Our view: Butte County has learned that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose with the government's uneven air laws.
The business of regulating air quality is more than a little bit strange, as evidenced recently by the fact that a pollution violation by a trio of businesses in Mississippi is very likely to help clean the air in Butte County, roughly 2,220 miles away.
The three companies imported and sold more than 80,000 engines that didn't meet the United States' pollution standards. Rather than trying to track all those engines down and wrest them from the hands of their new owners, the Environmental Protection Agency figured a better solution would be to force the companies to fund a program that would take an equivalent amount of pollution generated by those engines out of the air.
The pollution those engines created was particulate pollution — microscopic bits of ash and soot created by combustion. It's the same kind of pollution created by burning wood to heat homes, which has been a problem in Butte County.
So, eliminate the same amount of pollution in Butte County, Northern California, that was created by three companies in Mississippi and we're all good?
The program, if approved, aims to take 1,500 tons of particulate matter out of the environment every year for three years. If older wood stoves were swapped exclusively for newer, cleaner-burning stoves, 600 would have to be changed over three years to meet the goal. If the older wood stoves were swapped one-to-one for much cleaner-burning gas stoves, only 375 stoves would need to be changed over those three years.
It's unknown how much money would be coming to the county over the three years as the end result is likely to be a mix of new technologies to replace the old.
It's a thing of wonder, and the federal government is like that: largely incomprehensible whether it batters you or blesses you.
In this case, we've been blessed.
Come down into the valley after a weekend in the mountains and the valley looks like a smog pit. In reality, the air is cleaner every year than it was before the Clean Air Act was adopted in 1990.
Before that, we often woke up in February to black skies. Not gray skies, not dirty brown skies, but literally black skies. When frost hit during the almond bloom, the only solution to protect the crop critical to the area's economy was to fire up oil-filled smug pots, which filled the Sacramento Valley with a blanket of black, toxic smoke.
Back then, we didn't complain. We knew how much of an impact the almond crop had on the local economy. At one time most of the almonds grown in the United States were grown in Butte County, and nobody wanted to endanger that.
Rice stubble burning was similar. We needed the rice industry and were willing to deal with a few days of smoke to maintain the jobs that put food on our tables, either directly or indirectly.
There weren't a lot of people from outside the area then. In 1960, there were 3,000 students at what was then Chico State College, and most of them were from the rural north. They understood rural. They were willing to pay the price. There was no local agitation for change.
The push for change came from elsewhere. It wouldn't have happened without the Clean Air Act. And honestly most of us who were here before don't want to go back to what existed before. No one misses the black skies.
Almond farmers have figured out alternatives, and there's been a change of culture to the point they'd all be appalled at the idea of lighting up a smudge pot.
Rice farmers too have found alternatives to burning their whole fields, although burning remains an important tool for controlling disease in isolated areas.
There's no question the law is applied in ways that don't make sense. The most current example is the Air Resources Board's imposition of rules to address diesel pollution problems in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley by applying them to the whole state. Doesn't apply elsewhere? Doesn't matter. Doesn't make sense? Doesn't matter. Not to the bureaucracy.
But now it appears the pendulum is swinging back, and we may benefit from something that similarly makes little sense: A pollution problem in Mississippi has a solution in Butte County? Doesn't make any sense? Doesn't matter.
Take it and savor it. Don't try to understand.