The Brief

During wildfire season in the western US, soot-clogged skies have long triggered public alerts with advice like: Shut the windows and stay indoors. For those who can afford it: Use an air filter. As Canadian wildfire smoke curled down to Kentucky this year, officials began to do the same thing.

On alert days, “smoke’s there when you wake up in the morning, it’s there when you’re going to bed at night,” said Michelle King, the assistant director of the Louisville metro air pollution control district.

She and other regulators say they’re working on how to communicate about smoke — something she anticipates doing more often.

“We collectively are seeing, more and more, the very real impacts of climate change, and no reason to think that is slowing down or going away,” King said. “I think that this is a new normal.”

From the midwest to the mid-Atlantic, more U.S. states are laboring to understand how and when smoke will make meeting federal health standards harder.

“The best advice a Boy Scout will give you is, ‘Don’t stand downwind of the campfire,’” said Frank Steitz, an assistant director at the New Jersey department of environmental protection.

“But what if you can’t? What if you can’t avoid it?”

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 we breathe.

But these exceptional events are no longer exceptional, and the requests to obscure them from air-quality records are more common, according to an investigation from the Guardian, The California Newsroom and MuckRock. 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.

Finding common ground to change U.S. clean air law is rare. But on wildfire smoke, academics, environmental advocates and some regulators agree: it’s time to reconsider our approach.

A cyclist rides under a blanket of haze partially obscuring the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 8, 2023.

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“We’re going to have to think bigger when it comes to solutions. We’re just getting there,” said Jodi Bechtel, the assistant director for the department of environment and sustainability in Clark County, Nevada. “I cringe at the idea of amending the Clean Air Act because that is such a heavy lift. But I think we’re at the point where the way it’s written and the expectations in it almost aren’t working anymore.”

This year, said Michael Benjamin, the air quality and planning chief at the California Air Resources Board (Carb), he and his western colleagues “felt really bad” for eastern cities affected by Canadian fires. “But part of us, especially when it was impacting Washington D.C., we said, well, good,” he remembered. “Now the policymakers really understand what it means to be exposed to wildfire smoke. And maybe they’ll start to think seriously about how to mitigate it.”

A growing problem

The Salt Fire burns in Shasta County, as seen from I-5 June 30, 2021. Photograph:

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Smoke from wildland fires is reversing a continent-wide, decades-long trend toward bluer skies, according to recent Stanford University studies.

A warming climate has helped to set the stage for wildfires to burn hotter and bigger. “Stopping them or making them less severe is going to be very hard and going to involve intervention on a scale that we’re just currently not prepared or able to do,” said the environmental scientist Marshall Burke, one of the leaders of Stanford’s work.

At the same time the likelihood of wildfires grows, the U.S. is considering making stricter goals for ground-level ozone and fine particulate, pointing to an avalanche of studies documenting health impacts. The Biden administration has delayed plans to take action on ozone until after next year’s election. On fine particulates, a contentious public rule-making is expected to yield a more strict standard any day now.

Yet in the face of growing risk, and in anticipation of tighter limits on these types of pollution, state and local governments have been clear: they will turn to exceptional events for relief more often, even if the process is arduous.

“Lowering the annual standard will require more exceptional event demonstrations, resulting in a significant increase in workload for the state of Arizona and Maricopa County, with no benefit to air quality or public health,” wrote that county’s department of air quality, commenting on the EPA’s proposed soot standard.

Dave Jefferis hands a flag he rescued from burning to his neighbor, Jim Marchio. Both stayed behind to defend their homes from the River Fire Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.

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“There’s going to be much more pressure on regulatory agencies to take advantage of exceptional events,” added Carb’s Benjamin. “Sometimes people don’t understand what attainment means, and under the Clean Air Act, it’s not necessarily that you’re breathing clean air, it’s that you’re meeting these requirements that are defined by the federal government.”

Meanwhile, public agencies and other air policy observers argue that the exceptional events rule effectively undermines one of the few tools states have to combat wildfires: beneficial or “prescribed” burns.

Originated by Native Americans, controlled application of fire to wildlands reduces the risk of catastrophic infernos by clearing underbrush, pine needle beds and other fuels that make forests prone to burning. Federal and state agencies say that increasing this “good fire” is a priority. The EPA modified exceptional events guidelines in 2016, in part to do just that. But not a single prescribed fire has been forgiven under the exceptional events rule since then.

A group of 86 western scientists, researchers and advocates say that local regulators are not permitting prescribed fires because they fear they could create too much smoke – the kind that warrants exceptional events. “The current statutory scheme is selecting for the very worst type of fire when it comes to public health,” they told the EPA.

Near the California-Oregon border, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council advocates for a healthy ecosystem, which the director, Will Harling, said includes the return of beneficial fire. Obstacles to such planned burns, coupled with forgiveness offered wildfires, he said, are why his children “have smoked the equivalent of about 20,000 packs of cigarettes while they’re in their teens."

“Just because they scrub that out of the record doesn’t mean that smoke isn’t in their lungs,” he said.

EPA spokesperson Khanya Brann, responding to our questions in writing, confirmed that exceptional events “could result in the removal of event-influenced data from the data set used to make certain regulatory decisions."

Brann wrote that local air regulators must meet requirements in the exceptional events process, such as taking “appropriate and reasonable actions to protect public health."

Pathways to reform

A prescribed fire in Hayfork, California, on April 10, 2019. Advocates for the practice of setting planned burns to manage lands and minimize wildfire risk say the exceptional events rule gets in the way.

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Across the political spectrum, experts, advocates and states say it’s time to change the exceptional events rule. They offer vastly different ideas about what that change should look like.

States and their advocates generally seek liberation from regulatory paperwork. Republican senators, led by Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, recently introduced legislation aimed in part at making filing for exceptional events easier.

Similarly, the Western Governors’ Association has argued for greater state flexibility, complaining both that “the rule is resource intensive, costly, and place[s] a significant burden on strained state resources,” and that regulators are slow to act on it. The nonpartisan association suggested to lawmakers that rules should permit more complicated multistate exceptions.

We can’t fix it, goes the reasoning, so why should we be punished for it?

The EPA, for its part, maintains it is following the law. “The Clean Air Act requires the agency to address emissions from natural events such as wildfires differently than emissions from industrial or mobile sources that EPA and Tribal, state and local air agency regulations can control,” Brann wrote.

Independent clean-air watchdogs emphasize instead that the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect public health.

People take the tramway to Roosevelt Island as smoke from Canadian wildfires casts a haze over the area on 7 June 2023 in New York City.

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That could mean stepping up enforcement, said Eric Schaeffer, the executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a non-profit that advocates for transparency. Plenty of controls already on the books could work better, he said, including more frequent inspections and better monitoring systems for known polluters. “There’s always more that can be done,” he said.

Michigan attorney Nick Leonard, who represents fence-line communities where Canadian smoke has mingled with routine local pollution, called the exceptional events rule a “misapplication” of the Clean Air Act, and pointed out that local air regulators could simply stop using it. “It’s sort of creating this alternative reality,” he said.

Though the EPA strips exceptional events-related data from regulatory use, epidemiologists and health experts continue to analyze air quality using unmodified data, which remains available. In its annual State of the Air report, the American Lung Association has always included pollution exceedances that exceptional events would leave out, said Will Barrett, a clean-air expert for the group.

“Those are unhealthy air days,” Barrett said. “Ultimately, your lungs don’t care if the pollution is classified as an exceptional event under an obscure federal law.”

‘A warning light on the dashboard for the Clean Air Act’

Hazy New York City skyline during bad air quality on June 7, 2023 due to smoke of Canadian wildfires brought in by wind.

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For the summer of 2023, more than 20 states so far, from Wyoming to Wisconsin to North Carolina, have flagged air-quality readings that were far higher than normal. Most of these days came in June, as skies in the midwest and eastern U.S. were blanketed with Canadian wildfire smoke.

Wildfire smoke knows no borders. Unlike refineries, wildfires have no scrubbers. You can’t shut them down. But the Clean Air Act, whose pollution controls have saved millions of lives, affords the agency responsible for healthy air no direct authority to manage lands that burn.

Instead, the EPA’s response to this fast-growing source of soot, ash and toxic chemicals has been “ad hoc” and muddled by a lack of coordination with other agencies, according to a Congressional watchdog’s report earlier this year.

EPA spokesperson Brann wrote that the agency “supports efforts by agencies across the federal government — including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior, as well as interagency forums such as the Wildland Fire Leadership Council — to implement and further develop strategies to reduce wildfire risk, and to help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfires.”

The growing use of the exceptional events rule reveals “a poorer and poorer fit between the policy we have and the problems it’s trying to solve,” said Stanford University’s Michael Wara.

He called the rule “a warning light on the dashboard for the Clean Air Act."

To heed it, say experts, it’s essential to adapt the law to the conditions under which we already breathe.

“If fires are going to become more widespread and more predictable, then that changes the calculus for air-quality determinations,” said Schaeffer of the Environmental Integrity Project. “You have to assume that’s part of your baseline now.”

The landmark law protecting air quality wasn’t created to deal with global heating. But the policies of the past are colliding with the problems of the future.

“The Clean Air Act should really include climate,” said Benjamin of Carb.

“States who have tried to keep these things separate — to keep climate change and exposure to local air pollution as two distinct things — I don’t think they’re going to be able to maintain that indefinitely,” he said.

A key assumption of air pollution policy, said Wara, has been that we are in control: “Climate change is kind of making a mockery of that.”

The obligation to protect people from polluted air remains, he added: “That’s really what the Clean Air Act is supposed to do, is keep people safe.”

While he was in college, Moiz Mir lived under an orange sky in Sacramento for weeks because of the Camp fire; some of that pollution was forgiven in nearby Nevada county as an exceptional event. His neighbors didn’t understand the risks of smoke then, or know where to get masks. He began to warn them, to educate himself, and to learn from other fire-prone communities how to cope.

Smoke, he said, “made a permanent and lasting impact” on his psyche and life path. Now 26 years old and a grassroots climate activist, he points out that “in crisis, people look to authority for answers."

They’re still looking, as the smoke thickens.

“We were thinking like the impacts of climate change were distant,” Mir said. “But now, it’s quite literally the air that I breathe.”

Manola Secaira of CapRadio contributed to this report

Public officials across California are contemplating what to do with dozens of streets, parks and libraries named in honor of civil rights icon César Chávez in the wake of allegations he sexually assaulted two girls and a woman decades ago.

The allegations surfaced in an investigation by the New York Times published earlier this week that sent shock waves across the country.

Chávez, who was head of the United Farm Workers union, is widely recognized as one of the most influential labor leaders in U.S. history, known for founding the union and for leading national boycotts of grapes to improve working conditions for farmworkers.

Chávez died in 1993.

Many state and local leaders, including L.A.’s mayor and county supervisors, suggested changing the César Chávez holiday on March 31 to Farm Workers Day. March 31 was Chávez’s birthday.

In Sacramento on Thursday, Democratic leaders of the state Legislature said they would push for such a change.

“The farmworker movement was never ever about one man,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said at a news conference. “It was built by tens of thousands of workers. People who labored in the fields, people who organized, people who sacrificed and who stood up when it was hard.

“We have a responsibility to remember the movement and to move it forward with integrity.”

Also on Thursday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed a proclamation renaming the city's César Chávez Day holiday as “Farm Workers Day.” The city recognizes the holiday on the last Monday of March.

“I grew up as a child admiring the farmworker movement,'' Bass said. “I didn't think I was ever going to eat grapes again because my family boycotted grapes.”

The grape strike, organized in part by Chávez, lasted five years from 1965 to 1970.

Multiple allegations of sexual assault

The New York Times investigation uncovered multiple allegations that Chávez had sexually assaulted girls and women in the 1960s and ‘70s, when he was head of United Farm Workers, including union co-founder Dolores Huerta.

Huerta, now 95, told the Times the rape and sexual assault resulted in pregnancies that she kept secret. Huerta said she gave the children up for adoption after birth.

In a statement, Huerta said in part: “... for the last 60 years [I] have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”

Bass said Thursday she met Chávez once and “thought it was an opportunity of a lifetime.” She said her heart “broke” this week when she heard the allegation that Chávez had raped Huerta.

The mayor said renaming the holiday would allow people “to reflect on how the struggle of farmworkers has elevated working people everywhere.”

She added that the city would need to consider changing the names of buildings, streets and other things named in honor of Chávez.

For example, César Chávez Avenue runs through the heart of the Boyle Heights neighborhood. Several murals of Chávez dot the city.

Bass said she had been in contact with Chávez's family, and they supported her action.

The mayor was joined at the proclamation signing by Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, who said in a statement that the farmworker movement has always been about the power of the people, “especially the women whose labor built it and too often went unseen."

“As we honor that legacy, we also have a responsibility to tell the truth about harm and stand with survivors,” Hernandez said.

Councilwoman Ysabel Jurado also attended the news conference. She said the movement doesn’t belong to one person.

“Farm Workers Day honors the workers, families and organizers still in the fields and still fighting for fair wages, safe conditions and dignity,” the statement from Jurado read. “And it recognizes that this movement is carried forward every single day by people whose names we may never know but whose impact continues to define the spirit of Los Angeles.”

Other cities and counties 

Many other cities and counties are considering wiping Chávez's name from public spaces.

L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said she would introduce a motion looking at renaming the county’s César Chávez holiday.

Supervisor Janice Hahn suggested the county consider renaming Chávez day “Farm Worker Day.”

“For those of us who grew up admiring the farmworker movement, today's news is heartbreaking,'' Hahn said in a statement Wednesday. "But as in any other civil rights movement, men were only half the story. The abuses of one man will never diminish the extraordinary sacrifices, accomplishments, and legacy of the women of the farmworker movement.

“It's time we put them first.”

The process for renaming streets and other public structures varies from city to city and school district to school district. It could take months before many cities move to erase Chávez's name from public spaces.

You can follow your city council agenda to keep up with what’s going on, or better yet, reach out to your representatives on the council and county Board of Supervisors to make your voice heard on the issue.

California, along with a coalition of 23 other states and a dozen cities and counties, sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday for rolling back the scientific finding requiring it to regulate greenhouse gas pollution.

“This isn’t a small technical change,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference in Sacramento. “It’s a sweeping decision that would increase pollution, worsen climate change and put the health of millions of Americans at risk. And it’s not based on any credible science.”

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, seeks to reinstate a 2009 conclusion known as the endangerment finding — that carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases threaten public health and welfare.

The climate rule served as the scientific basis for the agency’s ability to limit emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The Trump administration finalized the repeal of the endangerment finding Feb. 12. A post on the EPA’s website stated the change would also dissolve restrictions on vehicle emissions and save Americans $1.3 trillion.

“As a result of these changes, engine and vehicle manufacturers no longer have any future obligations for the measurement, control and reporting of GHG emissions for any highway engine and vehicle, including model years manufactured prior to this final rule.”

Sanchez said California’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the landmark 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, signed into law by then-Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, “remains unchanged.”

Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties also were parties to the suit.

KQED’s Laura Klivans contributed to this report.

California voters are split along party lines on two controversial proposed ballot measures — a billionaire tax and an initiative requiring voters to show government ID when they cast a ballot — according to a new poll.

The survey from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies found 52% of voters backing a proposed one-time, 5% tax on the net worth of billionaires. The money would be used to fund health care programs, which are being cut by the Trump administration; 33% of registered voters said they were opposed and 15% said they are still undecided.

Whether voters back the measure, which is being pushed by a health care labor union, is highly correlated to their partisan leanings: 72% of Democrats said they’d support the billionaire tax if it qualifies for the November ballot, while the same percentage of Republican voters are opposed. Voters with no party preference were more split, with 51% backing the wealth tax.

The voter ID ballot measure is more evenly divided, with 44% of voters in support and 45% opposed. Republican voters said they would overwhelmingly vote “Yes.” Democrats are unified in opposition, with only 19% in support.

IGS co-director Eric Schickler said that while neither measure has qualified yet for the ballot, most voters surveyed said they are aware of the proposals.

“The Billionaire Tax Initiative starts out in a relatively strong position, but with it polling just above 50%, that still leaves room for what will be an intense, expensive campaign,” he said. “The Voter ID Initiative looks like it faces an uphill climb: given the strong Democratic opposition, it needs very strong support among nonpartisan voters, and it currently seems to be falling short. But it is still very early.”

If they move forward, the campaigns around both measures are expected to be expensive and bruising. Democrats are split on the billionaires tax: Gov. Gavin Newsom is opposed, Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna said he’s in support, and many other Democrats — including legislative leaders and candidates for governor — have offered support for the concept but expressed concerns with the details of this proposal.

Some billionaires have already left California, and others, like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, are lining up huge campaign war chests to fight the measure.

And Democrats are gearing up to fight the voter ID measure, which several Southern California Republican lawmakers are pushing. The proposed ballot measure comes as the U.S. Senate debates what’s known as the SAVE Act, a far more draconian voter ID measure.

Backed by President Donald Trump, that legislation would require a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, essentially eliminate mail-in ballots and require states to hand over their voter rolls to the federal government. It already passed the House but is facing a steep climb in the Republican-led Senate.

The poll was conducted between March 9 and 15 among more than 5,000 registered California voters. It has a sampling error of plus or minus 2 points.

The Los Angeles Unified board members who represent schools named for César Chávez are calling for their renaming.

A New York Times investigation published Wednesday found the famed labor leader Chávez sexually abused girls and women including United Farmer Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta.

“In light of this information, we believe it is necessary to move away from traditional César Chávez-centered celebrations and lessons tied to the state holiday and instead prioritize student safety, dignity and truth,” read a statement from board member Kelly Gonez and Vice President Rocío Rivas.

The renaming process would likely take months and include meetings with school staff, students and parents. In the meantime, district leaders and educators are grappling with how the allegations of abuse change lessons about a figure who helped galvanize generations of activists.

“ I think we are all deeply, deeply troubled by the allegations that have come forward over the last couple of days,” said Andres Chait, the acting Los Angeles Unified superintendent.

Chait said that March 27 will continue to be a school holiday (the currently named César Chávez Day, on March 31, falls during LAUSD’s spring break).

A district spokesperson provided a statement Wednesday that said a review of curriculum and resources related to Chávez is underway “to ensure the emphasis remains on the important work of the farmworker movement, not on any one individual.”

How are community members and educators reacting?

Last semester, students at STEM Academy of Hollywood learned about Chávez and the movement to unionize farmworkers in Irene Atilano’s ethnic studies class.

Atilano said students walked into her classroom Wednesday with questions after seeing the allegations of Chávez’s abuse on social media.

“ They were just like, ‘What do you think?’” Atilano said. “And I'm like, 'It doesn't matter what I think. What do you guys think? Let's learn together.'”

Their reactions ranged from “this really sucks,” to a sense of loss.

“This is why we don't try to idolize people,” Atilano said. “We want to make sure that we focus on the community, we focus on the movement.”

Atilano said she plans to teach ethnic studies again and is thinking about how misogyny and patriarchy intersect with political and social justice movements.

“It can be found everywhere,” Atilano said. “I’m trying to see how I can make those connections in the future, but it's a work in progress.”

On March 10, the LAUSD board unanimously approved a resolution recognizing Chávez — one of many such resolutions over the years — and pledging to provide curriculum and resources aligned with the foundation that promotes his legacy, education and economic development. The board last year also passed a resolution honoring Huerta.

In response to LAist’s questions about curriculum related to Chávez, an LAUSD spokesperson provided a statement that said the district is providing additional instructional materials “to support classroom learning, ensuring students continue to engage with themes of leadership, service and social justice in age-appropriate and meaningful ways.”

LAUSD board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin issued a statement Wednesday morning with links to resources related to sexual and domestic violence.

“Just my own team, we’re seven women … and our own triggers, our own stories are coming out,” Ortiz Franklin said. “You can imagine that happening everywhere in homes, in classrooms, the adults having to manage this, and then also, helping students process.”

César Chávez Elementary in El Sereno is one of several schools in Southern California named after the labor leader.

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How would renaming work?

Blanca Juarez was at César Chávez Elementary in El Sereno on Wednesday to pick up her daughter. With a father and grandmother who were both farmworkers, she said she was troubled by the news.

“He was like the only hope in those days — the only one speaking for all of the — and now, well, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say,” Juarez said.

She said it was too soon to be talking about renaming the school.

Gonez and Rivas said they would work with the communities surrounding the elementary school and the César Chávez Learning Academies in San Fernando to identify new names.

In recent years, the school renaming process has included meetings with staff, students, parents and community members and a public vote. The LAUSD board must vote to finalize any name changes.

LAist Deputy Managing Editor Fiona Ng contributed to this story.