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Online Stock Market Trading The proliferation of sport utility vehicles and light trucks has a cost, and Washington officials have just gotten a partial bill: Tons more pollutants are being pumped into the air than local planners had anticipated.

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Stock Investing Course While they are not the sole culprit -- diesel truck emissions are also contributing -- the increased presence of SUVs on area roads is a major factor driving pollution levels far beyond the "budget" that local officials had constructed in order to bring the Washington area into compliance with federal clean air standards by 2005. That leaves local governments a stark choice: Come up with new and potentially costly ways to reduce air pollution or face the possibility that new road and highway projects may be arrested. Local jurisdictions only recently hammered out a $42 million package of pollution reduction measures in Maryland, the District and Virginia. That plan aimed to eliminate an expected three tons per day of excess emissions. Now a new computer estimate of vehicle pollution shows the problem is closer to 47 excess tons a day. Officials will be scrambling in the coming weeks to come up with yet more reductions, a process that will require looking not only at cars and trucks but also at lawnmowers, power plants and everything else that contributes to regional pollution.

Stock Market Game Other urban areas are likely to get similar bad news as they run their numbers through the new federally required estimating model. Tougher tailpipe standards adopted for SUVs in 2000 will eventually help, as will new fuel and emissions rules for diesel engines, but it will be the end of the decade before those standards fully phase in. SUVs could also be more efficient, but government, bowing to the auto industry, has not insisted. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed a 1.5 mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency standards for SUVs and light trucks over the 2005-2007 model years. That's a small step compared with what automakers could do, but it would be a beginning. While manufacturers have profited from the swing to SUVs and light trucks, the failure to hold those vehicles to the same kinds of standards as passenger cars has been costly in many ways, from growing dependence on foreign oil to continued pollution of the nation's air. How costly? Just ask officials right here. They're looking at the tab, and they don't know how to pay it.

Stock Investing Game Washington Post - 11/24/2002

Topic: Air Pollution

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