It's not every day that an automotive journalist winds up in a typing shed at an environmental writers' retreat. But I have this long-awaited history of leaded gasoline (long awaited by my publisher, that is, for whom it is now significantly overdue) to work on. So when offered the choice, I chose not to surrender but to retreat. Which is how I wound up in California's bucolic Marin County, on the edge of the Point Reyes National Seashore, tapping the keys as close to 24-7 as a man can get before turning into Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Correction: I give myself about another week and a half before I start thinking about killing anyone with an ax.
Over a breakfast of muesli and organic yogurt this morning, I did have to concede that I probably am the only environmental writer in town with a supercharged Jaguar at his disposal. I guess that's just the way I roll, even if book duty means that I don't get to drive the XJ Super V8 as much as I'd like. (For my groundbreaking study on how this sort of ride comfort and 0-to-60-mph times below 5.5 seconds may be part of the solution to the world's environmental woes, or at least those in my biosphere, stay tuned.)
A couple of weeks ago, I arrived here in a Mercedes-Benz E320 Bluetec with the all-new turbo-diesel V-6. I suspect it would have established my environmentalist bona fides better if it smoked and clattered the way diesels used to, but it was so clean, fast, and quiet that the only way people knew I had gotten 30 mpg on my trip from San Francisco was when I stopped and told them, which, it turns out, isn't the conversation starter you might have hoped - although I did befriend a nice fellow and his 1958 Willys wagon, a real survivor of a machine and like its keeper, perhaps not above a little illicit puffing of its own.
The Mercedes' lack of smoke and odor, gratifying as it was, reminded me of a recent day back east, when I was riding to work on my bicycle and found myself stuck behind a commuter bus. This Vehicle, a block-lettered sticker on its rear engine cover began, Uses . . . and then I was gassed to within an inch of my life as the bus pulled away and a cloud of sooty, black diesel smoke as large as the village hall enveloped me. Catching up at the next light, I was able to finish reading the sticker. This Vehicle Uses Clean-Air Technology. Lord help me if it hadn't; I might have died then instead of just feeling like I was dying.
The E320 Bluetec reminds us that new diesels are a lot tidier than their fog-machine ancestors. But the memory of the bus reminded me that there are sure a lot of nasty diesel engines still out there, and boy, do they suck.
Now is as good a time as any to remember a giant mistake in America's clean-air policies, the type we should be careful never to make again, but which we surely will. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when carmakers were being forced for the first time to clean up their acts, our representatives in Washington decided to give all the other engine makers - manufacturers of farm tractors, construction machinery, chain saws, snowmobiles, leaf blowers, trucks, buses, and just about every other internal-combustion special interest you can think of outside of the passenger-car business - a gargantuan break. The best Congress money could buy exempted them from having to meet the new emissions standards governing automobiles, or in many cases, any standards at all.
The diesel lobby made the usual arguments back in the day: Why it had to be this way. Why they shouldn't be forced to reduce their emissions. How such requirements would cost jobs while aiding and abetting foreign competitors. How their poor, working customers, such as farmers and truckers, couldn't afford to pay even a penny more for their equipment. How there were relatively so few of these exempted machines anyway. And of course, when they said these things, they were blowing it all out their collective trade associations' tailpipe, heavy on the particulates, and with a big assist from the oil companies for whom they effectively were fronting.
Since the beginning of time (or ever since oil was first struck at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859), the oil industry has had a problem with the sulfur content of its petroleum. In the nineteenth century, kerosene made from sulfurous petroleum would cause lamps to smell bad and sometimes to burst spontaneously into flame. Sulfur described the difference between sweet and sour crude (the latter has the high sulfur content). Sulfur influenced the price of crude oil, and learning how to remove sulfur from crude became one of the industry's first technological success stories; they'd more or less figured it out before McKinley became president.
But if at first the industry didn't know how to remove sulfur, when it did learn how, it didn't want to, because it cost money - not that much, just enough to make them not want to bother. Today, a century later, the oil companies are finally getting around to being forced to introduce the lower-sulfur diesel they've known how to make since - wait, oh, that's right - pretty much forever. And all diesels, young and old, will now be cleaner, since reducing sulfur cuts particulate emissions, even when burned in engines with less sophisticated emissions controls.
Particulates are important. In California, state officials estimate, they constitute about 70 percent of the statewide risk from air pollution, and most of it comes from diesel. Of the more than forty chemicals identified as toxic air contaminants found in diesel particulate matter, fifteen are classified as carcinogens. Young children are most susceptible to cancer and other diseases, as well as to the losses of function that can be caused by microscopic diesel-exhaust specs lodging in lung tissue. Diesel particulates irritate eyes and throats, aggravate allergies, and intensify asthma attacks. Scary, too, when you remember a 2001 study of California school buses by the National Resources Defense Council found that the air inside running buses carried up to four times the amount of diesel soot of air monitored around the exteriors, measuring up to forty-six times the cancer-risk threshold designated by the EPA.
And it's not just kids. Scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that on days when amounts of fine particles (including diesel particulates) in the air rise, adult deaths from heart attacks, strokes, asthma, and other respiratory diseases also rise.
There's another benefit to reducing sulfur - because it won't be there to contaminate catalytic converters, they can more effectively curb other pollutants. It's easy to see why. In the bad old days (like last year), garden-variety diesel might contain more than 3400 sulfur parts per million (ppm). Today, that's heading down from 500 ppm to 15 ppm, another 97 percent reduction. Diesel, its supporters sometimes say, gets a bad rap. They forget that it deserved to have a bad rap; it was bad.
But I'd better stop. All work and no play may not make Jamie a dull boy, but it hasn't made him a very interesting one, either.
You'd think I was at an environmentalists' retreat.