Cleaner diesel equipment needed.

Byline: Laura Etherton For The Register-Guard

We've made real progress toward reducing diesel pollution in the last three decades.

New national rules on the books will clean up diesel trucks and buses in the next few years, the equivalent of taking 13 million of today's trucks and buses off the roads. Here in Oregon, the Department of Environmental Quality is working to promote voluntary retrofit of diesel engines to achieve cleaner air even sooner.

Now it's time to clean up a long-overlooked source of air pollution that releases more dangerous soot each year than cars, trucks and buses combined: diesel equipment used at construction sites, farms and ports.

Here in Oregon, these non-road diesel engines consume about 25 percent of all diesel fuel used in the state but emit about 65 percent of the particulate, 47 percent of the nitrogen oxides and 91 percent of the sulfur oxide pollution from all diesel vehicles. This pollution is largely uncontrolled right now, but the technology exists to greatly reduce it.

That's why it was such good news in April when, under the driving force of then-administrator Christine Todd Whitman, the federal Environmental Protection Agency proposed strong new rules to sharply curb diesel equipment pollution. And it's why President Bush and new EPA head Mike Leavitt should move this proposal forward right away.

The pollution from these engines aggravates asthma and other respiratory conditions, contributes to heart disease, and cuts short the lives of thousands of Americans each year. Moreover, the EPA recently concluded that diesel exhaust likely causes lung cancer at everyday levels of exposure. Diesel emissions also obscure visibility in national parks, damage plants, and pollute lakes and forests with acid rain.

The good news is that by requiring cleaner fuel and pollution controls similar to the catalytic converters used on cars for decades, the EPA has proposed rules that would reduce pollution from new diesel equipment by more than 90 percent - a plan that would eventually prevent 111 premature deaths and 2,353 asthma attacks each year in Oregon.

Reducing the impact from these engines would have a net positive impact in Oregon in a variety of ways, from avoided health costs to increased productivity, estimated at between $800 million to $1.2 billion per year.

To help clear Oregon's air as much as possible, the proposal should be strengthened in two key ways. The standards should be fully phased in sooner than a decade from now, and the rules should cover trains and ships, which produce about 15 percent of the particulate pollution from non-road diesel engines. This step should also result in significant air quality benefits for a Northwest treasure, the Columbia River Gorge, which also serves as the major rail link between Seattle, Tacoma and Portland to all points east.

Oregonians deserve clean air, and this diesel proposal is an important step. President Bush should write the rules - with key strengthening changes - into law.

Laura Etherton is field director of Oregon State Public Interest Research Group.