First pushed through by the Republican senator and climate denier Jim Inhofe, the rule has become a ‘regulatory escape hatch’ for states that want to meet federal air-quality standards
in 2018, schools across the region closed to protect kids from breathing dangerous air. When wildfires blanketed the Willamette valley with soot and ash in 2020, hundreds of Oregonians sought urgent care for shortness of breath, headaches and asthma. When Canadian wildfire smoke made its way to Michigan last year, ozone levels in Detroit spiked to levels that caused officials to warn residents sensitive to air pollution to take extra care.
Firefighters work to keep flames from spreading through the Shadowbrook apartment complex as a wildfire burns through Paradise, California, on 9 November 2018.sees the problem in fairly simple terms: the growing threat of wildfire smoke is exacerbated by climate change. Climate change has been fueled by the oil and gas industry. Their lobbyists, in turn, have pushed states to use the exceptional events rule as much as possible, slowing progress to address air pollution at the local level.
In the spring of 1998, air-quality managers in his home state found themselves in a tough spot. A wildfire on Mexico’s drought-stricken Yucatán peninsula had sent acrid smoke north, and around that time Oklahoma City exceeded its pollution limits. If the soot and ozone stayed on the books, they’d have to tighten controls on known local polluters. Instead, they argued to the EPA that the pollution shouldn’t count because it came from a wildfire, and so was “natural” and “uncontrollable”.
“The purpose of the amendment was deregulatory, to be sure,” said John Walke, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council , a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization.The exceptional events rule functions as a regulatory escape hatch. When soot and ozone drift in from “natural” sources like wildfires, regulators can ask the EPA for an exception. If the federal agency grants it, that air pollution is erased from the regulatory record and disregarded in regulatory decisions.
The adjustments were allowed in more than 70 counties across 20 states, which together are home to almost 36 million Americans. Businesses and industry representatives lobbied local air regulators before an event was even considered, as happened in Kentucky, and worked together with them to file exceptional event requests, as happened in Louisiana.
“We’re just pretending like it’s just not happening,” said Sanjay Narayan, the managing attorney for the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “The pollution is not in the air from sort of a regulatory perspective, which is the way in which things become invisible. All of this is invisible unless you trawl through all of these reports.”
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