When it comes to combating acid rain, President Bush's "Clear Skies'' initiative is fundamentally flawed and inadequate to the task. Its overall premise is the right one, to be sure. It proposes steep nationwide reductions in air pollution by imposing caps on emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. But it provides no way of ensuring that every region of the country will benefit equally from cleaner air. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide are the two major contributors to acid rain, which drifts eastward from Midwestern states and descends over the Adirondacks, killing lakes and forests. In some areas of the Adirondacks, the soil is so lifeless that it will take generations to recover, if at all. That is all the more reason why the Bush plan, in the words of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, is too little, too late. And it is not only the health of the Adirondacks that is at risk. Millions of Americans who suffer from respiratory ailments also need to breathe cleaner air. "Clear Skies'' is flawed because while establishing caps, it also creates a trading system that will enable older, dirtier power plants to remain in operation simply by purchasing emission credits from newer, cleaner ones. Thus, while the national goal of reducing aggregate pollutants might be achieved, different regions of the nation will remain at risk. The Adirondacks are a case in point: They are downwind of older Ohio power plants that burn high-sulfur coal and are among the dirtiest in the nation. As a result, they are most in jeopardy from these emissions.

The utilities that own these dirty plants have every economic incentive to use credits to stay on line. They are cheaper
than installing expensive scrubbing equipment that would otherwise be needed to meet clean-air standards.   What's more, scrubbers reduce a power plant's fuel efficiency, acting much like the catalytic converters on an automobile.
But the payoff in cleaner air is worth the trade-off. Mr. Spitzer had been making some headway in taking these
utilities to court under the 1970 Clean Air Act, to force these utilities to install scrubbers. But "Clear Skies'' would
change the rules and halt the legal challenges.

The stakes are high. According to a recent report in the Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio led the nation in 2000 in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. Moreover, a new report shows 60 percent of the nation's dirtiest power plants have increased their outputs of sulfur dioxide, with 263 of them also increasing nitrogen oxide emissions.

This trend has to be stopped. But the cap-and-trade system envisioned by Mr. Bush won't do it. Eric Schaeffer, an EPA official who recently resigned in protest of Mr. Bush's environmental policies, puts it succinctly: "Continuing to
rely on a pollution-trading approach ... plays Russian roulette with the health of communities at the wrong end of
these schemes.'' And the Adirondacks are definitely at the wrong end.