Environmental policy of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, were people with a history of opposition to the agency they were named to head. Since the environmental movement of the 1970s, the nature of environmental issues has changed. While the initial emphasis was on conventional air and water pollutants, which were the most obvious and easily measurable problems, newer issues are long-term problems that are not easily discernible and can be surrounded by controversy. Acid deposition, in the form of acid rain and dry deposition, is the result of sulfur and nitrogen dioxide being emitted into the air, traveling and landing in a different place, and
Period 2 element (including hydrogen, carbon, and sulfur). Many oxides are extremely stable substances difficult to decompose—like water, carbon dioxide, alumina, silica, and iron oxides (the latter often appearing as rust). Oxygen is part of substances best described as some salts of metals and oxygen-containing acids (thus nitrates, sulfates, phosphates, silicates, and carbonates. Oxygen is essential to all life. Plants and phytoplankton photosynthesize water and carbon dioxide and water, both oxides, in the presence of sunlight to form sugars with the release of oxygen. The sugars are then turned into such substances as cellulose and (with nitrogen and often sulfur) proteins and other