(FORTUNE Magazine) – You may not believe it, but we claim authorship of the headline above. It was not produced by chimps randomly banging on a keyboard or by CBS moles infiltrated into the Keeping Up production department. But then, who would have believed 60 Minutes -- usually a liberal patsy on environmental issues -- capable of producing that gem about acid rain? We allude to the December 30 show debunking the acid rain menace, mainly by just putting on camera various folks knowledgeable about the recent report from NAPAP -- the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program. Your servant became fascinated by the acid rain issue several years ago, partly as a result of editing two sterling FORTUNE articles on the subject by William M. Brown, an energy-environmental specialist and original thinker. He left us persuaded that the acid rain scare was based more on ideology than on empirical data -- that, in fact, the data then available showed acid rain to be a relatively minor problem on which it would be absurd to spend billions of tax dollars. Brown is, we believe, the only student of the acid rain issue to point out that acidification from bird droppings is a far greater problem for America's lakes and trees than the sulfur dioxide emissions involved in acid rain. Long remembered around here will be the lamentations of the FORTUNE reporter assigned to check and quantify this statement, along with her final conscientious estimate (150 million tons of droppings a year) of the amounts involved. The acid rain ideology centers on a fairy tale about greedy business despoiling virginal nature. Few politicians seem willing or able to talk back to this image, and the Bush Administration caved in completely last fall. This was when the Prexy decided that an ''environmental President'' had no choice but to sign the Clean Air Act (which will cause maybe $6 billion a year to be spent on acid rain prevention), all of which also required him to ignore NAPAP research in which the federal government had invested $500 million. To be sure, Bush was not alone in walking nervously past these research findings. The New York Times and Washington Post, both invincibly committed to the Clean Air Act, have yet to acknowledge editorially that the NAPAP final report is at odds with the act. We offer them no hurrays and trust they get their fair share of droppings.