Friday, October 08, 2010

Close Enough for Gummint Work, California Style

Who needed all that silly business and commerce, anyway?

California grossly miscalculated pollution levels in a scientific analysis used to toughen the state's clean-air standards...The pollution estimate in question was too high - by 340 percent, according to the California Air Resources Board

Here's the fun part:

The staff of the powerful and widely respected Air Resources Board said the overestimate is largely due to the board calculating emissions before the economy slumped, which halted the use of many of the 150,000 diesel-exhaust-spewing vehicles in California.

Oh, really?

Independent researchers, however, found huge overestimates in the air board's work on diesel emissions and attributed the flawed work to a faulty method of calculation - not the economic downturn.

CARB guessed--yup, guessed--that off-road diesel consumption was 1 Bn gal/yr when actual measures showed less than 300K gal/yr.

The cost-to-comply with the reg was estimated at $10Bn or more. California unemployment is greater than 10%. There's no relationship between those numbers, of course.

No comments: