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Book Reviews
Acid Rain
By Fred Pearce
Published by Penguir Books, 1987, £3.95.
Fred Pearce, news editor of the New Scientist, makes a devastating case for urgent action to end the nightmare of pollution that has accumulated throughout the world, but particularly in Europe. In a slim, 162 page volume this book presents in an easily readable way, even to the most unscientifically trained mind, a convincing catalogue of facts, figures and theories.
«The skies of Europe are poisoned," Pearce argues. "'Toxins are carried on breezes from power stations and autobahns across the most polluted continent on earth. When the poison falls to the ground it chokes the pores of leaves on trees from the Alps to the Urals; it eats away at stone, brick, paper and rubber; it destroys soil and flows into rivers where it kills fish by disrupting the operation of their gills. It kills humans too." In the London smog of 1952 it is now known that 4,000 people were killed. That smog was acid fog with acid droplets like the water in a car battery. Today scientists are finding mists almost as acid on Scottish hillsides.
Sulphur
The processes of chemical reactions are explained clearly: sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are slowly converted in the air and especially in clouds, to sulphuric and nitric acids. This is called oxidation and is speeded up in the presence of other pollutants. Ammonia is one such pollutant, which is being given off in ever larger quantities from intensive and factory farming. Ammonia emission has increased by 55% in the past
years in Britain.
In Britain Central Electricity Generating Board power stations have been responsible for two thirds of total acid emissions. The CEGB recently admitted part responsibility for the disappearance of fish from Norwegian lakes. Yet in September 1987 Britain and the USA refused to sign the treaty agreed by 21 nations under the aegis of the United Nations, to cut emissions of sulphur dioxide, mainly from power stations, by 30% by 1993. Talks on reducing nitrogen oxide emisions (Nox) have broken down even though it is as destructive as sulphur dioxide.
Control of emissions of smoke have largely ended the old winter smogs of the 1952 type but they are being replaced by other pollution agents as deadly in their effects. Even the controls in the power stations of Britain are not effective; they merely built taller chimneys to transfer pollution to other places. Three power stations, Drax, Eggborough and Ferrybridge pump out 800,000 tonnes of gaseous pollutants a year, including 600,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide. The CEGB agreed in late 1986 that Drax B will be fitted with clean-up equipment by the early 1990's but the other three will continue to pump out the pollutants. However today, as regards smoke pollution, it is the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe that lead the world: 'There are few controls on air pollution in most of Eastern Europe. Most of the smoke and sulphur comes from fuel burned in heavy industry, rather than power stations. There is so much gas pollution in the air that nobody worries about acid rain or ozone. Eastern Europe contains three of the most polluted zones on earth."
Significantly Pearce gives most information about Poland because when Solidarity was emerging it investigated and published póllution data
8
Sulphur fallout over Europe. metre per year. From Acid
The figures show grams per Rain, by Fred Pearce, p23.
square
on Poland. He reveals that "twenty per cent of Polish people live in areas where average amounts of sulphur dioxide in the air exceed the governments permitted levels (these are 4 times those set in the USA)... In the last 20 years life expectancy of Polish men has fallen... the average amount of sunshine in the city (of Cracow) has fallen from almost 5 hours per day to around 3 hours per day today." In every one of the Stalinist countries people's health and the environment is sacrificed to production levels. In East Germany emissions of sulphur dioxide now exceed those of Britain, a country more than double its size.
Ozone
Car emissions are another major source of pollution. The number of cars in the world has increased from 38 million to 350 million in the last 40 years. Strict controls in the USA from 1975 have forced car manufacturers to fit pollution control devices in new cars. As a result between 1970 and 1983 the emission of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons from new cars fell 90% and nitrogen oxides 75%. But in Europe no agreement is in sight.
Car pollutants, particularly Nox and hydrocarbons,
are a key element in the formation of ozone at ground level, Europe's latest killer. There is a lot of natural ozone around-in a protective shield high in the stratosphere. This has been in the news recently because other pollution, possibly from aerosols, has caused 'holes' in this protective layer. Unlike this layer, ozone at ground level is largely man made and is dangerous. It is created by sunlight acting on a range of pollutants, especially from car exhausts. It causes attacks of asthma in humans; it irritates the throat and lungs, causes catarrh, headaches, and a reduced resistance to infections and can be mistaken as hay fever. Symptoms are likely to occur when ozone levels go above 80 ppb for an hour or more-a level found on sunny days all over urban and rural Europe. At the height of the worst ozone episode in Britain-the 1976 hot summer-deaths rose by 20% in London. Everybody assumed heat was the cause but it might well have been ozone. Ozone also eats at every kind of material; from rubber tyres to textiles as well as being a likely cause of the decline in European forests.
Pollution of the air leads on in the book to pollution of the water, with once again a startling catalogue of facts
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and analysis. Throughout Britain water supplies are becoming more acid. Loch Fleet has experienced a hundred fold increase in acidity with fish dying as a result. Even the Royals may soon have to look elsewhere than Balmoral for their fishing-perhaps that's why Prince Charles has a 'green' tinge! In Wales salmon are dying out, and the Lake District is badly affected also.
Rivers
Water authorities were established with the express aim of a massive clean up of the country's rivers and estuaries. After 20 years of improvement, since 1980 the process has reversed. A recent HMSO report states that the main factor has been overloaded sewerage works.
Investment by the water authorities in sewerage works has for the past 5 years been half the peak reached in the 1970s.
From water to trees. In Germany and Switzerland more than half the trees are damaged by pollution. And despite denials by the British Forestry Commission evidence is accumulating that British trees are also being badly affected by pollution.
So what can be done? The science and technology exists or can be developed to solve the problems. For example Britain invented a process called flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) back in the nineteenth century, but failed to apply it. Leslie Reed, former head of the government's air pollution inspectorate said in 1983, "When it came to the post war expansion and
rebuilding of the UK power industry, the inspectorate considered it was impracticable to require sulphur dioxide removal from the very much larger boilers being built." Since 1948 all new British power plants have been required to set aside land for FGD equipment but until 1986 this requirement had never been drawn on.
Privatisation
The clear cut conclusion of the scientific evidence, states Pearce, is to start cutting all pollution straight away. Yet with the threatened privatisation of the electricity and water industries, pollution controls will become an even lower order of priority for the new owners. Billions of pounds are needed for investment in the water industry but it is not profitable to
47
invest guards.
This very readable book shows the ravages of capitalism, including the bureaucratic nationalised industries, and Stalinism, providing clear scientific evidence of the urgency for the working class to own and control society while there remains anything worth controlling. The removal of one more contradiction-that between man and the environment-will be the task of socialism, the rational planning of resources to bring into harmony the needs of mankind and our planet's ecology.
controls
By Bryan Beckingham
Booknotes
Books received for review since the last edition of the MIR include The Great Tin Crash: Bolivia and the World Tin Market, published by the Latin America Bureau at £2.95. The world stock market crash of 1987 was preceded in 1986 by an equally stunning collapse of the International Tin Council, a 22 nation body which administered the world market prices for tin. A more than 50% drop in prices led to the end of the ITC which had been designed to maintain stable prices. Around the world, poor tin producing nations like Bolivia suffered as thousands of miners lost their jobs.
This short booklet attempts to explain what happened and why, and the consequences for working people in countries like Bolivia-it is a prophetic warning of the tragedy ahead for the people of the Third World as prices collapse in the coming world recession. The booklet graphically reveals the way in which the raw material producing poor nations have been exploited by the con-
sumer states of the advanced capitalist world, and how even the limited protection that a commodity agreement on tin provided places like Bolivia can be swept away when the forces of the 'free market' exert themselves. The book concludes: "although they have an impor tant role to play, commodity agreements cannot substitute for a planned world economy geared to ensuring a minimum standard of living for all, in which costs as well as benefits of change are shared"
Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, pubiished by Grafton at £3.95, is an autobiographical account of how the wife of the general manager of the Shell Oil Company, who subsequently became a senior executive herself in the company after the 1949 revolution, was accused of being a British spy, locked up in solitary confinement for over six years, and cruelly humiliated by her captors during the socalled Cultural Revolution introduced by the Maoist bureaucracy in 1966.
The book graphically exposes the Stalinist methods of terror and intimidation imposed on individuals innocent of any crime during that period. Unfortunately some of its power is lost, as Nien Cheng clearly seems to take for granted her privileged status of servants, money and luxury living, and appears unaware that this would make her an obvious scapegoat for Maoist propaganda. Her life style prior to her arrest seemed very similar to Mao's own wife-except that Nien Cheng was subjected to lengthy imprisonment and her daughter was murdered. Mao's wife simply organised these brutalities.
Finally 1987 was the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Paine, the Englishman who wrote some of the seminal works of the American and French bourgeois revolutions. The Thomas Paine Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick and publ ished by Penguin at £5.95, allows the reader to dip into the ideas of Paine, but is less successful in placing them in the context of what Paine actually did during the French revolution and the American War of Indepen-
dence. In particular, Michael Foot's introduction to this volume concentrates more on Paine's thoughts and even literary style than on how this important fighter for freedom from feudalism and absolute monarchy tried to implement his ideas.
Paine opposed the colonisation of India by the British state; he fought in the revolutionary army under Washington against the British; he participated in the French revolution; he even proposed a form of social security in his most famous work "The Rights of Man' to help those without work or property. Inevitably he was forced to flee Britain and those who published his books were prosecuted by the British monarchy after the Napoleonic Wars when the government feared his ideas may be taken up by the growing movement of an emerging working-class. Unfortunately much of this is not dealt with adequately in this reader, and MIR readers may find a good biography of Paine of more value.
By Bob McKee
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