Editorial Mr. Reagan gets our goat

Americans (in the White House at least) do not seem to share the concern we Canadians have for a healthy, clean environment. They seem to place a higher value on technological supremacy, regardless of the cost.

That’s the message inherent in President Ronald Reagan’s recent endorsements of massive U.S. funding of two very different scientific research projects. The first, which is most familiar to Canadians, amounts to a promise to fulfill a year-old promise to endorse the recommendations of the joint U.S.-Canada Commission on Acid Rain. That commission recommended the U.S. spend more money on research into ways to burn coal more cleanly to cut down on acid rain. The cost? $2.5 billion(US) over the next five years. Mr Reagan’s renewed endorsement of this plan extends to about 15 years the length of time the Americans have been talking about acid rain.

In Canada, on the other hand, governments and industry have been doing something about the problem. They have taken some pretty tough measures to live up to a national commitment to cut by half acid-rain-causing emissions by 1990. Just last week, Noranda Inc. and the federal and Quebec governments announced funding plans to construct a $125-million sulphuric acid plant. It should cut by half sulphur dioxide emissions from the Horne smelter in Noranda, Que., by 1990. The acid plant will probably never be profitable, but it will keep alive and well the smelter, which is the lifeblood of 1,200 people. And Falconbridge Ltd. is spending $3 million over the next three years on research to reduce emissions from its copper-nickel smelter in Sudbury.

The second endorsement by Mr Reagan really gets our goat. In it he supports a Department of Energy plan to build a superconducting super collider, which has been described in the American press as a giant, expensive video game for high-energy particle physicists engaged in intellectual games. Designed to smash protons together at an energy of 40 tetraelectronvolts in an underground ring, 52 miles in diameter, it is estimated this megaproject will cost $6 billion(US) by the time it’s up and running in 1996. The Department of Energy and the physicists lobbying for the project fail to mention the scientific reasons they want to build the thing (to look for a hypothetical object called a Higgs boson that plugs a leak in the mathematical basket devised by physicists to hold the various particles of nature). Instead they stress the number of jobs it will create (4,500), the possible spin off technologies it will have (superconducting magnets) and the world- wide prestige it will bring the U.S.

Wouldn’t similar benefits come from a research and implementation plan for acid rain abatement? One of the painful points here is that similar physics could be accomplished in much cheaper colliders planned in Europe. In fact, if the U.S. project does go ahead, plans for a similar project in Europe would be scrapped to avoid duplication. And on top of all this, there are no guarantees the American machine will be successful in providing that ultimate “theory of everything” which physicists are seeking.

A determined research effort on a similar scale, directed at developing and implementing new, clean coal-burning technologies would, in our eyes, be seen by the world as a more practical and commendable undertaking for the U.S. and would carry many of the benefits being attributed to the supercollider project.