Thirty years ago, taller smokestacks on the east coast were reducing local air pollution. But an unexpected byproduct was killing forests and aquatic life — acid rain.
Some people said that too little was known about the causes of acid rain to warrant doing anything. EDF scientists responded by assembling multi-year data on smokestack emissions and comparing the up-and-down pattern with acid rain data.
An irrefutable correlation emerged, helping to break the policy logjam in Washington. In 1990, Congress passed a law to cut acid rain pollution in half.
To do this analysis in the 1980s, the scientists needed to take over EDF’s entire computer system. “Today”, one of the scientists said, “I could do it all on my phone!”