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
Nitrogen dioxide is a consequence of preferential absorption of light in the blue (400 – 500 nm), although the absorption extends throughout the visible (at shorter wavelengths) and into the infrared (at longer wavelengths). Absorption of light at wavelengths shorter than about 400 nm results in photolysis (to form NO + O, atomic oxygen); in the atmosphere the addition of O atom so formed to O results in ozone formation. Nitrogen dioxide typically arises via the oxidation of nitric oxide by oxygen in air: Nitrogen dioxide is formed in most combustion processes using air as the oxidant. At elevated temperatures nitrogen combines