Maybe if everybody who was pricing a new car or truck would also figure the money saved over the years because of the difference in fuel efficiency between gasoline and diesel, more diesel engines would be sold.
In the coming years it is possible that fuel economy will not be the only consideration in comparing gasoline and diesel. It depends on possible new regulations yet to be dreamed up in the D of C.
Congress has not yet decided whether it will do anything to try to reduce global warming. I assume in that regard, diesel fuel efficiency is better for global warming because it puts less carbon compounds in the air. Am I right? Zeev, anybody?
Anyway, carbon compounds are not the only gaseous chemicals that contribute to global warming. There is a compound called laughing gas, nitrous oxide, that is produced by the catalytic converter that is 300 times more effective in producing heat trapping effects than carbon dioxide. What I am saying is that if in coming years it is decided to effect policy to reduce global warming, laws and regulations may make the diesel engine far more popular than it is now. Unfortunately I don't know how the diesel engine compares with the gasoline engine plus catalytic converter in producing NO.
Car Part May Add to Global Warming
Friday, May 29, 1998; 5:49 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK (AP) -- Catalytic converters have gone a long way toward
cutting smog from automobiles in the last two decades, but federal
regulators say the devices are a growing cause of global warming, The
New York Times reported today.
The Environmental Protection Agency says that converters, which break
down smog-causing nitrogen and oxygen from car exhaust, are
rearranging the compounds to form nitrous oxide -- a potent greenhouse
gas.
Nitrous oxide, known as laughing gas, is more than 300 times more potent
than carbon dioxide, the most common of the greenhouse gases that trap
heat in the Earth's atmosphere.
Nitrous oxide makes up about 7.2 percent of the gases cited in global
warming, the EPA said in a study published this spring. Vehicles fitted with
catalytic converters produced nearly half of that nitrous oxide.
''You've got people trying to solve one problem, and as is not uncommon,
they've created another,'' Wylie Barbour, an EPA official who worked on
the study, told the Times.
Automakers say they could fix the catalytic converters, but some
environmentalists say the problem will exist as long as cars run on
gasoline.
Nitrous oxide also comes from nitrogen-based fertilizer and manure from
farm animals. It is not regulated because the Clean Air Act was written in
1970 to control smog, not global warming. No regulations exist to control
gases that are believed to cause global warming.
Last winter, the United States joined other industrialized nations at a
meeting in Kyoto, Japan, in agreeing to lower emissions of greenhouse
gases to 5 percent below 1990 levels, over the next 10 to 15 years.
The U.S. Senate has yet to approve the agreement and no federal rules
have been written. The EPA will seek public comment on its study.
c Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
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