O'Donnell noted that the EPA itself has calculated that the diesel cleanup would prevent more than 8,000 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma attacks each year. The diesel cleanup would produce the clean-air equivalent of removing 13 million of today's trucks off the road. The EPA plan was announced by former Administrator Carol Browner last December. It would reduce pollution by new big diesel trucks and buses by up to 95 percent by 2007. To enable use of high-tech pollution control devices, EPA also would require refiners to remove 97 percent of the sulfur from highway diesel fuel.
Sulfur is a poison, much as lead was a poison to automobile catalytic converters.
The cleanup plan had been thrown into doubt on January 20, when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card ordered federal agencies to review recent major rules, including the diesel cleanup. New EPA Administrator Whitman reviewed the rule closely and agreed that it is needed to protect public health and that it can be achieved at a reasonable cost. O'Donnell noted that yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld EPA's national health standards for fine particle soot, a pollutant linked to tens of thousands of premature deaths annually as well as other breathing problems. The Supreme Court ruling underscored the urgent need to clean up this dangerous pollution. O'Donnell noted that petroleum refiners have sued to block the diesel cleanup.