Discourse for all interested in all things air-quality related
No one knows with absolute certainty what transportation patterns in the United States will be like once over the Corona Virus pandemic or whether we’ll return to travel patterns exactly the way they were pre-pandemic. Speaking to this, a team of researchers from two universities (Vanderbilt and Cornell) got to work to consider several possible … Read more
The below Apr. 28, 2020 press release is from Earthjustice. Today the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released an updated draft of the nation’s first electric truck standard. The rule asks manufacturers to build zero-emission vehicles that would help strengthen public health in vulnerable communities, and is key to tackling California’s longstanding air quality crisis. … Read more
It’s been amazing! Around-the-world reports have been pouring in about how clean air in many parts of the world has become. Countrywide lockdowns and stay-at-home/shelter-in-place orders instituted during the COVID-19 outbreak have led to tremendous reductions in not just driving, but public transit use, shipping (on navigable waters) and flying. All of them combined having … Read more
In California’s expansive and agriculturally conducive San Joaquin Valley, encompassing eight counties in all, one-in-five children is an asthmatic. According to the California High-Speed Rail Authority highlighting childhood health and freight and passenger train transport and travel in a media release expresses that in the Valley the childhood asthma rate is better than double the … Read more
Wood-burning restrictions in California’s eight-county San Joaquin Valley as of Mar. 1, 2020 were lifted. Though the burning of wood in residential fireplaces, fire-pits, woodstoves, etc. post-Feb. 29, 2020 is allowed, it is however, as the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District (Air District) has stated, discouraged. And, for good reason, obviously: Fine-particulate-matter pollution … Read more
Sometimes people mistake a locomotive for a train but there is no mistaking a train for a locomotive. And just like a locomotive isn’t a train and a train isn’t a locomotive, there should be no confusing steam with diesel-electric with diesel-hydraulic with straight electric with hydrogen (fuel-cell-electric) locomotive power. The type of energy supply … Read more
It is no surprise that news of the Trump administration’s action to loosen the U.S.’s clean car standards would spark criticism, outcry, response. As the Environmental Protection Network noted, “‘The Trump administration’s rollback of President Obama’s historic Clean Car Standards is an environmental and economic disaster,’ said EPN member Jeff Alson, who served as a … Read more
The Trump administration finalized a major rollback of fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles today. The revised standards will maintain dangerous levels of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and cost consumers more at the gas pump without making the nation’s roads safer. The administration’s final Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles rule, or so-called “SAFE” rule, is a … Read more
The world Corona Virus Disease – 19 (COVID-19) pandemic is a disruption of major proportions to which there is no equal, not in this century, anyway. This infection has the potential to develop into one of the worst health crises because, at this moment in time, the disease continues to spread and there is still … Read more
Air quality the world over right this very moment is in a world of hurt what with the corona virus outbreak and COVID-19’s continual spread and path of destruction the disease has wrought. Reported have been 8,000 COVID-19-caused deaths with people contracting the disease numbering in the hundreds of thousands. This is a pandemic that … Read more