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A little-known pollution rule keeps the air dirty for millions of Americans
- infecto 3y agoI love clean air but I find the article's title and opener a little unrealistic. I probably missed the gist here of the article but it seems to me this number being calculated by the EPA is being used to go after local governments and commercial polluters. They have no control over pollution from wildfires. Do we measure the number in the AM and decide its too high and tell everyone in the plant to go home for the day? Pollution is bad but this to be going after it the wrong way, should we not be focusing more on the past few years of insane wildfires?
- dangus 3y agoIt also seems like the EPA has the power to accept or deny requests: > 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.”
- giantg2 3y agoBut everything is a loophole if you don't like it.
- bombcar 3y agoFor the purposes of tracking direct man-made pollution ignoring wildfires and other “acts of God” is the way to go. You get absurd data otherwise - none of the EPA’s tools “work” against wildfire pollution so it makes sense to factor that out. 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.
- master-lincoln 3y agoIs there any evidence most wild fires are not direct consequence of human action? This "act of good" argument seems disingenuous as even if no direct human action caused the fire, there is evidence that human actions caused general higher risks for wild fires in certain areas.
- bombcar 3y agoSomething can be the consequences of human action and still not under the purview of the particular agency. 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.
- bluGill 3y agoForesters have been complaining for years that they are not allowed to manage forests the way they should be. Every time they try to start a fire to burn of underbrush someone goes to court to get an injunction against it.
- mrpopo 3y ago> none of the EPA’s tools “work” against wildfire pollution so it makes sense to factor that out. 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.
- jihiggins 3y agoWhy is a single day of productivity more important than the health of the country? Also, the last few years of insane wildfires are in part due to climate change. We're way past the point of both having and eating that particular cake, as it's long past its expiration date. That said, Covid has already seen us pick "productivity" over what was basically the health of the entire country, so...
- vuln 3y ago[flagged]
- brutusborn 3y agoI chose the CNN one at random, it doesn’t mention the motive of the arsonists. I don’t think you can just assume they are all due to climate activists.
- ceejayoz 3y agoAs far as I can tell, only one of them hints at even a potential political motive, and that was an animal rights activist burning down a slaughterhouse.
- ejb999 3y agodoesn't really matter what the motives are - the news regularly tell us that the wildfires are a result of climate change (with no proof) - when in fact a lot of them are caused by arsonists - clearly not by climate change. Nothing wrong with calling out lies in the media.
- Qwertious 3y agoThe key metric of wildfires that climate change affects is their intensity - once the fire is lit, they'll cause far more destruction and burn much longer in a hot, dry environment than they will in a cold wet one.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> Do we measure the number in the AM and decide its too high and tell everyone in the plant to go home for the day? 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.
- usrusr 3y agoIf there was some backroom conspiracy on a mission to erode pollution standards, this is how they would do it: "What about natural disasters! Why are counties getting a free pass when nature strikes, but not when industry operates!" 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.
- giantg2 3y agoNot to mention that some of that smoke is coming from other jurisdictions (Canada) that we can't control.
- faeriechangling 3y agoI mean America could always liberate Canada…
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoUSA can control half the World when they want to impose profit-making sanctions against Huawei, or to increase copyright terms; I can't see how they couldn't do something on air pollution if they wished to. 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?
- giantg2 3y agoThe wildfire smoke affected air quality for much for the north eastern US for a few weeks this year. What is the solution to that? Forcing Canada to do more controlled burns?
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
- dp-hackernews 3y agoNatural fires have been happening naturally for, what millions of years? All of the rest of nature seems to be able to cope with that, and even we've survived up until today... 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?
- ceejayoz 3y ago> All of the rest of nature seems to be able to cope with that, and even we've survived up until today... 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.
- rob74 3y agoAnd that desire for control leads humans to suppress small fires, which then leads them to build settlements literally in the middle of the forest and to neglect trimming trees around power lines because fires are kept under control, until, because of drought caused by climate change it's not possible to keep them under control anymore, and then you get huge fires which cause pollution thousands of miles away (and the destruction of the settlements in the middle of the forest and also some which were previously thought at a safe distance)...
- btilly 3y ago
- almostnormal 3y agoWhy are the air quality measurement devices located on the roof (pictures in tge article)? Fresh air is up there, but what people breathe is air closer to the surface.
- quercusa 3y agoThere's not going to be any significant difference between 2m and 10m. 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/program/X030FullDocumentD0.pdf http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/documentation/progr...
- phonon 3y agoHow do you know those instruments in the photo are measuring temperature?
- giantg2 3y agoI'd assume (maybe wrongly) proper air measurement would require some adjustment for things like density based on altitude, temperature, etc so there's a standard to compare it to.
- stephen_g 3y agoThe cylindrical unit half way up the pole and to the right with the louvres is a solar radiation shield that would be typical for containing a thermometer and possibly a humidity sensor - the louvres let the air through without letting direct sunlight hit the thermometer and throw off its reading. 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.
- 3y ago
- trimethylpurine 3y agoClick bait title for an article that confuses the EPA with the Department of Health.
- hirundo 3y agoFrom the graphs in the article it's clear that the omitted days were very close to each other, almost a vertical line in some. That seems to indicate that these are from particular events, rather than just chopping out inconveniently high readings that happen to cross the line. Not that this rule can't be abused, but these spikes look like relatively isolated events that local enforcers may have no control over.
- spandextwins 3y agoAll these fires and train derailments, what's really going on?
- ceejayoz 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion Train derailments have happened the entire time. We have a thousand a year in the USA.
- polytely 3y agoif there is an increase in train derailments it probably is related to the insane understaffing https://hbr.org/2022/12/u-s-railroads-and-the-pitfalls-of-systematic-understaffing https://hbr.org/2022/12/u-s-railroads-and-the-pitfalls-of-sy...
- brutusborn 3y agoIs there good evidence that either are becoming more frequent? 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.
- giantg2 3y agoHow does the exceptional event exception "keep the air dirty"? What are they actually proposing changing when it comes to things like wildfire smoke?
- jjk166 3y agoThis is exactly how the law ought to work. We make exceptions for events that would legitimately obfuscate the data and there is a strict review process (less than 20% of requested exceptions got approved). Increasing numbers of wildfires are a concern, but it's a problem totally unrelated to the EPA's air quality monitoring. The EPA isn't keeping air dirty, it's keeping human activity from making the air excessively more dirty, which is what it's supposed to do.
- jackbravo 3y agoBut, but but. If an event makes the air super dirty, the government should look for ways to make sure we all put our gran of salt on fixing the problem, instead of hiding it.
- rando_dfad 3y ago> the government 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?
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoAgreed. Must be a slow news day or something? This is a non issue
- mrpopo 3y agoYes, let's keep believing that the increase in wildfires isn't in any way related to human activity at all (climate change and bad forestry practices don't exist). Dust storms in Asia spread further and further (because of deforestation), is that also totally unrelated to human activity?
- malfist 3y agoEPA regulation is not going to reduce wildfires. Conflating it's pollution measurements with those from non-industrial sources just makes EPA's job harder and less meaningful.
- PopAlongKid 3y agoI use the EPA AirNow site[0] from time to time, and it seems to me they don't "hide" anything, even during wildfires, which I am affected by. [0]https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow https://gispub.epa.gov/airnow
- taeric 3y agoOn the days of the outlier events, I don't think it is exactly hidden on how things are going, is it? I certainly know when wildfires are causing bad air here and we don't go out on those days, if we can avoid it. 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.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoCan we have a new rule? Anytime a clickbait headline such as this is posted, the top comment is just a reworked headline with the missing pieces revealed.
- samtho 3y agoI find it difficult to believe that people would be shocked to discover that datapoints can be removed as a result of the spike identified as non-human-caused pollution. 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.
- mayneack 3y agoI doubt we can control something like a volcano, but the main example in the article, wildfires, can absolutely be controlled more than they are today. 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.
- samtho 3y agoIt sounds like we’re either measuring the wrong thing or putting too much weight behind a measurement that sums up an inherently complex system. This measurement matters enough to be able to petition days to be excluded, why can’t we just codify the exclusion of clearly out-of-normal datapoints? Ignoring everything else, a random spike caused by anything transient is not useful information to us, our goals need to be aligned to the trend over time.
- mayneack 3y agoIn an ideal world, I don't think opinionated manipulation of the underlying dataset is a good idea. If you want to avoid outliers dominating your analysis, you should aggregate it in an outlier resistant method like using the median or other percentile based strategy. 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.
- Wonderdonkey 3y agoOn a little bit of a tangent, this article made me think about how far we've come in terms of air quality in Southern California. We can and should always do better. But in my high school years, we had up to 160 hazardous/very unhealthy air days in a year, and up to 305 mildly unhealthy to very unhealthy days that same year (1981). For comparison, in 2022, we had one hazardous/very unhealthy day, and fewer than 10 every year from 2007 on, with the exception of 2020. That actually inspires me when we see actual results from the efforts. 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 http://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev01b.php