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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

I 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?

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For 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.

> 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.

Is 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.

Something 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.

Foresters 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.

It 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.”

But everything is a loophole if you don't like it.

Why 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...

productivity is what feeds and powers the country. it's amazing how many people forget that no amount of financial engineering will permanently abstract the physical output of goods and services countries produce. there's a line between PE vultures juicing the marginal penny and just totally discarding productivity.

> 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.

If 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.

Not to mention that some of that smoke is coming from other jurisdictions (Canada) that we can't control.

I mean America could always liberate Canada…

Would that mean we'd get to have Freedom Bacon alongside the Freedom Fries?

Well software job salaries would probably go up.

No, we'd get the Puerto Rico treatment.

USA 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?

The 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?

It affected other parts of the US for a lot longer than that. On the upside, the sunsets this summer were absolutely stunning.

> 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.

Does the reverse not happen in the Northern of the States of USA? Are approaches better in USA, do you do more controlled burns? Is wind direction generally Southerly along the border?

Along the New York / Canadian border, yes the wind is generally southerly and easterly, very rarely are you getting the wind to go up from new york and into Canada. Since the fires were in Ontario, that wind brought it over Lake Ontario, and down across new york and down the coast.

Thanks for the info.

It was bad for a week or so here in Kansas. Like you could see the haze easily against a building/tree 1/4 mile away.

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