Calif. Climategate Part II: Air Board's 340% pollution error
October 9th, 2010 9:19 am PT
ECOPOLITICS
Photo: PAUL TAYLOR
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has belatedly disclosed that its scientists have overestimated state diesel engine emissions by 340%. CARB is the powerful state agency charged with researching and regulating air quality standards. These diesel pollution estimates were the basis for costly 2007 regulations forcing businesses to cut diesel emissions by replacing or upgrading heavy-duty, diesel-fueled off-road vehicles used in construction and other industries.
CARB said the overestimate was due to diesel pollution calculated during the economic recession, when 150,000 diesel-exhaust-spewing vehicles in California were shuttered. Independent researchers, however, found that gross overestimates in the CARB diesel emissions were attributable to chronically-flawed computer modeling systems.
These flawed diesel pollution research regulations come from the same eco-obsessed CARD regulators that contrived the controversial 2006 California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32). California voters can delay the California Global Warming Solutions Act by voting for Prop. 23 on November 2nd. Prop. 23 would prudently suspend implementation of AB 32 greenhouse gas controls until the state’s unemployment rate is reduced to below an unemployment rate benchmark of 5.5%.
Worse, last year members of the CARB learned that the author of critical studies on diesel engine pollution, Hien Tran, had falsified his academic credentials. Tran admitted his deception, and accepted a CARB demotion. However, Tran’s analyses remained the basis for the aforementioned pollution regulations imposed upon operators of trucks, buses and other diesel-powered machinery. The Tran study concluded that diesel "particulate matter" (soot) was responsible for about 1,000 additional California deaths each year. Tens of millions of dollars in engine upgrades where required of California diesel operators under the new regulations.
Jerry Brown, the California Attorney General and Democrat gubernatorial candidate in the November 2nd election, should immediately order an investigation of CARB. Clearly, CARB’s radical and costly air pollution regulations have been corrupted by partisan, militant eco-group lobbying and green bureaucrats.
What is clear from continuing climategate eruptions is that partisan ideologies and cultish environmentalism have replaced prudent science and rational environmental policy decisions. Militant environmentalism and green-obsessed bureaucrats have become an “axis of antagonism” that we can no longer afford.
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