EPA to Rescind Truck Exhaust Regulations
- Thread starter Xmo1
- Start date
Xmo1
Registered Senior Member
That was the aerodynamic stuff.
There's a loophole that allows a trucker to escape engine upgrades by upgrading the aerodynamics. The loophole is favored by smaller and poorer truckers - the aero upgrade is much cheaper and simpler. Closing the loophole is favored by larger trucking companies - they upgrade their engines anyway, on a regular schedule, and they have trained fleet mechanics to handle the complications of the pollution control stuff (a considerable burden, in my brief and tangential experience), so this gives them a competitive advantage.
From a larger community's pov, the benefits of cutting down on truck exhaust as far as one possibly can are overwhelming, and new ones are turning up every year (the connection between breathing diesel soot and dementia of several kinds in old age is the latest to show up in the numbers - it's a strong correlation, and fits with the inflammation and diabetes studies in mice as well as epidemiological surveys of people).
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Xmo1
Registered Senior Member
“Now, this would reinstate a loophole that would essentially go back to dirty old engines in a new frame,” O’Donnell said.
This was the last line of the article. What the ruling implies is that people will not buy new trucks (obviously, that's why the opposition), opting to install older engines to cut fuel costs, while producing dirty emissions. My comment on the RR engines was a slightly humorous note on other engines that incur high fuel costs, not about truck design. But yes the pollution is exactly the thing the EPA is supposed to regulate, and rather than enforcing the standards they are doing away with them.
These are budget cutting responses. The same thing happened with the SEC when their budget was cut. They could no longer afford to prosecute 80 percent of the cases they had against Wall Street. They didn't have the personnel or the budget to do the job they were created to do. In both of these cases you can see where the power is coming from, and it isn't from the people who are concerned about pollution or white collar crime.
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