A Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing Wednesday yielded unexpected consensus on the need to address the cold weather functioning of diesel engine pollution controls, even as divisions remained on how best to achieve that goal.
The roughly 90-minute gathering centered on S. 3135, the “Cold Weather Diesel Reliability Act,” sponsored by Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), to scrap existing requirements that heavy-duty engines power down or shut off when their emission controls malfunction in frigid temperatures.
“This is a problem that my constituents brought directly to my office, and it’s really about another EPA mandate that doesn’t reflect the real world,” Sullivan said. In Alaska, with huge tracts of remote areas, it “can literally be a matter of life and death,” he added.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the committee’s ranking Democrat, indicated he was open to discussion of what he called a “very narrow topic,” but said that Sullivan’s legislation “may target a problem that the EPA has already largely addressed and manufacturers already adapted to.”
