Without contaminants blowing in from Mexico and Asia, the reasoning goes, Phoenix would have been in compliance with federal pollution limits.
Other regions are now taking up that strategy. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency accepted similar reasoning to propose that the area around Salt Lake City in Utah get a reprieve from stricter emissions rules governing vehicles, factories and power plants.
These places should not be penalized “due to foreign sources of emissions,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said on X. “Federal ozone air quality standards would have been met had it not been for emissions transported into the region from outside the U.S.”
Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, hailed the move. “For too long, Utah has faced the prospect of being penalized for air pollution we did not create and cannot control.”
The buffered identity is at times a useful fiction, but reality remains porous and tribal. The article shows the buffered self at the atmospheric level. Phoenix and Salt Lake City want sovereign borders for their lungs. The ozone does not cooperate. Westerly winds carry Asian emissions across the Pacific. Mexican summer winds carry pollution north. The molecules cross borders the way the buffered self insists they cannot.
The political move is the giveaway. Zeldin and the Trump EPA admit porosity only to dissolve obligation. Yes, we are porous to outside pollution, so we should not have to clean up our local sources either. The admission of porosity gets weaponized to protect the buffered fiction. We are not open to the world in any sense that creates duty. We are open only in the sense that lets us off the hook.
Wang’s line at the end punctures the whole frame. “What’s blowing in is also blowing out.” The US is the second-biggest polluter on the planet. American emissions settle in lungs in Tokyo and Tijuana. The flow runs both ways. The buffered nation imagines unidirectional sovereignty over its airspace while breathing molecules from elsewhere and exhaling its own across the world.
The coalition pattern fits. Arizona Chamber of Commerce, Utah Petroleum Association, data center boosters, oil and gas. These are the coalitions whose status, income, and protection depend on weak local rules. The porosity argument lets them shield coalition members from regulation. Curtis frames it as Utah suffering unfair punishment. The framing presupposes a buffered Utah whose pollution problem comes from elsewhere. The same wind blows the other way and Curtis says nothing.
Moench’s clinical point closes the trap. The lung tissue does not care where the ozone came from. A 3 ppb increase over ten years produces damage equivalent to a pack a day for 29 years, regardless of provenance. The body is porous. The harm is real. The buffered identity is a story the body cannot tell.
