Rich Kassel's Blog
Dumping Dirty Diesels in NYC and Mexico City
October 3, 2007
Posted by Rich Kassel in Curbing Pollution , Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably
With this post, I’m finally joining the ranks of NRDC’s bloggers. While I’ll leave it others to cover the latest news on the ethanol, halo 3, or arctic melting, I’ll try to fill in the gaps with posts on the air pollution, clean fuels and vehicles, and mega-city issues that interest me personally and keep me employed professionally.
Right now, I’m balancing projects to reduce diesel pollution in New York City and Mexico City. In both cities, I’m working with environmental advocates and progressive government officials who are trying to reduce diesel pollution, as much and as fast as possible.
Both cities are led by mayors who have launched grand sustainability plans in the past year. Indeed, it is fair to say that both New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard are staking their legacies on their ability to deliver long-term sustainability plans on their watches.
For Mayor Bloomberg, congestion pricing is at the center of the media coverage of the plan, but his PlaNYC 2030 also makes a major commitment to reducing diesel pollution from the City’s buses, trucks, construction equipment, ferries and other dirty diesels.
This commitment to cleaner diesels makes sense—more than half of the soot pollution inhaled by people walking up Madison Avenue come from the buses, trucks and construction equipment operating right there. For more on this topic, take a look at the column I wrote last week for the Gotham Gazette, an online must-read for NYC government and political watchers.
For Mayor Ebrard also, sustainability is moving to center stage. His Plan Verde (Spanish-language coverage here) includes land conservation, public space, water, mobility, air, waste, and climate change and energy goals—and like Mayor Bloomberg, diesel pollution is a major problem that he hopes to solve during the implementation of his plan.
Mayor Ebrard’s commitment to reducing diesel pollution makes sense also. Vehicles contribute more than 70 percent of the soot pollution in Mexico City, and much of that can be traced to the city’s taxis and buses. He’s hoping to build a system of 10 Bus-Rapid Transit lines to shift solo drivers sitting in the city’s horrendous traffic to faster-moving buses operating in their own lanes, and to replace the staggeringly crowded and polluting microbuses that operate on those lines currently. Plus, he’s looking at ways to introduce a cleaner, “ultra-low sulfur diesel” fuel to the city’s bus fleets, and to replace the oldest, dirtiest transit buses with the cleaner buses, among other key steps.
These projects have me thinking a lot about the differences in pollution levels—and pollution expectations—between these two great cities. Here in New York, we live with ozone and soot pollution levels that have never met EPA’s health-based standards. People complain about our air pollution all the time. Yet residents of Mexico City (not to mention Delhi, where I once saw pollution levels on a monitor that were ten times what we breathe on Madison Avenue) would breathe a lot easier if they could trade their air for ours.
It’s fascinating to participate in the air pollution debates of both cities. There are so many similarities in the problems, and in the fuels and technology responses to the problems. But what’s really fascinating is that both of these cities (along with London, Paris, and others) are looking decades into the future. And, they are both creating sustainability plans that elevate a range of environmental issues to the same level of importance as the economic development issues that usually frame long-term planning discussions.
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- Rich Kassel
- Senior Attorney and Director, Clean Fuels and Vehicles Project
- New York City
- I came to NRDC in 1991 on a three-year grant, and never left. Over the...
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