Clean Air Act Loophole Let Some Counties Mask Dangerous Pollution: Investigation

Dozens of U.S. counties have used an obscure provision of the Clean Air Act to claim their residents breathe cleaner air than they really do, according to an investigation by the California Newsroom, MuckRock and The Guardian published on Monday.

The "exceptional events rule" allows counties to not take pollution caused by "natural" or "uncontrollable" events, including wildfires, into account. The investigation found more than 70 counties across 20 states used that provision to not take several bad air days into account in their analyses of air quality. These counties are home to more than 21 million people in total.

The investigation found that county officials had asked for 700 exceptional events to be struck from air quality analyses, and the EPA agreed to 139 of them. As a result, people living in these areas may not be fully aware of the danger posed by the air they breathe, and could hinder air quality improvement.

The investigation comes weeks after other research showed that increasingly catastrophic wildfires have reversed some of the substantial gains made in air quality over the past few decades. In some western states, the wildfire trend has erased as much as half of the gains made in keeping certain dangerous pollutants out of the air.

"We have saved more lives in this country because we cleaned up the air than almost any other environmental policy," Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, told The Guardian. "That’s what’s being undermined."