diesel clean-up: moving forward

Want to improve air quality where you live, work, commute or play AND do something about climate change at the same time?

Clean Water Action and Clean Water Fund organizers across the country are focused on helping people do just that this summer as construction season begins. Older, dirtier diesel engines and equipment will be in and around our neighborhoods contributing to new and upgraded community infrastructure but also causing air-pollution-related health and climate impacts.

Diesel exhaust contains more than 40 toxic air contaminants, carcinogens, and ozone-forming elements, as well as fine particulate matter or soot, and its effects can be seen in rapidly rising rates of asthma, health care costs and bad air quality days. Along with the epidemic respiratory, cardiovascular and systemic health impacts, including new evidence of links to adult diabetes, the black carbon emitted by diesels presents internationally-recognized climate challenges.

A recent report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) confirms the growing threat from black carbon, including acute warming effects and disturbed tropical rainfall and regional circulation patterns. Older diesel engines are responsible for about 60% of black carbon emissions in the U.S. and Europe, and are the fastest-growing source of black carbon emissions in developing countries. More than half of U.S. black carbon comes from diesels: 41% from engines in on-road vehicles such as trucks, and another 16% from engines used off-road, often in construction equipment.

For carbon dioxide and other long-lived greenhouse gas pollution, cuts will require many decades before climate change benefits such as lower temperatures ban be measured. In contrast, replacing and scrapping older diesel engines or retrofitting them with diesel particulate filters provides one of the few opportunities to achieve immediate climate and health benefits. The UNEP report emphasizes the need for fast action on short-lived climate changing pollutants like black carbon and ground-level ozone. Less diesel pollution means improved respiratory health, fewer hospital emissions and work days lost due to sickness.

People from the communities most affected by diesel pollution have become key players in the fight for more stringent clean air policies. By participating in pollution ‘patrol’ monitoring, attending local meetings, testifying at hearings, and writing letters to decision-makers, neighborhood volunteers, Clean Water Action staff and members are demanding smart, clean diesel solutions on state and local levels. Residents and businesses in East Providence, Rhode Island, for example, will soon celebrate their state’s first construction project to implement the diesel retrofit program. That program resulted from last summer’s landmark legislation, which passed following a three year negotiation process with environmentalists, construction industry and labor union representatives.

Progress is not limited to Rhode Island. Massachusetts is also emerging as a diesel clean-up leader. There, collaboration between Clean Water Action, Clean Water Fund, other local and statewide groups, federal and state agencies and neighborhood-based groups and leaders has been driving much of the progress.  To reduce harmful emissions, the state has retrofitted more than 5,000 school buses, hundreds of waste hauler vehicles, and various state and municipal on-road and non-road heavy duty diesel vehicles. One dozen MBTA locomotives have been “repowered,” and electrification of South Boston’s fishing pier has reduced boat and fishing engine idling and air pollution by 95 percent.