the diesel pollution solution:
Making Air Healthier and Combating Climate Change

Have you ever looked at the black exhaust coming from diesel trucks, buses and construction equipment and worried about the impact on your health? Clean Water Action and Clean Water Fund are helping to lead the charge in a national initiative to reduce diesel exhaust from lung-level tailpipes. These preventable emissions harm community health and accelerate global warming.

In 2012, Clean Water Action will partner with local groups and youth-organizing programs to engage leading institutions and municipal officials across New England and beyond. The goal is to tackle some of the biggest sources of diesel pollution: excessive diesel vehicle idling and the significant pollution caused
by the oldest, least efficient and dirtiest diesel fleets. Efforts will concentrate first on those urban neighbor-hoods where vehicles’ diesel pollution is the worst, and residents are already overburdened by multiple envi-ronmental health risks.

Making Progress at the Federal Level

Clean Water Action and its more than five hundred partner groups in the National Diesel Clean-Up Campaign have convinced Congress to extend diesel clean-up program funding through 2016, while adding innovative new elements to the programs.

Next up is winning passage of the Clean Construc-tion Act of 2011, now before both the U.S. House and Senate. The legislation would require and provide funding for cleaner diesel engines and equipment used on publicly-funded transportation projects. This cost-effective approach would complement “Clean Construction” principles included in the Federal Transportation Reauthorization bill, now called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21).

Momentum to pass a federal clean construction policy has been building, as the Diesel Clean-Up Campaign’s national network of environmental health/justice, industry and labor allies have worked together to advance similar diesel clean-up policies in states and communities around the country. With so much divisive debate in Congress, the diesel clean-up legislation appeals to common sense and efficiently addresses multiple issues affecting people in urban, suburban and rural areas nationwide.

Learn more and help these diesel clean-up measures win the strong, bipartisan support they need to win passage.