OP
flusher
Super Member
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2005
- Messages
- 7,538
- Location
- Sacramento
- Tractor
- Getting old. Sold the ranch. Sold the tractors. Moved back to the city.
Today's Sacramento Bee has this article on CARB and commercial diesels:
POLLUTION
Air Board will weigh delay on diesel rules
FIRMS SAY RECESSION HAS DONE THE JOB
By Jim Downing
jdowning@sacbee.com
The California Air Resources Board must decide today whether the bad economy justifies giving truckers and construction firms more breathing room on the state痴 toughest-inthe-nation diesel pollution regulations.
By cutting diesel consumption, the recession has likely improved the state痴 air quality, air board staff say. Fleet owners hope to use that evidence to convince the agency that it should delay mandated retrofits and upgrades they say the recession has made them unable to afford.
典hey could not have put enough regulations in place to do what this slowdown has done, said Felipe Martin, chief financial officer at Sacramento痴 Martin Bros. Construction.
Separate sets of regulations apply to diesel trucks and construction equipment. The trucking regulations alone, set to take effect in 2011, have been projected to cost California com- panies $4.5 billion over the next two decades.
Over the next 15 years, the regulations are projected to avert about 9,400 premature deaths and save billions in medical costs and lost work time. Environmental and public health groups don稚 want the rules altered in a way that would give up any of those benefits.
典hese are probably the most important regulations that ARB has adopted in this decade, said Bonnie Holmes-Gen, senior policy directory with the American Lung Association of California.
At the same time, the air board is struggling with a festering controversy over a staff statistician, Hien Tran, who prepared a key report related to the truck rules and later was found to have lied about his academic credentials.
Tran claimed to hold a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. He had been a graduate student at the school, but had not completed his doctoral dissertation.
The agency knew about Tran痴 fraud before last December痴 board meeting, but it did not disclose that information to every board member or raise it at the public hearing on the trucking rules. One industry group has called for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to fire air board Chairwoman Mary Nichols over her handling of the matter. At least two of the agency痴 nine board members have said the issue raises serious concerns about the regulations legitimacy.
典o me, it痴 a violation of the public痴 trust, said Ron Roberts, a 13-year board veteran.
Tuesday, Nichols spokesman Leo Kay said agency staff should have notified the board about the problems with Tran痴 credentials before the diesel vote. But he said the regulations were warranted even without the conclusions in Tran痴 study.
展e had mountains of other health reports guiding our hand on this regulation, Kay wrote in an e-mail.
Tran was ultimately suspended for 60 days and demoted. Air board officials ordered his study reassessed by a peer review panel, which declared it sound.
At its meeting today in downtown Sacramento, the air board is scheduled to decide whether to order staff to prepare a proposal to change the rules governing heavyduty trucks. The agency could take similar action on the construction equipment regulations. Those rules were already relaxed earlier this year.
An agency report released last week projected that recession-related pollution reductions would be sufficient to meet state air-quality targets through 2011, even if the diesel truck regulations were not enforced. In 2012 and beyond, though, regulation would be needed to keep the state on pace to meet longer-term goals, including a 2014 federal air-quality mandate.
Based on that study, the California Trucking Association is pushing for the board to delay implementation of the rules for one year to 2012 and to ease enforcement after that.
The air board could also be swayed by industry arguments that the recession has made it impossible to retrofit and replace old trucks on the agency痴 timeline. Heavy-duty truck sales in California dropped 60 percent between 2006 and 2009, according to the air board staff report.
To some degree, those slow sales cancel out the air quality benefits of reduced trucking activity because old, dirty diesel engines are replaced with new ones at a slower rate than the agency predicted last year.
鏑onger-term, emissions might not be lower even if activity is lower than our initial projections, said Tony Brasil, chief of the air board痴 heavy duty diesel implementation branch.
The regulations to be debated today do not apply to diesel pickup trucks and cars.
Call The Bee痴 Jim Downing, (916) 321-1065.
