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Earth United States

Western US Wildfires Undo Two Decades of Air Quality Progress (axios.com) 32

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Increasingly intensive and frequent wildfires in the western U.S. are deteriorating air quality and causing more premature deaths, a new study found. Fires have damaged federal efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve air quality mainly through reductions in automobile emissions, per the study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health. From 2000 to 2020, air quality has worsened in the western U.S. due to wildfires. Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found. The fires have also caused an increase of 670 premature deaths per year in the region in the two-decade span. Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. had no major declines in air quality during the same time period.

Our air is supposed to be cleaner and cleaner due mostly to EPA regulations on emissions, but the fires have limited or erased these air-quality gains," said Jun Wang, the study's lead corresponding author and chair of the University of Iowa's Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, in a statement. "[A]ll the efforts for the past 20 years by the EPA to make our air cleaner basically have been lost in fire-prone areas and downwind regions," Wang added. "We are losing ground."

[Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA] said the findings were consistent with other studies that contribute to the same overall picture that after the air quality regulations' great success, "the extremes of those air pollution episodes are actually now increasing again" due to wildfires. "On average, the air quality is still better, but the problem is, it's during these episodes of just-near apocalyptic conditions where we're really losing a lot of ground and that really is because the size and the intensity of wildfires has increased greatly," he said. Given climate change is a wildfire driver, keeping global heating to the lowest level possible will help. "But we're still going to see more warming no matter what moving forward, and so there will be further increases in the wildfire hazard," Swain said.

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Western US Wildfires Undo Two Decades of Air Quality Progress

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  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2023 @11:39PM (#64058941)

    poor forest management, including suppression of smaller natural recurring fires so we get great conflagrations instead.

    Climate alarmist paycheck receiver wails his doom nonsense but experts have already weighed in

    • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @01:31AM (#64059047)

      Just typical California. The state government taxes the shit out of us and nobody knows what happens to the money after that. We're basically just paying mandatory bribes. It...could go into forest management...but no, that would be too productive... Right now we're busy spending billions to figure out how many more billions should be spent on a high speed train to nowhere. But don't worry, they won't actually build a train to nowhere, instead they'll just build the world's most awesome diagram of it.

      • Don't forget the $26 billion budget hole.

        Someone has to pay for that. And since I fled the state last year, it ain't gunna be me, buddy! For each one of the millions of us who ran away the rest of you are going to have to pay that much more and receive even fewer lower quality services going forward.

        Why are you still there?

        • Actually I moved here last year from Arizona for a new job. The pay I was offered to do so is out of this world, so overall a decent net gain. But still, I feel like I'm donating money to people who make even more than I do. Meanwhile the rsilverguns of the world with net negative tax burdens blame all of their problems on those of us who work for a living because apparently he feels he's not being subsidized fairly.

          NB: Word on the street in LA is that San Francisco is so bad lately that people literally le

          • Dude, it's a trap. I was there from junior high until last year, several decades. I pulled down big salaries but ultimately returned a huge amount of it in taxes and higher cost of living.

            Now I have a way better life, better services, nicer people, way lower crime, lower costs on almost everything and my stress level has dropped to near zero.

            I don't know your situation obviously but be careful. I strongly suggest you come up with a tipping point that will trigger you leaving again. It could be a certain

      • Just typical California. The state government taxes the shit out of us and nobody knows what happens to the money after that. We're basically just paying mandatory bribes. It...could go into forest management...but no

        Most forest in California is Federal property. The state of California cannot manage Federal property.

        Of the approximately 33 million acres of forest in California, federal agencies (including the USDA Forest Service and USDI Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service) own and manage 19 million acres (57%).

        • by NetNed ( 955141 )
          Management of forests in California, including on federal land, does not fall 100% in the hands of the feds. There are multiple agencies involved from both the state and federal level involved
  • ..and all of the billions spent on weapons like the B2 that sit idle are wasted, while the real enemy destroys towns
    I wonder what the reaction would have been if it was ISIS that destroyed Paradise California?
    Fire is our real, powerful and always present enemy

  • by NaCh0 ( 6124 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @01:01AM (#64059029) Homepage

    Environmentalists block forest management efforts then complain about the fires.

    https://abc7.com/big-bear-fore... [abc7.com]

    And when not enough natural fires are started, they will use arson to keep the global warming narratives alive:

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u... [nbcnews.com]

    And let's not talk about Maui where they blocked the use of water to stop the town from burning down.

    https://www.civilbeat.org/2023... [civilbeat.org]

    We still don't know how many people died in Maui.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by elainerd ( 94528 )

      No, we can never solve problems.

      This causes revenue streams to dry up. Sure, they could use controlled fires to routinely burn out the underbrush and keep the national and state forests clean, walkable charming places (just like they do in states that don't have massive wildfires every year)....but that would solve the problem that they have engineered to create revenue streams for...

      Besides, do you really want to deny the industries that rely on burning down vast numbers of residences in these states. How

    • Environmentalists block forest management efforts then complain about the fires.

      The forest management efforts were originally blocked by government. Some of the first laws in California prohibited natives from doing controlled burns. Now we are literally going back to using native practices (the specific way they did their burns) in California because as it turns out even after we tried to wipe them out and nearly succeeded they still have retained more knowledge about how to do it well than we have managed to invent. We have a growing number of native fire crews like e.g. the one belo [karuk.us]

  • Or something equally unlikely to be enforceable, much less have the desired effect.

  • by clifwlkr ( 614327 ) on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @09:10AM (#64059783)
    I live in the mountains in the western US and the town I live in has now banned new installations of woodstoves and fireplaces. We have massive beetle kill and tons of dead trees everywhere. Fortunately, I am grandfathered in and have a woodstove I can burn some of this free wood in. But because of potential pm 2.5, they won't let houses for the last 10 years take advantage of this. So we had a large wildfire, dumping who knows how much pm 2.5 into the air, and now for the last 2 years they have been cutting the dead trees for safety, and burning them in huge slash piles instead of in a nice wood stove with reburners that reduce 2.5. The whole neighborhood has been full of smoke....

    We need to take the initiative here and realize that we want people cutting their own firewood and burning it in EPA approved stoves to help with the problem. Instead, we ban it to save the planet, so it then can burn in uncontrolled and much dirtier methodologies, thus destroying the planet. The logic of this is beyond crazy, and is one of the reasons we have forest management problems....
    • It's kind of frustrating, living on a literal woodlot and having to jump through a ton of hoops to get a wood stove installed. Especially when you're forced to use electric heating, and the power goes out anytime it snows or there's any kind of wind.
      I get the air quality argument in town, but out in the sticks it's just foolishness. It's like they don't realize that every spring/fall just about everyone out here has massive burn piles, which is apparently 'okay' -- but heating your home with wood from you

  • ... Wildfires Averted by Two Decades of Air Quality Progress!
  • ... to the Native Americans. And let them resume controlled burns like they did before asthmatic palefaces arrived.

  • due to the Canadian wildfires. I don't know how this report can say the Eastern US has had no major decline in air quality.

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