E-mail story
Printer friendly page
Subscribe to PrintBy Russell Clemings / The Fresno Bee
For almost two decades, experts have said that one good way to reduce smog in places like the Valley is to find and fix the very dirtiest cars and light trucks. So-called gross polluters -- generally those emitting at least twice the allowable pollution -- make up fewer than one vehicle in 10. Yet they account for three-fourths of illegal emissions. [Look up your vehicle's smog test results and compare it with others]Studies have shown that many of those vehicles somehow evade the Smog Check program, which is supposed to get them off the road. But promising solutions must run a gauntlet of opposition from bureaucrats who won't acknowledge Smog Check's failings -- or accept that an alternative might work better.Just last year, an analysis showed that Smog Check is as likely to give a polluting vehicle a passing grade as to fail it, and that two in five failing vehicles will fail again within six months of being repaired.The state-run program's flaws leave local agencies like the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District grasping for ways to reduce motor vehicle emissions. The district's main answer: A plan to track down almost 3,000 gross polluters per year and take them off the road. The main problem: Not enough money.So instead, the district is launching a three-year program to target just 600 of an estimated 43,000 gross polluters on Valley roads. At that rate, it would take more than two centuries to round up all of the region's dirty vehicles.Doug Lawson, a former state Air Resources Board scientist and a longtime critic of the Smog Check program who now works for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., says Smog Check has a fundamental problem: It focuses on testing cars when it should focus on finding and fixing gross polluters.The program tests millions of clean cars per year. But in the process, it somehow misses perhaps hundreds of thousands of gross polluters -- and many tons of otherwise avoidable smog-forming emissions.And that, Lawson says, is the main argument in favor of alternatives: "If Smog Check were working as well as they say it is, then it would be finding and fixing the high emitters. But it isn't."State regulations generally define a gross polluter as a vehicle with emissions that are more than twice the legal limit for its year, make and model. To drive such a car is illegal, although enforcement is rare outside of registration.Beyond that, gross polluters are hard to categorize. Many are old, but some are nearly new, transformed into gross polluters by poor maintenance or tampering. Some are owned by scofflaws who don't register their cars and never get smog tests. Some get tests from dishonest shops.A surprising number fail the test, get repairs done, then pass, only to have emissions rise again within weeks or months. Whether that's because of inadequate repairs or new, unrelated breakdowns is not clear. But the state's own random roadside tests show about 40% of failed-then-repaired cars fail again in six months.Whatever the explanation, gross polluting vehicles are one of the few major potential sources left for big cuts in smog-forming emissions. The challenge lies in finding a way to identify them and get them off the streets, either forever or at least until they can be fixed properly.University of Denver chemist Donald Stedman thinks he has the answer. In the mid-1980s, his lab built a device that can measure emissions by focusing a light beam on a car's exhaust as it drives by. Ever since, he has been arguing that it is the best solution to catching the cars that slip through the Smog Check net and forcing their owners to fix them.Continued on the next page >