As U.S. wildfires pollute the skies, a loophole is obscuring the impact. Can it be fixed? ( www.muckrock.com )
An obscure part of the Clean Air Act grants regulators an opening to “forgive” air pollution from wildfires, meaning that it doesn’t count against air-quality goals. After wildfires flourished across North America this year, more U.S. states east of the Mississippi may use this exceptional events rule to subtract smoke from the record, if not from the air citizens breathe.
But these exceptional events are no longer exceptional, and the requests to obscure them from air-quality records are more common, according to a recent investigation. Without reform, the exceptional events rule is likely to become a regularly used tool, one that experts warn may divert resources or distract from addressing the growing problem of wildfire smoke.
