Filed under: Air Quality
Max Auffhammer stated the obvious when he said that California’s laws are the most stringent than any other state in the nation. Stemming from the fact that California has one of the worst air quality as well, due primarily from the density of automobiles in the certain urban areas, it is not surprising that such a “green” state would try to minimize its impact on the nation’s carbon footprint, let alone minimize the impact it has on the health of people in the state.
His paper states that various NOx and VOC’s from gasoline outputs combine to form ozone; helpful in the ozone layer, but harmful if ingested by humans. As he calls it, inhalation of ozone is a “sunburn of the lungs” and adversely affects human health by causing airway irritation. But what does gasoline and California’s laws have to do with ozone?
Auffhammer and Kellog collaborated to examine the effectiveness of gasoline content regulation in reducing ozone pollution. They based their data on the gasoline content regulations passed by the county and the local weather since ozone is produced at its peak during high temperatures and peak sunlight, i.e. summer. The data is impressive (although I would personally not want to go through all that) and consists of monitor values for every NOx and VOC’s emitted at certain areas where the EPA has its monitors, and local weather stations data. The mathematical formula they presented takes into account all of the variables that occur. The design of the experiment as well as collection of data could not have been more comprehensive, and I applaud them for actually having the patience to sit through 7 GB of downloaded information from the EPA.
Certain regulations have shown questionable effects in certain counties in the nation, but none as pronounced as that of the effectiveness California’s policies have shown. The authors compared the data from counties in California against various counties in the nation. They also took into account that each county in California has its own policies on gasoline content besides the CARB RFG that is in effect for the whole state. The fact that California was able to impose regulation flexibility with each county is important. Each county can improve on the minimum RVP the CARB RFG states, making the effect more evident and decreasing California’s total Carbon footprint compared to other major states.
RVP’s do not work because they let refineries choose what chemicals to remove, giving the refineries the option to only remove the non-reactive chemicals in the gasoline. CARB works because it strictly imposes what NOx and VOC’s to remove during the critical summer months, plus the fact that each county can improve on the current policy by requiring the gasoline that is being sold in the said county to have fewer outputs than some other counties in California.
Thinking about these implications, people may come to the conclusion that the rest of the United States should follow California’s footsteps and impose the same strict RFG laws, but then again, the rest of the United States does not have the same problems as California when it comes to cars and weather. With the exception of some states, the rest of the United States may not be able to follow California’s example mainly because cars are not the major contributors of ozone in the atmosphere. In the industrial states, factories are the major contributors to atmospheric ozone, so how do you regulate gasoline laws when gasoline is not even the major contributor to the NOx and VOC’s? And what about interstate travelers, i.e. trucks, which are heavy diesel polluters who get their diesel from one state and travel to neighboring states bringing in the diesel pollutants from out-of-state gasoline. A lot of factors may be weighed in signifying that the problem does not solely lie on the gasoline and its outputs.
Although the problem of clearing the air has a lot of components, the work of Auffhammer and Kellog is instrumental in alerting the rest of the nation on what policies do work and what don’t.
