Bush Sr. Solved the Acid Rain Problem. Trump Is Bringing It Back.

With bombs in Iran and deregulation at home, Trump seems determined to resurrect one of the most apocalyptic images of the 1980s.

Images of black rain pelting one of the world’s oldest civilizations, after the United States and Israel bombed Iran’s oil depots this week, are tough to unsee. Many news outlets are calling it “acid rain”—a term that may understate the problem, since the smog caused by this bombing is likely even more toxic than typical air pollution. While there’s stiff competition for the most horrifying headline out of this war so far (given the disregard for civilian lives and the complete lack of an endgame), this one feels particularly surreal—a nightmarish blast from the past.

Acid rain is not a phrase we have heard much in recent years. That’s because it is a problem that was largely solved during the first Bush administration. The phrase was probably first coined in the nineteenth century by a chemist named Robert Angus Smith, to describe the polluted rain in Manchester, England—a place whose industrial pollution was hauntingly described by Elizabeth Gaskell in her novel North and South, as well as by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England­­­­—but it was not taken seriously by North American scientists, or popularized in the........

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