How can you stop acid rain and photochemical smog?

Question

How can you stop acid rain and photochemical smog?

Answer 1

Acid rain is primarily caused by sulfur containing fuels, primarily diesel and coal. These fuels emit sulfur dioxide when burned, which then transforms to sulfuric acid resulting in acid rain. To stop it you must reduce or eliminate sulfur in fuels. Regulations to reduce sulfur content of fuels have been in effect for a couple of decades now and have been effective in significantly reducing sulfur emissions. New much stricter regulations are just now going into effect to drastically reduce allowable sulfur levels and can be expected to dramatically reduce acid rain over time, but as long as we burn fossil fuels it will be impractical to completely eliminate it.

Photochemical smog is made of a mixture of nitrogen oxides, ozone, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), peroxyacyl nitrates (PAN), and aldehydes (R'O).

The primary pollutants are NOx and VOC's they combined with air and sunlight to cook up the other components of smog.

Nitrogen oxides are released in the exhaust of fossil fuel-burning engines in cars, trucks, coal power plants, and industrial manufacturing factories. VOC's are vapors released from anthropogenic (man-made) sources such as gasoline, paints, solvents, pesticides, and biogenic sources, such as pine and citrus tree emissions.

In order to stop smog we must eliminate NOx and VOC em missions. A number of steps have been taken to do that , catalytic converters for instance reduce both from tail-pipe emissions. Another measure is the reformulation of paints to reduce VOC emissions. However, much more is required to reduce smog to a negligible problem.

One important step will be the replacement of fossil fuel energy sources with renewables like solar power and wind power. As we phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewable fuels both smog and acid rain will start to disappear entirely. This will be an important side benefit of the efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which because it causes global warming is of much greater urgency than other pollutants.