Schumer: President's Budget Cuts Continue To Eat Away At Vital Anti-Acid Rain Funding For Upstate Ny - 2 More Acid Rain Research Programs Are Put ...

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Schumer: President's Budget Cuts Continue To Eat Away At Vital Anti-Acid Rain Funding For Upstate Ny - 2 More Acid Rain Research Programs Are Put On The Chopping Block

Two weeks after blasting the Bush Administration for threatening to cut a key acid rain monitoring program used across Upstate New York, today U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer revealed that the Administration is planning to further gut anti-acid rain efforts by completely slashing funding to two additional programs. The President is planning to cut the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Temporally Integrated Monitoring of Ecosystems program (TIME) and the Long-Term Monitoring (LTM) program which are critical federal programs that work to combat acid rain across New York State and the country by examining the acidity of lakes and streams.

Today, Schumer, a longtime crusader against acid rain - which has already decimated scores of pristine parks, forests and lakes across the state - called on the Senate Committee in charge of these programs' budgets to immediately restore their funding levels.

"The Bush Administration's budget cuts continue to eat away at anti-acid rain programs that are vital to protecting New York State's forests, lakes and rivers," said Senator Schumer. "With acid rain already decimating so many of New York State's precious parks, lakes and rivers, it is inconceivable that we would now slash funding to federal programs that are vital to combating acid rain. It is absolutely critical that scientists and environmentalists fighting this scourge have the tools they need."

These two programs work together to collect data on the prevalence of acid rain throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states by examining the acidity of lakes and streams. The two programs take different statistical approaches to monitoring, and both approaches are necessary to provide scientists and policy-makers with a thorough understanding of the effects of acid rain.

The LTM program makes frequent measurements over many years of the chemistry of a set of acid-sensitive lakes and streams, allowing scientists to evaluate trends in acidity in these sensitive areas.

The TIME program, by contrast, monitors a statistically chosen sample of lakes and streams once per year, and allows scientists to determine what proportion of the lakes and streams in a region is affected. Together, the two methods provide a clear picture both of trends in acidity over time and also of its extent over the landscape at any given moment. Scientists and policy-makers need both types of information in order to solve the problem of acid rain.

Schumer sent a letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, under the Senate Committee on Appropriations, calling on it to restore funding at the historic $800,000. The bill is set to move to conference with its House companion bill. Schumer urged that the funding be restored during conference.

Earlier this month, Schumer sent a letter to the Senate Subcommittee, calling on it to restore full funding for CASTNET, a third acid rain monitoring program that measures acid rain pollutants in the air.

"We need all three of these programs in full force as we wage battle against acid rain," Schumer stressed today. "Cutting funding for any or all of them would be a terrible blow to our efforts."

Twenty years ago, acid rain was devastating the Eastern half of the United States. Congress, the EPA, state and local governments acknowledged the damage that unregulated emissions of certain acid-rain-producing pollutants were having on the environment. They took decisive action to curtail those emissions, and today, acid rain is not as bad as it once was. However, in certain parts of the country, acid rain continues to be a major ecological problem. The Northeast is the region most affected by this problem, with the Adirondacks in Upstate New York being brutally hit.

As a result of decades of acid rain, more than 500 of the Adirondack Park's 2,800 lakes and ponds are too acidic to support their native life. Thousands of acres of high-elevation red spruce and fir forests have been wiped out and mercury contamination exacerbated by acid rain has been documented in more than 20 Adirondack lakes, making the fish unfit to eat.

Schumer emphasized that acid rain is a statewide and national problem, with every region in New York possessing dangerously acidic rain. Catskill Park's forests and lakes have also been severely impacted by acid rain, as have the Great Lakes of Western New York and the Finger Lakes.

Acid rain has been attributed to sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx), chemicals that can be transported in the wind, causing environmental and health problems hundreds of miles away. Fine particles can pose serious health risks, especially for people with heart or lung disease (including asthma) and older adults and children. Ground-level ozone can irritate the respiratory system, aggravate asthma, reduce lung capacity and increase people's susceptibility to respiratory illnesses like pneumonia and bronchitis.

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