California’s diesel truck crackdown

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California’s Air Resources Board today released long-awaited draft regulations to clean up big rig pollution that aggravates asthma, cancer and heart disease across the state. The rules, which are scheduled to take effect in 2010, would affect toxic diesel emissions from more than a million heavy-duty trucks that operate in the state, many of them transporting merchandise from the massive complex of ports in Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Air Board chairman Mary D. Nichols predicted that slashing truck pollution would ‘improve both public health and the economy, especially when you account for the reduced health care costs thanks to fewer hospital visits, mortalities and work days lost, caused by exposure to big rig diesel exhaust.’

Diesel truck transport from the ports and from the state’s huge agricultural industry in the San Joaquin Valley is the California’s largest source of smog-forming nitrogen oxide emissions and toxic particulates. The ports recently banned the dirtiest, older trucks. But the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles areas are violating federal air quality standards, which cannot be met without stricter overall truck emission rules, air officials say.

In a report this week, the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group, found that available technology can dramatically reduce emissions as well as the fuel consumption that increases global warming. ‘Truckers can make relatively simple modifications to their rigs, save themselves a lot of money over the long run, and save us all from pollution,’ said Don Anair, UCS senior vehicles analyst.

But truckers and agribusiness interests have tried to soften the regulations, saying it is too expensive for truckers to invest tens of thousands of dollars in clean trucks at a time of high gas prices and economic woes.

The air board will vote Dec. 11 on whether to adopt two rules that would affect not just California trucks, but all big rigs crossing the state. The first would require the use of existing technology to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gases. Another would require truckers to install filters or upgrade their engines to reduce smog-forming and particulate pollution.

‘We know there are financial challenges,’ Nichols said. But she noted that California is offering industry more than a billion dollars in loans and grants to help with the cost of the proposed rules.

-- Margot Roosevelt