A little-known pollution rule keeps the air dirty for millions of Americans
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Agree with your general sentiment; the article headline may be a bit of clickbait.
The challenge is what arm of the government has jurisdiction for what cause of harm?
Dust storms in Asia spread further and further (because of deforestation), is that also totally unrelated to human activity?
The point is that there needs to be a regulatory government tool to assess, measure, predict and prevent human-caused natural pollution, be it from dust storms or wildfires or anything else.
If you believe that shouldn't be the EPA's job, then it needs to be someone else's.
Also, if you have read the article, you could see that Ohio and Pennsylvania were low on the list, with <10 days excluded. California and New Mexico have >50, and that smoke ain't coming from Canada, so your point is deceptive...
That being said, the question "who should tackle forest fires" is completely irrelevant to how the EPA should implement their emissions standards.
I did not explicitly say whether it should be the EPA's job or not. The data being nixed is at the local level. No one said it should be ignored at higher levels.
> Also, if you have read the article, you could see that Ohio and Pennsylvania were low on the list, with <10 days excluded. California and New Mexico have >50, and that smoke ain't coming from Canada, so your point is deceptive...
Sorry, but it is not deceptive. You just seem to fail to understand there can be local level data useful for regulating local companies and macro level data for getting a better overall picture. The article was specifically talking about lower than state level. Should a forest or industrial fire two counties over ruin another county? At least for California, I would imagine the locals have great motivation to have something they have no control over stricken from their record since the state more than likely uses EPA numbers in ways that could hurt them.
Not in the US so I'm perhaps missing some context related to which bodies are responsible for which regulation but... why can't EPA regulation reduce wildfires?
Conceivably, the EPA could demand changes in forest stewardship, but a lot of the wildfires are already in national forest land, so the nation forest service would be a more appropriate agency.
EPA could perhaps help issue guidelines and emission allowances for prescriptive burns that should probabalistically reduce wildfire emissions, but will absolutely have emissions during the burns.
The issue highlighted in the article seems to be with the broad classification of all wildfires by the EPA as “natural” or “uncontrollable” events - it's pretty clear that this isn't the reality for the majority of recent wildfires. Though wildfires are historically a natural & necessary occurrence, manmade wildfires are a well-documented occurrence & something the EPA seems well-positioned to take action on.
Unless, that is, I as an ignorant non-US observer am unaware of some other regulatory body that is already (or is better suited to) regulating human contribution to wildfire frequency.
But from an emissions standpoint, the proximate cause of a wildfire is irrelevant. The fact is that a wildfire's emissions are not due to industrial pollution, which is what the EPA regulates.
They can be and are regulated, often by controlled burn bans. Climate change isn't the sole human cause of uncontrolled wildfires, nor do they need to be intentional to be suggested to (proximate) human decisions.
> Mother nature doesn't respond to court summons...
Conceivably, the EPA could demand changes in forest ownership. When government owns things it does whatever. Some of the worst pollution was from socialst countries without meaningful private property.
This seems tautological? Surely the proposal here is a change to said standards to increase their utility?
You'll need to define "legitimately obfuscate" here - presumably you're proposing that a majority of data consumers would consider wildfires irrelevant in their assessment of air quality. Why do you think this?
Anecdata but off the top of my head I can only think of data consumption in which wildfires would be relevant - excluding the data gives a harmfully incomplete picture.
It also strikes me that data annotation would solve whatever your use-case might be if data needs to be excluded?
in which case this seems to posit that measures to reduce human causes of wildfires are not valid pollution control measures?
But the EPA should be tracking and controlling ALL sources of pollution. This is like politicians deciding PI should be 3. EPA numbers are now meaningless, which is probably the point.
We can’t regulate acts of nature, even if these acts are made worse by carbon emissions, as it’s useless to include data about these events as the EPA regulations are focused on voluntary emissions.
The real problem is that we rely on the blunt instrument of overall air quality to measure elective pollution in a shared atmosphere. This is far from my area of expertise so I don’t know how or if it’s possible to fix this measurement problem.
If your dataset excludes natural fires, but doesn't exclude controlled burns, for example, controlled burns would end up looking more negative because they cause pollution and don't get "credit" for any prevention.
If you allow for manipulating the data, especially on such a politically charged subject, the manipulation method itself will get gamed like it seems is happening here.
How can you be so sure? What about controlled burns?
The issue highlighted in the article is that human-caused pollution is being misclassified as non-human-caused pollution. Nothing more to it.
> In total, local regulators made note of almost 700 exceptional events. The EPA agreed to adjust the data on 139 of them.
So the EPA is only making adjustments for 20% of the events, and it seems like the EPA has the ultimate authority here. Doesn’t seem like there’s an issue.
I think I’d take issue with the article calling this a loophole when it’s exactly how the law was designed to operate.
If I had to take the opposite stance I would say that our lungs and bodies can’t tell the difference where the pollution comes from. Perhaps a state with more frequent wildfires does need to have more stringent human-made emissions standards than states that have few wildfires to keep the overall air quality at an acceptable level.
As an analogy, a state with more snowfall might need to spend more money on snow removal and road resurfacing. We don’t just throw up our arms and say “sorry we aren’t doing anything about it because it isn’t the state’s fault.”
However, later misuse of the data for other purposes may cause issues - if you were very sensitive to pollution you’d want to know where the wildfire areas are and avoid them, and the EPA data doesn’t show that.
The EPA could likely require changes to certain things that might mitigate some possible causes of wildfires (like building clearances, smokestack spark arrestors, etc) - but other cases of "human caused" including direct arson aren't under it's jurisdiction.
The problem comes when there's stuff that falls through the cracks as it is under nobody's jurisdiction.
Factor that out for part of the analysis on one hand, and include it and add some new tools to the EPA on the other.
Wildfires are made worse by bad forest management and climate change, and the USA isn't a small player in the field. Claiming that it can't have an impact is preposterous.
That said, Covid has already seen us pick "productivity" over what was basically the health of the entire country, so...
In the places where air quality tends to be low, perhaps we just have regulations enforcing minimum air cycling and filtration levels.
"Close everything" isn't the only available mitigation.
I don't believe that the root cause of this article is anything like that (sibling comment points out an interesting subtlety, why are they allowed to hide the numbers, instead of granting a visible exception in terms of enforcement?), but it would look pretty much the same.
Find a way to make it make absurd profits for USA business and it'll happen.
Aside from that, is Canadian produced air pollution a problem in USA?
What is the solution to that? Forcing Canada to do more controlled burns?
In theory, we napalm and some F-16s laying around somewhere. It would be a very American solution to the problem. Doubly so if we avoid doing controlled burns in our territory.
Look up images of LA pollution in the 1970s and 1980s. It was madness. And even with that obvious, visible soup we called air back then, there was extreme resistance to anti-pollution measures.
Reference: air quality index by year: http://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php
I can kind of see how it is annoying to allow outliers to be struck from target measuring goals. That said, I also don't see how or why it helps people that are trying to hit targets to include the outliers that they didn't cause. If anything, that would help obscure if they were also rising.
A better question might be why they are measuring temperature there on a hot roof and not over grass. According to NOAA, that's a Class 5 location (the worst):
Class 5 (error ≥ 5ºC) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface. (Section 2.2.1 of the U. S. Climate Reference Network Site Information Handbook)
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/documentation/progr...
But I’m sure they aren’t using it as a calibrated value (obviously they would have guidelines for placement and would know this doesn’t meet them), it’s probably just being used as an indicative reading.
The seas also get "polluted" by underwater volcanic vents, amongst other natural things, constantly...
It makes no sense to stand over a fire and inhale the smoke, or to drink the water from too close to those vents, but are we really trying to change the nature of the planet?
I mean, who's going to stop the sand from the Sahara Desert making it's way over to the UK for everything that breaths air to breath in, not to mention leaving a layer of red dust everywhere, especially on vehicles and the like, caught by the dew that happens naturally when the temperature changes.
Shouldn't the focus be more on what industry is doing to the air and water and soil, and what we seem to be inadvertently supporting with the present lifestyle?
Extinctions are a very natural thing, too. Polio is natural. Smallpox was. Humans tend to want some control over the environment they live in.
> Shouldn't the focus be more on what industry is doing to the air and water and soil, and what we seem to be inadvertently supporting with the present lifestyle?
"Is the air clean" statistics should reflect if the air is clean, as a variety of decisions on ventilation, filtration, etc. rely on it. "Is the air polluted by humans" is a different question.
That said, global warming isn't the top cause of the problem, either. A century of fire suppression is.
Most people forget that the Sahara Desert is man-made. Back during the Cathigenian period, the southern Mediterranian was the breadbasket of Rome, and the land was verdant plains, antelope, hippos, rivers and streams everywhere.
So we killed it.
Train derailments have happened the entire time. We have a thousand a year in the USA.
I’ve seen some rough evidence for wildfires increasing, but in most places this seems to be a function of less aggressive forest management (controlled burns and clearing).
For trains, I would guess that overall train frequency is increasing over time (more people need more stuff transported) so the frequency of derailments should increase proportionally.
https://hbr.org/2022/12/u-s-railroads-and-the-pitfalls-of-sy...