Self-righteousness and an unbridled lust for control over the lives of 307 million Americans are the hallmarks of environmental laws in America.
If the environmental activists and the Washington bureaucrats who write these regulations are wrong on such basic issues as to the major sources of air pollution, standards of effective mitigation, and the civil and criminal prosecution of air pollution offenders, wouldn't you think that would be headline news?
The LA Times, in an unexplained lapse of balanced journalism, reports that 30% of the ozone -- one of the primary components of photochemical smog, found in the skies above the Western United States during the spring -- comes from the coal-fired factories of East Asia (primarily China and India).
Read MoreThe study, published in the journal Nature, probes a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists in the last decade: Ground-level ozone has dropped in cities thanks to tighter pollution controls, but it has risen in rural areas in the Western U.S., where there is little industry or automobile traffic.
"Ozone is a difficult gas to pin down," said Cooper, who works at the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. "The study of intercontinental air pollution has been going on for a decade, but whether it was increasing overall was uncertain. And in places where it had spiked, along coasts and in national parks, we didn't know how much was from local sources and how much was from Asia.
Cooper said they have not yet determined exactly how much of the ozone increase comes from Asia, but they found that the increase was about twice as much when prevailing winds came from South and East Asia.
