RALEIGH — It’s not hard to understand why some officials in the Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir area want to know more about their region’s air quality.

Faced with the possibility of being declared a “non-attainment” area for ozone pollution by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as in partial violation of a separate standard for particulate matter, the so-called “Unifour” region of North Carolina (comprising the four counties of Catawba, Caldwell, Burke, and Alexander) could see a serious economic downturn worsened by the imposition of new regulations. The region can already lay claim to the dubious achievement of having had the greatest reversal of economic fortune in the United States in the past four years — going from an unemployment rate below 3 percent to joblessness approaching 10 percent last year.

So it makes common sense for Unifour folks such as Caldwell County Commissioner John Thuss to want to know more about why air-quality monitors in the region are picking up violations of the ozone and particulate standards. Unfortunately, the means he and others want to use — the placement of additional monitors in other parts of the region — will actually make the problem worse.

That is, it will appear to make the problem worse, which in environmental policy is essentially the same thing. You have to recognize that common sense matters little when dealing with federal regulations and the activist groups that manipulate them to push their anti-capitalist political agenda. Accuse me of being hyperbolic if you want to. But the fact is that if a region wants to avoid a non-attainment designation and the adverse regulatory and economic consequences that follow from it, the last thing it should do is seek to set up more air-quality monitors.

As JLF’s Roy Cordato has pointed out on multiple occasions, both federal standards and the “studies” of self-styled environmentalist groups make no allowance for the number of monitors when evaluating air-quality trends. It only takes one monitor to trip for the entire area to be considered in violation of the standard — to be declared a “red” day for ozone, for example. Because air pollutants are not evenly distributed across a region, the more monitors you have, the higher the likelihood that one of them will detect something on a given day.

Adjusting for the number of monitors can make a huge difference in how jurisdictions are ranked across the country. Such adjustments should be done as a matter of course, but then again lots of sensible things ought to be done in government as a matter of course, but are not.

The problem is exacerated in places like Lexington and Hickory, where it appears that the placement of monitors near unique environments such as train yards, factories, and even barbeque joints can skew the readings. While in a sensible world the addition of other monitors in more representative places of the region would generate a more useful outcome, because their results would be averaged in with the monitor subject to gusts from a smokehouse, in the current legal environment the only likely result will be a few additional days of violation.

These policies contribute to the misperception on the part of many North Carolinians that the quality of their air is bad and getting worse. No, the quality of our air is relatively good and by most measures is better than 20 or 30 years ago, even though many more people live, work, and drive around the state now.

Too many of our laws reward people for doing the wrong thing and punish those who do the right thing — like trying to measure their air-quality more accurately. Sometimes, this is the accidental result of good intentions and bad follow-through. Over times, the explanation is less benign.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.