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?
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.
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?
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?