GREEN NEWS * France - Considers city centre car bans

Paris,France --Fleet Europe, by Tim Harrup -6 April 2011: -- The French Ecology Minister is to put forward a proposal which would see certain high polluting vehicles banned from eight of the largest city centres in France. According to calculations made by ‘Le Parisien’, some 10 million vehicles currently on the roads could be affected. Both heavy goods vehicles and passenger cars will fall under any new legislation, along with certain motor-bikes. The cars in question are over 13 years old and are too old to be fitted with particulate filters. Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and five other cities have decided to create priority zones for air quality, known as ‘Zapa’... The minister points out that France risks a record fine for non-conformity with EU regulations in the domain of air quality. The testing of the scheme will begin by 2012 and last three years, before being potentially rolled out into other cities...

GREEN NEWS * USA - House Approves Diesel Emissions Reduction Act

"This is the equivalent of taking 13 million of today's trucks off the roads"...

Washington,DC,USA -Work Truck On Line/Shared by Mike Willcockson in World of Trucks (Linkedin) -December 22, 2010:   ...  "When all of today's older diesels have been replaced by new models that meet current EPA standards, at least 110,000 tons of particulate matter (or soot) and 2.6 million tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides will be eliminated from the nation's air"...   The Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA) now just needs President Obama's signature for the bipartisan legislation to be reauthorized for five more years as the U.S. House of Representatives approved DERA this morning by a voice vote, according to the Diesel Technology Forum...   DERA is a five-year reauthorization of the highly-successful program created in 2005 to establish voluntary national and state-level grant and loan programs to reduce diesel emissions  upgrading and modernizing older diesel engines and equipment...  DERA is being supported by a unique and diverse coalition of more than 500 environmental, health, industry, labor and government organizations...  DERA funds are used to clean up the nation's older diesels, by retrofitting or replacing them with new technologies that significantly reduce the soot and emissions. EPA estimates there to be an estimated 11 million older diesel trucks, buses, and equipment in use today...