The response to this crisis is a long standing Canadian version of dithering-while-Rome-burns, except that it is our forests dissolving from airborne sulfuric acid, and our lakes dying because the water is too acidic to support biological systems more complex than the ones involved in making pulp and paper products. Acid rain is a currently unfashionable but solvable problem. It hasn’t been taken seriously because both our governments and our industrial chiefs believe that the general public hasn’t got the attention span of a milk cow. The result has been a twenty-year multigovernment Alphonse & Gaston jamboree so dumb it wouldn’t get a laugh in a milking barn.