Cal’s landmark diesel law choked by faulty data
A report released Friday, Oct. 8, as part of a story broken in the San Francisco Chronicle and on the San Francisco Gate website said California scientists grossly miscalculated pollution levels in a scientific analysis used to toughen the state’s clean-air standards. As a result scientists have spent the past several months revising data and planning a significant weakening of the landmark regulation.
How grossly miscalculated? Well, the report said the pollution estimate was fudged as much as 340 percent, according to CARB, 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 the In-Use Off-Road Diesel Vehicle Regulation, adopted by the board in July 2007 to cut the amount of emissions released by diesel vehicles, with some exceptions, that aren’t operated on regular roads and highways. Most of the affected vehicles are used in industries such as construction and mining, and airport ground support, and include bulldozers, dump trucks, forklifts and cranes. The regulation calls for cuts in diesel emissions by replacing or making costly upgrades to the various vehicles.
CARB staff said the overestimate is largely due to 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 CARB’s findings on diesel emissions. The researchers’ latest estimate for sources of nitrous oxide found that off-road vehicles are burning 228 million gallons of diesel fuel per year, as opposed to CARB’s prior estimate of 1 billion gallons. Researchers further 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 this year while officials decided whether to weaken the rule.
On Thursday CARB announced a proposal (interestingly at the same time The Chronicle was preparing to publish its story) that includes delaying the start of the requirements until 2014 and exempting more vehicles from the rule. If CARB approves the revisions in December, it would be a major blow to the rule.
The setbacks incurred by the overestimated data and the resulting proposed softening of the regulation have served to fuel more irritation about the performance of the agency, which has been criticized as being a powerful bureaucracy of appointees that’s not accountable to voters. The Chronicle story also increased the Category level of the hurricane force winds swirling around the state’s controversial AB32 Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, one of the nation’s most ambitious environmental policies to date.
AB32, which aims to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020, has been subject to under intense scrutiny and pushback, especially this year when the state will elect a new governor. Supporters say it will reinvigorate the state’s economy and create thousands of new jobs in the emerging green sector, but critics, including many local and county governments, say the law is a jobs killer, citing massive amounts of new expenses and unfunded mandates to municipalities, industry and business in conforming to new pollution regulations.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has promised to suspend the law for at least a year, while Democrat Jerry Brown said he still supports the law. California voters, meanwhile, will vote on Proposition 23, a November initiative to suspend AB32 until the state’s unemployment rate, which is currently at 12.4 percent, falls to 5.5 percent or less for at least one year.
Another “black eye” CARB apparently gave itself was from another grossly over-inflated figure, this one an estimate of premature deaths caused by particulate matter spewing from diesel engines. The first calculation found 18,000 deaths a year in the state had links to particulate matter, but a revision cutting that figure in more than half was ordered after a board scientist who oversaw the study was found to have faked his scientific credentials. As if that weren’t bad enough, according to The Chronicle, board members were not told by CARB Chair Mary Nichols that the scientist, Hien Tran, lied about earning a doctorate from UC Davis before a December 2008 vote in favor of regulations based in part on his science.
Nichols, who acknowledges she knew about the falsification prior to the vote, has apologized for not sharing that information with her fellow board members.
A spokesman for the Washington D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute called the overestimate “a scam” to promote a green agenda. The non-profit CEI is a public policy organization that serves as a watchdog group for a variety of issues, including energy, environment, business and finance, technology, telecommunications, and food and drug regulation. –San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com and FOX News.
