on total SO₂ emissions, then let power plants buy and sell permits to stay under it, in whatever way made economic sense to them.
By 2023, SO₂ emissions from power plants had fallen 95%, even as electricity production held steady.
Lakes recovered. Forests came back. It was one of the cheapest, most effective environmental programs in American history.
And it was a market solution. Reagan-era economists helped design it.
The Empire Strikes Back
The cap worked so well that it eventually became irrelevant. We’d be celebrating that win if the regulations that got us there hadn’t just been gutted in favor of the oldest, dirtiest operations.
When Congress wrote the Clean Air Act, it grandfathered existing facilities, assuming they’d retire within a decade or two. It made sense at the time. A $200 million investment in pollution controls at a plant with 10 years of operating life left is hard to pencil out.
So the older facilities were given a free pass, assuming they’d soon be replaced with modern, cleaner technology.
But those plants from the 1970s are still operating today, exploiting that loophole.
By patching up their equipment instead of modernizing, they’ve avoided triggering ‘New Source Review’ — which would force them to meet current standards. Aging, dirty operations responsible for a disproportionate share of the nation’s pollution. Still running on eight-track-era technology.
But Mother Nature, modernizing sounds expensive. Maybe there wasn’t a choice?
😒
The estimated savings is $670 million spread across nearly 200 facilities. Even less impressive is that a disproportionate share goes to exactly one plant — the Colstrip Steam Electric Station in Montana, because they spent 50 years avoiding upgrades to be crowned one of the nation’s top polluters.
But even modern plants that already have pollution controls are allowed to backslide. Facilities that received presidential exemptions are no longer required to maintain or upgrade their controls. They can just progressively degrade, along with the air.
In 2025, coal plants that received presidential exemptions increased their sulfur dioxide output by 24%.
Six plants in Texas alone increased their pollution by 48% in a single year. Public health cost: $8.8 billion. 667 deaths.
That’s thirteen times more in medical costs for six Texas communities than the entire country saves under the rollback.
These plants are outliving their natural lives at the expense of our own. At a cost that doesn’t show up on their balance sheet. Just in every family flattened by medical bills.
This deal buys us measurably worse air quality, a documented spike in premature deaths, and the revival of a problem we spent 30 years solving — in exchange for giving one facility from the Ford administration a pass on upgrading equipment it probably should have replaced during the Clinton years.
The More You Know
In the past year, I’ve given so much side-eye to the gutting of the EPA, my therapist (Old Faithful) fears I don’t know how to look straight ahead anymore. In my defense, what’s ahead of us is scary.
In January 2026, the EPA was directed to stop factoring in the value of human life when calculating whether pollution is worth preventing.
But if human life doesn’t matter, what is the point of all of this?
What is the point of protecting corporations if the people inside them don’t matter? If the communities they thrive in are sacrificed in the process?
What is the point of making all this money if you can’t live to enjoy it?
Progress, not perfection.
Mother Nature
📣 Know someone who thinks environmental regulations are just red tape? Breathe a word to them.
