the auto and the air,Why the Birds Cough
Steif, William
the auto and the air Why the Birds Cough by WILLIAM STEIF On the hot, muggy evening of August 28 last year, 30,000 people, mostly young, crowded onto the Boston Common, the big center city park,...
...The external combustion engine converts fuel energy into thermal energy of a working fluid...
...But last summer, for the first time, long fingers of tear-producing, yellow-gray smog appeared over Palm Springs...
...Using these two methods—and including the 1971 model year—total air pollution from automobiles will diminish somewhat in the 1970s, but by 1980, NAPCA says, it will be on the increase again because of the growing number of autos on the highways...
...Ambulances took twenty-five persons to two hospitals, while oxygen was given to many other young people on the grounds of the Common...
...Development of a practical battery is still highly problematical, but there is another difficulty: If the nation's automobiles converted to electricity on anything like the present scale of use, demand for power to charge the batteries would soar...
...Since 1860, fossil fuel burning has increased the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide about fourteen per cent...
...As for tests with such non-polluting vehicles as the electric car, Ford said: "We have tremendous investments in facilities for engines, transmissions, and axles, and I can't see throwing these away just because the electric car doesn't emit fumes...
...In the United States alone, there are ninety million autos and fifteen million trucks and buses on the highways...
...Over the one-month period in which the twenty-two were studied, five of the men had blackouts...
...Achievement of those goals would solve the problem, but there is strong reason to doubt that the goals can be achieved with the internal combustion engine...
...Almost everyone knows not to shut his garage doors when his auto's motor is running, but not many people know why...
...Steam turbines produced so far have shown variable nitrogen oxide emission rates, but most engineers believe there is no inherent barrier to the development of turbines with low nitrogen oxide emissions...
...Without it, the brain is fatally damaged within six minutes...
...Detroit's new sincerity is verbalized this way by Chrysler's research director, George J. Huebner, Jr.: "There are no holds barred [on the anti-pollution effort...
...At the present rate of increase, 180,000 Americans will die of these lung ailments in 1983...
...Eighty per cent of all metropolitan Los Angeles's air pollution is caused by automobiles...
...Four-fifths of it is in the first seven miles above earth...
...In all, 1,300 cars were in the garage when the show was over...
...The suit accused four big auto companies of conspiring to retard development and use of devices to control auto-produced air pollution...
...A briefing paper prepared last August for Dr...
...The implications of the increasing clamor have not been lost on Detroit, where a $100 billion-a-year business is at stake...
...And in mid-February, as part of a thirty-seven-point program to rescue the environment, President Nixon issued strict new regulations for auto exhausts in the mid-1970s, proposed encouraging development of a "virtually pollution-free" car by spending $9 million a year on research, and asked for power to phase out the lead in gasoline...
...As late as May 1968, Henry Ford II was telling a magazine interviewer that he preferred a cooperative "research and development" program with several oil companies in the fight against pollution...
...Within NAPCA only a couple of million dollars yearly have gone to research— most of the agency's $60 million-a-year budget has been spent for establishing a bureaucracy that could set up air quality standards for fifty-seven metropolitan areas and promulgate those standards...
...The mixture is forced into combustion chambers (cylinders), where sparks explode the mixture intermittently, driving pistons...
...In California, which pioneered in smog control legislation, and in some other states, politicians are vying with one another to produce tougher proposals aimed at the internal combustion engine...
...Another leading environmentalist, Senator Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin Democrat, went even further and suggested that the auto's internal combustion engine should be phased out starting this year unless the auto manufacturers develop pollution-free exhausts...
...Mileage is better...
...Man used to consider the air infinite, but it actually is finite, amounting to between five and six quadrillion tons...
...The best estimates available are that the United States puts about 188.8 million tons of pollutants into the air yearly...
...The Federal General Services Administration is testing a dozen vehicles on natural gas in Los Angeles and several dozen more in Houston and Mississippi, and has had encouraging experiences so far...
...The results could be more rain and hail and even a possible decrease in the food supply...
...The odd thing is that the industry has been on notice since the mid-1950s that it would have to do something...
...This is an all-out effort...
...General Dynamics, Gulton Industries, Allis-Chalmers, and Westinghouse have all done work in this specialty, and some smaller firms actually have marketed a few dozen electric cars...
...Some 25.9 million tons go into the air annually, more than half from motor vehicles...
...The reason is that the auto's internal combustion engine emits great quantities of carbon monoxide, a poison which has an affinity for the blood's hemoglobin—the red cells transporting oxygen—about 210 times greater than oxygen...
...others are pushing hard to make a practical and economical electric car...
...The vendors of natural gas and petroleum gas deny that their wares are any less safe than gasoline, and they may be right...
...High concentrations of nitrogen oxides may produce lung damage, but this is still only a tentative conclusion...
...About ninety-four million tons a year go into U.S...
...A more radical alternative is to do away with the internal combustion engine entirely...
...Or consider the experience of the twenty-two men working the toll booths at either end of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel—all but one in their twenties and thirties...
...the auto and the air Why the Birds Cough by WILLIAM STEIF On the hot, muggy evening of August 28 last year, 30,000 people, mostly young, crowded onto the Boston Common, the big center city park, to hear a rock group named the Chamber Brothers...
...But the new standards laid down in mid-February 1969 for nitrogen oxides do not go into effect until the 1973 model year, though California—with its stricter controls—is demanding reductions in nitrogen oxides in the 1972 models...
...Its carburetor mixes air with gasoline...
...About seventeen million tons are expelled into the air each year, slightly less than half from vehicles...
...The internal combustion engine is responsible for the smog, the carbon monoxide, and Detroit's vast business enterprises...
...There are alternatives to afterburners on the internal combustion engine...
...But we are not going to...
...The companies' top executives, who a few years ago scoffed publicly at California's problems (with such wisecracks as, "What Los Angeles needs is filter-tipped people"), are quite circumspect today...
...Lee DuBridge, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology, reported: "There is strong evidence that the use of Federal standards geared to controlling the internal combustion engine will not result in the drastic inroads on the problem needed to safeguard public health...
...He believes the Nixon Administration's approach—setting goals for industry which seem fairly distant in time—is exactly wrong...
...Thus, relatively small concentrations of carbon monoxide can deprive vital body functions of an oxygen supply...
...The silent steam engine does not need as much horsepower as the internal combustion engine because it does not lose as much power...
...But the steam engine has its drawbacks, too...
...so is economy...
...GM's Cole even was willing to kick an old ally, the oil business, so as to make the point that lead in gasoline is dangerous and should be removed...
...But problems of supply and distribution make it likely that these two fuels will be confined to fleets of trucks, buses, taxis, and possibly short-run rental cars...
...The implications of the increasing clamor have not been lost on Detroit . . ." Particulates, tiny bits of matter which become deadly irritants when combined with other pollutants...
...He predicts that the short-changing of research, both by the Federal executive branch and by industry, will haunt the nation in future years...
...Technically it is further advanced than the electric-powered car...
...Yet the near-disaster at the Boston Common is an index to how air pollution from the auto has created a crisis in the nation...
...The bulk of it comes from the internal combustion engines of automobiles...
...The air in large American cities contains 100 times that amount of carbon monoxide...
...Senator Edmund S. Muskie, Maine Democrat, welcomed this "rhetoric of concern" and promptly offered a detailed $975 million air pollution program which he hoped Mr...
...At best, the effect of present Federal standards will be to postpone in time the upward growth of pollution levels rather than to reverse the trend...
...That amount would seem to suffice for eternity, but many scientists now worry that we are expelling so many poisons into the air so quickly that we are in danger of changing its nature—in which case, "filter-tipped people" may become a necessity...
...It forms an envelope around the earth to a height of nineteen or twenty miles...
...The power produced is transmitted to the wheels...
...This, at least, was the gist of testimony from Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Creed Black to the Senate Commerce Committee last winter during a hearing on a bill introduced by Muskie and the two Democratic Senators from Washington, Warren G. Magnuson and Henry Jackson, to encourage development of a low-emission auto by permitting the Government to pay up to twenty-five per cent above normal prices if the auto proved pollution-free...
...In Los Angeles, the smog is so bad that doctors advise 10,000 persons a year to leave the area...
...GM, Ford, and Chrysler each put on major anti-pollution displays for the automotive engineers...
...Fresh air contains less than one-tenth of one part carbon monoxide for each million parts of air...
...The highly specialized tissue of human lungs—an evolution of millions of years—acts as a one-way screen, holding back the blood on one side but permitting the air's oxygen to make its way to the blood, where millions of red cells transport it to other body tissues and exchange the fresh oxygen for carbon dioxide, a waste which is conveyed back to the lungs and exhaled...
...Petroleum gas has been used in the municipal fleet of Tampa, Florida, for several years and in Chicago's bus system for more than a decade with success...
...Some 21.5 million tons go into U.S...
...One is to reform the engine by direct injection of the fuel into each cylinder, metering the gasoline precisely, eliminating the carburetor, increasing horsepower and economy—and reducing emissions...
...Though such fuels cut pollution greatly (because the fuels burn much more completely), they must be used under pressure...
...Once President Nixon had spoken out against leaded gasoline, GM (followed closely by Ford) swiftly passed the word that it was redesigning the engines on most of its 1971 models so that they would operate on lead-free gasoline...
...Within the Department of Transportation, less than $1 million a year has gone to research, mostly to run a couple of smog-free bus experiments...
...Hydrocarbons, organic compounds which are vital to the photochemical process by which smog is produced...
...Only a few weeks later, General Motors President Edward N. Cole told the Society of Automotive Engineers' convention in Detroit that an essentially pollution-free auto could be built by 1980, and added: "We must be highly aggressive in taking action and, equally important, in getting credit for our accomplishments...
...The man most angry about the record is Senator Muskie, who pioneered the early Federal legislation...
...Indeed, more than 200,000 vehicles, mostly trucks and specialized vehicles such as fork-lifts, have operated for some years on petroleum gas...
...Obviously, automobiles are the chief villains when it comes to carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides, though they are not wholly blameless in the other two categories...
...Nevertheless, the steam engine appears to be the best of the far-out candidates to replace the internal combustion engine, and companies in California, Massachusetts, and Nevada ¦—the last headed by retired millionaire William Lear, who made the business jet a great success—have experimental models in various stages of testing...
...Farther away, in the 1975 model year, the Nixon Administration is demanding its first reduction in emissions of particulates (to a third of the present emissions...
...Other scientists predict a cooler earth as the sunlight is blocked by increases in particulates...
...There is also growing suspicion that oxidants have carcinogenic effects...
...Many came in automobiles, which they parked beneath the Common in a three-tier, 1,500-car municipal garage built a few years ago...
...More stringent Federal controls have been placed on 1970 and 1971 models, and as a result carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions in the 1971 models will be reduced about three quarters from the emissions of those two gases in the pre-1968 models...
...Almost four-fifths of the air is nitrogen, almost one-fifth oxygen, the rest other gases and water vapor...
...All of which puts the problem of our fouled ambient air on the Nixon Administration's back again...
...But possibly the biggest drawback has nothing to do with the engine itself...
...GM and Ford, with Chrysler and American Motors trailing far behind, seem to have convinced the White House, HEW, and NAPCA that the internal combustion engine can and should be salvaged...
...Despite such warnings, it appears that the Nixon Administration, under benevolent guidance from the auto makers, is still placing its bets on modification of the internal combustion engine and its fuel...
...For instance, autos spew out 200,000 tons of lead particulates annually, as a result of the almost universal practice of selling leaded gasolines to reduce engine knock...
...The air is ambient—that is, all encompassing...
...The trouble with the internal combustion engine is that it is so popular...
...We shall intensify our research, set increasingly strict standards, and strengthen enforcement procedures—and we shall do it now...
...The problem is already beyond reasonable bounds...
...Some 30.4 million tons are expelled into the air yearly, two-thirds from burning coal...
...About thirty per cent of the oxygen inhaled by a person goes to the brain...
...air, three-quarters of that from motor vehicles...
...Nixon would support...
...Only eighteen months later, Ford's attitude seemed to have changed radically...
...further reduction in nitrogen oxides (to a seventh of the present emissions...
...Oddly enough, the Republican Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, seems to agree with Muskie...
...In his State of the Union message at the end of January, the President said: "The automobile is our worst polluter of the air...
...To understand why Detroit is on the defensive, it is necessary to understand the automobile's role in polluting the air...
...The engine has the singular advantage of burning its fuel much more completely than the internal combustion engine (since the burning is continuous) under lower temperatures and pressures...
...Either compressed natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas can be burned easily in present motors with relatively simple and inexpensive ($200 to $300) modifications...
...That, in turn, would mean building many more coal and oil-fired utility plants—and these are among the worst American industrial polluters...
...Adequate control requires further advances in engine design and fuel composition...
...These controls [are] far less than adequate to cope with a problem already well out of hand...
...What is not tentative is the effect of "marrying" hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides in sunlight: A whole new family of secondary products called oxidants results—irritating eyes, ears, nose, throat, and respiratory system, reducing visibility, damaging plants and materials, impairing lung function in victims of emphysema, even interfering with athletic performance of teenagers...
...All but a handful use the internal combustion engine...
...Maybe people are waiting to see if we will fall on our face...
...Such manifolds will require large amounts of fairly exotic metals, cost $200 to $300 (to be passed on to the car buyer), and require more maintenance than most drivers give their cars...
...By that time Los Angeles County, plagued with smog since World War II, had forced the shutdown of 1.5 million backyard incinerators and, when that failed to clear up the smog, had prosecuted oil refineries, steel mills, and 40,000 other industrial offenders...
...air, mostly from smokestacks...
...The companies are now willing to invest $80 million to $100 million a year in research, and they are now taking this research seriously...
...Twenty-four hours later the incident was nearly forgotten...
...Within minutes youngsters began staggering out of the garage on foot, gasping and choking...
...The "big five" in pollutants are: Carbon monoxide, tasteless, colorless, odorless, and lethal...
...Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Alfa-Romeo already have begun to build their engines in Europe this way, and there are hints that American manufacturers are working on the same principle...
...There are other indices, some almost unnoticed...
...So far, the chief anti-pollution improvements on the internal combustion engine have taken two forms: Injecting air into the still-hot mixture going out the exhaust system, thus creating more thorough combustion, or regulating the carburetor jet or nozzle that mixes gasoline with air more precisely, so that less fuel goes into the mixture...
...One of the big companies developed a catalytic converter in 1964—a device which would go a long way toward more complete combustion of gasoline if gasoline were unleaded—but simply laid it on the shelf...
...A number of experimenters and small companies are working to perfect an external combustion or "steam" engine...
...Indeed, wealthy Angele-nos used to drive down to Palm Springs, a desert resort 110 miles away, to escape the Los Angeles smog...
...Nitrogen oxides, another vital ingredient of smog...
...Los Angeles—"where the birds cough"—is notorious for its auto-produced smog...
...The engine burns its fuel within itself...
...Another alternative—even farther out, most experts think—is the electric engine...
...further reduction in carbon monoxide (to less than half the present standard...
...The quantity of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons emitted from the steam engine is about one-twentieth of the amount emitted from an uncontrolled internal combustion engine...
...it is simply that the auto makers, who have the expertise and large amounts of necessary capital needed to solve the steam engine's remaining problems, also have the greatest vested interest in perpetuating the internal combustion engine...
...Fortunately, a quick-witted city official saw what was happening and ordered the toll-takers to stop taking tolls so that the garage could be cleared swiftly...
...He believes that the only way to achieve results is through "a steady tightening of standards, on a regular and frequent basis, until an emission-free vehicle comes off the assembly line...
...The auto makers have dragged their feet for fifteen years...
...Hydrocarbons, on the other hand, seem to have little direct effect on health by themselves...
...Others passed out in their cars...
...The Democratic leadership in both House and Senate challenged the President to increase funding greatly for clean air programs...
...Nothing worked, the smog got worse, and the automobile was pinpointed as the culprit...
...Gradually the state tightened up its requirements and by 1965 the industry could no longer hold off Federal legislation...
...the auto makers have dragged their feet for fifteen years...
...A final alternative that is beginning to look much more feasible is use of a different fuel in the internal combustion engine...
...But no one is especially sanguine about ending air pollution with electric cars...
...But then, he has heard the birds cough...
...In the late 1950s the auto industry fought California state legislation, but in 1960 the first state law finally passed, requiring only a few simple adjustments in the auto's crankcase...
...and further reduction in hydrocarbons (to less than a quarter of the present standard...
...Sulfur oxides, which in combination with the moist membranes of the lungs form sulfuric acid, a poison...
...Henry Ford II, chairman of the Ford Motor Company, in December called environmental pollution "by far the most important problem" facing the auto industry in the 1970s and pledged $31 million for vehicle pollution control in 1970...
...The problem is the intermittent explosion of the fuel—a process in which the fuel is never completely burned...
...And when asked what his company's greatest problem was, Ford replied, "That's easy, making more money...
...That means a sealed system which, if ruptured in a mere fender-bender accident, could leak, catch fire, or explode...
...The result, as recent studies have confirmed, can be headaches, loss of visual acuity, decreased muscular coordination, loss of energy, blackouts, damage to the central nervous system, and reduced chance of survival from heart attacks...
...There is no guarantee that the degree of control that is possible with the internal combustion engine will be adequate...
...Under a consent agreement, the auto makers—without admitting their guilt —said they would not obstruct development of anti-smog devices and would make available, without fees, licenses of anti-pollution inventions to firms desiring them...
...For example, Chrysler has done a considerable amount of research on a turbine engine but maintains a total commitment to internal combustion...
...But the afterburners also could represent a huge new market for the auto makers...
...Some believe the external combustion engine is overweight and accelerates too slowly...
...Police carried at least twenty unconscious persons out of the garage...
...More than half were found to have dizzy spells from a higher-than-average concentration of carbon monoxide in their lungs...
...Much of the audience descended into the garage and, almost simultaneously, drivers turned on their motors and headed for the three toll-booth exits...
...The Administration's goals reportedly call for another fifty per cent reduction of the 1975 emissions levels in all categories by 1980...
...More expensive metals and more precise tooling (for a closed system) are needed...
...William Steif is a Washington staff writer for the Scripps-Howard News Alliance who specializes in coverage of environmental problems...
...Both GM and Ford have experimented with, and are continuing to work with, electric engines, the only sure way of getting zero emissions of pollutants from autos...
...But again, there are problems...
...the 1968 models were the first affected, and all that was required, again, was a fairly simple cutback on carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions...
...Some scientists fear that increases in carbon dioxide will prevent the earth's heat from escaping into space, melt the polar ice caps, raise oceans as much as 400 feet, and drown many cities...
...GM says it has been spending about $45 million a year on anti-pollution research and development, and Ford has been spending $28 million...
...no one wanted to upset a symbiotic relationship with the oil industry...
...The death rate from bronchitis and emphysema in the United States today is nine times as high as it was twenty years ago...
...The extent to which the nation's automobiles can be blamed for its polluted air has been known for years, but only in recent months have American political leaders, from President Nixon on down, been willing to listen to their scientific advisers and point the finger directly at the manufacturers in Detroit...
...To cut pollution Detroit can install catalytic converters, which it has ruled out because of the gasoline problem, or get a replacement for the internal combustion engine, which it refuses to do for economic reasons, or develop an exhaust manifold reactor, in which exhaust gases are mixed with air and "after-burned" in large, insulated, stainless steel manifolds at high temperatures...
...Even relatively low concentrations of carbon monoxide affect drivers, and peak-hour traffic jams in Los Angeles and Detroit have built up concentrations as high as 150 parts per million or even higher...
...The latter method is used on about eighty per cent of new American cars because the former method requires an air pump and is more expensive...
...What may have helped him along was the Federal anti-trust suit filed ten days before President Nixon took office...
...The draft of a national emissions standards study made for Congress by the National Air Pollution Control Administration (NAPCA) last year said: "It has been suggested by eminent scientists that the net increase of pollutants such as particulate matter and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution has affected the weather...
...The same is true of Washington, D.G., where the number of cars per square mile is one and a half times as great as in Los Angeles...
...Everyone recovered soon and went home...
Vol. 34 • April 1970 • No. 4
