Must Be An Election Year

ALERT! STOP THE PRESSES! BUSH ADMINISTRATION ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING GOOD!

Landmark controls on diesel emissions, finalized Tuesday by the U.S. EPA, are expected to prevent 12,000 premature deaths and 15,000 heart attacks each year. And these were no warmed-over regs from the Clinton era, passed off as the Bushies' own, as was the case with the Highway Diesel Rule, a tough new standard that will dramatically reduce diesel pollution from trucks and buses starting in 2007. The Bush EPA can claim all the credit for this initiative, which regulates "non-road" diesel-powered equipment such as bulldozers, forklifts, tractors, and generators -- sources responsible for a surprising 60 percent of all diesel particulate matter, which is suspected of causing cancer. The regulations require manufacturers to build 90 percent cleaner diesel engines for these non-road machines, and call for a whopping 99 percent reduction of the sulfur content in the diesel fuel that will power the updated engines. Enviros far and wide have sounded positively starry-eyed in their accolades: "The EPA staff have been phenomenal on this issue," said Richard Kassel, a Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney who helped the agency draft the regulations. "They went out of their way to give us as much of a voice in this regulatory process as they did industry. Nobody can deny that this will be remembered as a historic victory for clean air."