Bipartisan Acid Rain Control Bill Introduced in House

A bipartisan House coalition unveiled an acid rain control bill Thursday and predicted that the compromise legislation will be enacted this year.

“Without a doubt, the acid rain train is leaving the station,” said Rep. Gerry Sikorski (D-Minn.), one of the bill’s 150 co-sponsors.

“Today marks the first step down the road to House passage,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who played a major role in drafting the legislation.

The proposal would require an annual nationwide reduction by 1997 of 10 million tons--down from about 24 million tons--of sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants and factories, many of them in the Midwest.

The bill, proposing no major federal spending, also would mandate a 4-million-ton annual reduction in emissions of nitrogen oxides from vehicles and stationary engines by 1997.

The congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates that meeting the bill’s sulfur dioxide standards would cost the private sector between $3.4 billion and $4.3 billion a year in the 1990s.

The bill would impose a fee on electricity bills nationwide to raise an estimated $1 billion a year to help utilities and factories pay for technology to produce cleaner emissions.

Many scientists have concluded that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions mix with moisture in the atmosphere and return to earth to damage forests, waterways and aquatic life.

Most of the damage has been reported in the Northeast, but there have been reports of forest problems in the Southeast, acidic lakes in the Rockies and acidic fog in Los Angeles.