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.

“The images from Iran show that one bad policy decision can literally bring back life-threatening pollution overnight.”

From the [article](https://newrepublic.com/article/207709/acid-rain-iran-pollution-trump):

>Images of [black rain](https://share.google/pCzm92oWROymVxYDK) %5Bpelting%5D(https://www.reutersconnect.com/item/black-soot-after-reported-black-rain-following-a-strike-on-fuel-tanks-amid-the-us-israeli-conflict-with-iran-in-tehran/dGFnOnJldXRlcnMuY29tLDIwMjY6bmV3c21sX1JDMk0xS0FKNzEwRA%3D%3D) 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](https://www.euronews.com/video/2026/03/10/serious-water-crisis-on-horizon-as-middle-easts-desalination-plants-hit-and-acid-rain-fall) %5Bnews%5D(https://www.ft.com/content/d08d89bb-89f5-41c2-9835-e3ac59b67cfa) %5Boutlets%5D(https://fortune.com/2026/03/08/tehran-fire-smoke-acid-rain-us-war-israel-airstrikes-fuel-depot/) are calling it “acid rain”—a term that may [understate](https://www.euronews.com/video/2026/03/10/serious-water-crisis-on-horizon-as-middle-easts-desalination-plants-hit-and-acid-rain-fall) 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](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/us/politics/iran-school-missile-strike.html) %5Bheadline%5D(https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/human-rights-watch-says-that-israel-has-been-illegally-using-white-phosophorus-2026-03-10/) 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](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7028813/) 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 United States, until the 1960s, when ecologist Gene Likens discovered that air pollution caused by fossil fuels, when transmitted by rain into ecosystems, was devastating animal and plant life. At that point, acid rain became a target of serious campaigning, argument, and, of course, denial—much like climate change is today. When I was a child in the 1970s and ’80s, acid rain was one of the leading environmental problems in public discourse.