THE CLEAN AIR ACT AND YOU

BY ADAM BLATTENBERG

DIESEL WORLD MAGAZINE

If you didn’t know before, you know now, within the last year the EPA has started to heavily enforce the Clean Air Act. This means removing emissions systems, something that has always been federally illegal, is now being enforced harder than ever before. Doesn’t matter what your local municipality says, whether they enforce it or not, removing emissions devices is and always has been federally illegal. We have gotten away from this old “smoke is power” or “smoke is cool” mentality, which has been great to see. So many guys are making gobs of power on the track with very little smoke. That’s impressive. We need to continue this trend. Plus in the end, who really wants to have a massive sign pointing at you after you’ve left the stop light with a full head of steam? That’s just asking for trouble. I’d personally rather hot rod around town without calling attention to myself.

This recent change is going to affect the diesel performance industry. I used to live in California. I had a heavily modified truck that was built before CA started to smog diesels. When that changed, I was turning wrenches at a truck shop, I saw the industry go through the change. We got used to it pretty quickly and the change just became part of normal life there. Going through that makes me extremely confident that we as an industry and enthusiast group as a whole, will get through this very quickly. It’s not going to end diesel performance, not even close. Don’t pay any attention to those who say otherwise. Gassers went through this in the late 70’s and 80’s, look at that industry today, we’ve got 840hp production cars. It’ll be hard for many, that’s for sure, but we as an industry and enthusiast group will get through this just fine I’m certain.

What I’m about to go into next will mostly be for diesel industry professionals, but we all can take some good info from it. Recently I was able to sit in on a seminar hosted by SEMA, with the topic being emissions compliance and how it affects the automotive performance industry as a whole. In that seminar we heard from several people the most important to this conversation being Evan Belser, the Associate Director of the Air Enforcement Division for the EPA and Jeremiah Bearden, the Vehicle Enforcement Section Manager for CARB (California Air Resource Board). The two discussed separately what their divisions of the government do and they explained what they are currently looking for as far as emissions compliance enforcement goes. They shared some interesting statistics; 13% of all diesel vehicles originally equipped with DPF/ EGR/etc are deleted; these deleted vehicles are equivalent to adding 9-million diesel trucks worth of emissions to the planet (their words); this recent bump in enforcement stemmed from individual states complaints; among other stats. What really interested me was what exactly they’re looking for and why. It helped explain a lot of the scuttlebutt we’ve been hearing lately.