I wouldn’t have believed it if it were in any other newspaper but the very liberal San Francisco Chronicle – h/t to WUWT reader “crosspatch” who writes:
Was AB32 based on any data provided by the Air Resources Board?
According to various articles:
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/new-carb-economic-analysis-ab32-0362.html
CARB had a lot of input in this legislation. They have a history if politics interfering with science and I have no confidence that this law is based on sound findings.
Here’s the story from the Chron:
(10-07) 16:36 PDT Sacramento – —
California grossly miscalculated pollution levels in a scientific analysis used to toughen the state’s clean air standards, and scientists have spent the past several months revising data and planning a significant weakening of the landmark regulation, The Chronicle has found.
The pollution estimate in question was too high – by 340 percent, according to the California Air Resources Board, the state agency charged with researching and adopting air quality standards. The estimate was a key part in the creation of a regulation adopted by the Air Resources Board in 2007, a rule that forces businesses to cut diesel emissions by replacing or making costly upgrades to heavy-duty, diesel-fueled off-road vehicles used in construction and other industries.
The staff of the powerful and widely respected Air Resources Board said the overestimate is largely due to the board calculating emissions before the economy slumped, which halted the use of many of the 150,000 diesel-exhaust spewing vehicles in California. Independent researchers, however, found huge overestimates in the Air Board’s work on diesel emissions and attributed the flawed work to a faulty method of calculation – not the economic downturn.
The overestimate, which comes after another bad calculation by the Air Board on diesel-related deaths that made headlines in 2009, prompted the board to suspend the regulation earlier this year while officials decided whether to weaken the rule.
Today, after months of work, the Air Board and construction industry officials announced they agreed on a major scale-back of the rule – a proposal that includes delaying the start of the requirements until 2014 and exempting more vehicles from the rule. The announcement was made as The Chronicle was preparing to publish this report, which had been in the works for several weeks.
The setbacks in the Air Board’s research – and the proposed softening of a landmark regulation – raise questions about the performance of the agency as it is in the midst of implementing the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 – or AB32 as it is commonly called, one of the state’s and nation’s most ambitious environmental policies to date.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/07/BAOF1FDMRV.DTL#ixzz11iqEfuN9
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If they really want to reduce diesel particulate emissions, the right way to go about it is not to mandate particulate exhaust standards for vehicles, but to improve the refining standards for diesel fuel. This will also have the advantage of allowing the latest generation of diesel engines for cars (which require low particulate fuel) to be sold.
So what do we do now?
Do we call up all the businesses that left California that were forced out because of faulty research and high taxes and say we are “sorry”?
Going Green makes sense if it saves money, time and energy but not at the expense of quality of human life. ‘Course we all know this already but ignored it. Time to change. No more dirt worship.
Don’t End America, mend it.
Looks like they changed the title of the article to “Overestimate fueled state’s landmark diesel law.”
One can only wonder how “Faulty science behind state’s landmark diesel law” ever made it past the editors. Using the phrase “faulty science” in a climate article? Wow, now there is a mortal climate sin.