US air quality is slipping after years of improvement | Hacker News Reader

US air quality is slipping after years of improvement

apnews.com

70 pointsgilad22 comments

As someone living in Washington state who dealt with wildfire smoke in 2017 and 2018 it's important to note the paragraph in the article that mentions that the 2017 data was largely affected by wildfires. In our state, a lot of these originate in Canada.

It's an important note because the takeaway comments I see so far are directly implicating looser EPA regulations, when we don't have data to support that, yet.

I lived in Western Canada since 93 and it’s crazy how bad the last two years have been. Calgary’s August was brutal.

Do you think there's been any focus on ways to prevent these more? I imagine they are in very remote regions where there actually is very low risk of harm directly from the fires. I wonder if there is any possibility of using drones or satellite imaging to identify them early in a way that allows them to be put out before it becomes too expensive a problem to tackle.

I don't know if that would actually help though because a lot of people argue it's a change in forest management and prescribed burns that allows these bigger problems to develop.

Bad the last couple years in northern California as well.

Where can I find the data they refer to? These articles are maddening: they try hard to sound scienc-y and factual, yet they omit any reference that was used to draw their conclusions.

They'll reply suggesting you do a simple Google search

Note that air crosses borders, and wildfires are a primary cause of poor air quality days; the measure mentioned by the AP.

Wildfires are often manmade and exacerbated by climate change. Besides it doesn't matter what chokes you in the end dead is dead.

I don't know if the US has air quality norms? If so it could force strong measures that impact the economy.

> I don't know if the US has air quality norms? If so it could force strong measures that impact the economy.

They have rather strong ones, a lot of people are completely ignorant of how this stuff works. The U.S. tracks air quality across the country with a rather high resolution[0][1]; here in Canada we don't seem to have anywhere near the quality of reporting[2], and the air quality seems similar.

[0]: https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow/ [1]: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=... [2]: https://weather.gc.ca/airquality/pages/index_e.html

I wonder how much difference Gasoline Direct Injection has made. To meet fuel economy mandates it’s in most new car and light truck engines, and it produces way more particulates than engines that use normal fuel injection.

http://maps.who.int/airpollution/

That’s not a generic air pollution map, just particulate pollution which often gets really bad due to dry areas. Which is why the the Sahara desert is so bad without people.

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