How do cars pollute? In two main ways, through inefficient mileage (guzzling a gallon of gas every eight or 10 or 14 miles) and through tailpipe emissions.

There’s the pollution associated with manufacturing, also, but to keep it simple let’s stick with emissions and mileage. Obviously, both affect the air. Think of mileage as a measure of your car’s pollution volume over time – if a gallon of gas doesn’t take you very far, you have to burn a lot more gas — and emissions as the chemistry of that pollution; if the mix is particularly noxious, your car will be a bigger offender than one with better tailpipe controls.

So if you want to buy the cleanest car you can — in the price range you need — you’ll look at both factors. Fortunately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already done this work, assigning a  “greenhouse gas” score to most models. Find it at the EPA’s Green Vehicles website.

The EPA’s “greenhouse gas” score considers how much a vehicle contributes to global warming via its full lifecycle emissions of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NO2), and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs). The rating is mainly a function of a car’s gas mileage, but the analysis also looks at the fuel a car uses (gasoline, natural gas, diesel, ethanol) to factor in emissions.

Cars are given a score between 1 and 10, with 10 being the highest (the Prius solos at this rating) and 5 being not so hot (the Lincoln Town Car) and 3 (the GMC Sierra 15 gasoline model) being about as low as it goes. (The Sierra 15 jumps to a 6 on ethanol though.)

At the same site, the EPA chart also breaks out a column that considers just regulated tailpipe emissions — which doesn’t capture all the greenhouse gases and considers some outputs that aren’t greenhouse gases — giving each model an “air pollution score” as well. A diesel, say, might not score as well on this scale as it would on the greenhouse gas scale.

Interested in seeing just the EPA’s gas mileage ratings? Look to fueleconomy.gov, courtesy of the Department of Energy.

There’s a chart on fueleconomy.gov that’s a graphic illustration of what happened to GM. The chart is a compilation of 2009 hybrid vehicles. It lists 27 hybrid vehicles in descending order from the highest mileage cars to the lowest.

At the top of the chart, perch some of the highest mileage vehicles available, the Toyota Prius, the Honda Civic and the Nissan Altima. The top two clock in at 40 mpg and up. The Altima at 33-35 mpg.

The lowest mileage vehicles reside at the bottom of the chart. And the bottom five are all GM products: The GMC Yukon, Chevy Tahoe, GMC Sierra, Chevrolet Silverado and Cadillac Escalade.

This isn’t surprising. GM was focused on trucks and SUVs. It’s what they did best. And for quite awhile, America wanted these wheels. Now, everyone from lawmakers to Joe the Neighborhood Critic laments that GM failed to produce better mileage vehicles. Our vision is 20/20.

But what about this apparent tactical error of putting all their initial hybrid technology into large trucks and SUVs? Trucks and SUVs that tend to get 20 mpg on the highway and 20 mpg in the city (the four at the bottom of the list) — a 20/20 vision that doesn’t make sense in 2009, and especially not looking ahead to 2020.

Did it not occur to GM that perhaps these gas-guzzlers appealed to people who might not really care whether their luxury vehicles got 16 mpg or 20 mpg? Surely they understood that customers were mainly buying SUVs and big hulking trucks as status symbols (and occasionally to pull their boats or ATVs)? That pouring their gas-saving technology into this class of auto was like dressing up for a phantom ball?

Or were they just sticking to the market segment they knew best, making improvements on top sellers and clinging to high-margin models? Upping the gas mileage of the worst mileage vehicles did achieve a great percentage gain in mpg. But did the customers buy it? Did SUV drivers pay the hybrid upcharge? Not so much, and especially not now. Phantom Ball.

Roland Hwang, vehicles policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, once referred to the Tahoe hybrid as putting lipstick on a pig.

By not building some smaller vehicles with great mileage credentials, sooner and with enthusiasm, as a hedge if nothing else, GM essentially put all its pigs in one basket. And now it suffers.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

SAN MARTIN, CA — Thousands of lives could be saved in California by reducing the diesel fumes being pumped out from trucks and buses. New regulations are being considered to cut the cancer risk.

>> Watch now

Not long ago, a City of Austin crew spent the day installing new “No Parking” signs along the streets of my neighborhood. Two big Ford F450 trucks sat outside my home-office window for hours while the men dug holes and planted posts — and their engines ran the entire time.

Not wanting to be the block’s eco-scold, I said nothing as the trucks rumbled. But the waste of fuel nagged at me even after the noise was gone, and I eventually called the city to find out why workers would be allowed to run their engines like that. Surely the city didn’t approve of polluting the air all morning just so the truck would be pre-air-conditioned when workers took a coffee break?

After calls to three or four city departments, I found a public works supervisor with some answers. All work trucks keep their engines running, she told me, because of the LED arrow boards mounted on them which warn drivers to keep their distance. “You can’t turn the engine off and keep the arrows going, because your battery will die down,” she said.

It was easy to see how a safety-based practice might serve as an excuse to keep the cab cooled off, even when running the arrow was unnecessary: In my case, the truck was parked on a dead-end block where no traffic could approach from behind it. The woman I spoke with agreed that conserving fuel wasn’t the easiest topic to raise with work crews. “They’ve been here a while,” she said, “and when I mention this they kind of get, ‘Well, fine, what do you want us to do for safety?’”

With any luck, Austin street crews won’t have that excuse much longer. Jennifer Wells, a deputy fleet officer, says the city has “recently applied for grant money for auxiliary power units, which would power equipment that they’d normally have to use the truck engine to power. We’d run off a battery instead.” (”We’re only buying solar-powered arrow boards from here on out,” she adds.)

Wells says the city is also “putting together a conservation task force” that will write a policy on idling to govern all public vehicles. Currently, the only anti-idling law in Austin applies solely to trucks weighing more than 14,000 pounds.

That’s odd for a town so proud of its other green accomplishments, especially considering the efforts other cities have taken to curb idling. A “Best Practices” report issued by the U.S. Conference of Mayors last year, for instance, notes anti-idling policies in places like Charlotte, NC and Indianapolis, IN; Minneapolis, MN adopted an anti-idling law in June; and the state of New Jersey prohibits all vehicles from idling (with exceptions) for more than three minutes at a time. The EPA has attempted to corral the many laws adopted by states, counties, and local governments here, but it’s a list that keeps growing.

Those laws may sound like window-dressing efforts that won’t be enforced by traffic cops, but anecdotal evidence and articles in trucking-industry magazines suggest otherwise. (This one reports travel-plaza cameras catching idlers in New Jersey and lists fines across the country that range from a hundred bucks to twenty-five grand or prison time.) Of Minneapolis’s new law, spokesperson Matt Laible says, that while the city is initially “focusing on public education” before enforcing its $200 fine, “so far this year, we’ve received 21 calls to our 311 system reporting vehicle idling,” which suggests that cops will have help from green-minded citizens.

Of course, bringing this issue up in the summer may terrify readers who live in places where August heat could almost cook an egg in a car even with the windows rolled down. Even in the most eco-conscious city, a parent dashing into the store for a gallon of milk on a 110-degree day is unlikely to draw ire for leaving the AC running for the kids; the Minneapolis ordinance, for instance, allows that “Vehicles may idle up to 15 minutes in a one hour period if the outside air temperature is less than zero degrees or higher than 90 degrees.”

Many drivers may have the false impression that laws against idling are hurting their cars or pocketbooks in the name of clean air — that turning the engine off and restarting it causes undue engine wear or wastes more gas than it saves. That may have been true for cars a few decades ago, but no longer: From the California Energy Commission (which points out that “for every two minutes a car is idling, it uses about the same amount of fuel it takes to go about one mile”) to the Florida Section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, those myths have been thoroughly debunked.

The accepted rule of thumb for a modern car is that after ten seconds, idling uses more gas than turning the engine off and then back on; unless you’re in traffic that may resume at a moment’s notice, you should kill the engine. As for excess wear, a Canadian study cited in this Slate
article claims that “obeying the 10-second rule will add roughly $10 to a driver’s annual maintenance bill” while saving (at today’s prices) over thirty bucks’ worth of gas.

Trying to put the issue in perspective, Slate points out that “if every one of the nation’s 196 million licensed drivers reduced their idling by 10 minutes per day,” the reduction in CO2 emissions would only amount to “about 0.2 percent of the carbon dioxide that was emitted in the United States in 2006.”

But as any school crossing-guard can tell you, plenty of parents spend far more than 10 minutes a day idling as they wait to pick kids up — and school buses traditionally have done the same. Recognizing that buses are often among a community’s biggest polluters, and that the kids they carry are particularly vulnerable to polluted air, the EPA runs an awareness campaign on the issue while states and individual school districts have their own programs aimed at replacing older vehicles and greening the ones on the road.

The Environmental Defense Fund matches content to style with a “4R” school bus campaign that echoes the old “reading, writing, ‘rithmatic” mantra and the newer “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Gutsily, they’ve chosen to launch one of their two regional efforts in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry set right-minded heads shaking last year by vetoing a bus-idling ban that seemed to have support even from his old colleague George Bush.

(The ED program offers practice advice for groups wanting to clean up school bus emissions and tamp down on idling, and points to an EPA primer on retrofitting tailpipes to filter emissions. The one pictured here is designed to filter particulate matter from diesel emissions.)

Even more problematic than school buses are the trucks that haul an estimated 85% of America’s goods from producers to retailers. According to the EPA, “truck and locomotive idling consumes over 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel annually.” Almost half of that amount (along with emissions of “11 million tons of carbon dioxide, 180,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 5,000 tons of particulate matter annually”) comes from “long-duration truck idling” — a fact of life for truckers who sleep in their cabs and must run engines to keep them air-conditioned or heated.

A trucker recently complained to the New York Times that with rising fuel costs, “It’s to the point where you can get a motel room cheaper than you can idle the truck.” But other alternatives to idling are gaining popularity as well: Add-ons like the Pony Pack and Mack Truck’s hybrid system help electrical systems run without engine power, while some truck stops are installing electric hookups to accomplish the same goal.

One by one, justifications for leaving cars and trucks running are being made obsolete; and bit by bit, a patchwork of laws is making drivers face that fact. Before long, even the time-honored wintertime practice of letting cars warm up for a half-hour in the morning may die a well deserved death — especially with no less an authority than Tom & Ray Magliozzi’s Car Talk explaining that the practice was “bad for the car” even back before people cared how wasteful it was.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA) have extended their partnership with Volvo another three years to develop commercial trucks with greater fuel efficiency. The partnership is an extension of a one-year agreement signed by the three groups in June 2007, with the overall objective of creating heavy-duty engines with at least 10 percent greater fuel efficiency then diesel engines.

A total of $48 million will be used to:

• Test and analyze the impact of different biofuels on diesel engines to increase efficiency and fuel economy, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions of new long haul trucks.

• Develop hybrid vehicle technology for heavy-duty engines and coupled with waste heat recovery.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, green house gas emissions from commercial trucks are steadily increasing. Last year’s statistics reveal green house emissions from commercial trucks are up 69 percent, producing more emissions than commercial airliners.

“This partnership is a step in the right direction,” said Volvo CEO Leif Johansson in a statement. “The climate issue and increasing fuel prices make energy use and energy efficiency some of the most important societal issues of our time.”

“The transportation industry has a special responsibility and this research and development co-operation with the U.S. Government is crucial in our efforts to develop the technology required by both our customers and society as a whole.”

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media