[Adapted from a letter appearing on: http://www.vtr.org/people/streeter/lbc/emissions/governor.html ]

BAN DYNAMOMETER TESTING

[A "sample" letter to petition your state authorities for abolishing "IM240", the dynamometer test.]

SUBJECT: EMISSIONS TESTING RELATED TO 1990 CLEAN AIR ACT AMENDMENTS

I am writing to you on a matter of great concern to myself and thousands of other car owners: Automobile emissions testing related to the implementation of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, particularly with respect to vehicles made prior to 1996.

I won't bother you with a history lesson on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Clean Air Act legislation. So, I will get right to my point. The implementation of the EPA's chassis dynamometer test known as IM 240 is destructive to our expensive automobiles. I am one of many car owners who painstakingly cares for his car, babys its engine and takes every precaution to keep its costs manabeable. The EPA's IM 240 dynamometer test has been proven innefective at reducing polution, and is intended as a means of forcing people buy newer cars by inflicting irreparable damage to their vehicles. It will unnecessarily increase the cost of maintaining such vehicles. I am likewise opposed to any "scrapped motor vehicle" programs which offer incentives for motorists to scrap older vehicles.

The federal EPA has been pushing for emissions standards on cars made from 1967 to 1980 that those same cars would not have passed when new. Even vehicles with all their original pollution controls in a perfect state of tune would not be able to pass these unrealistic standards. If that were not enough, the EPA wants to raise the standards little by little each year. Experts I have talked with indicate that all carbureted vehicles will eventually fail.

Some people think that all cars can be "fixed" to pass these standards if enough money were spent on them. Nothing could be further from the truth! Light trucks and vans, having larger engines, simply don't meet the same emissions standards as 4 cylinder compacts - and all cars are supposed to meet tat standard. More importantly, the test itself is mechanically abusive and destructive to the motor's internal components, the transmission, and the brake lines - because the violent accelleration and hard braking that is done in this test is beyond what any vehicle is designed to endure in any normal driving situation. It is obviously an effort to ruin people's cars and force them to buy new ones which most cannot afford. This is way out-of-bounds for the government to perpetrate on citizens' personal property.

There are serious questions about the EPA testing programs. The American Automobile Association (AAA) has recently released a study, "Cleaning The Air," conducted by Energy and Environmental Analysis, Inc. which conclusively shows that automobiles and light trucks are not the primary (or even secondary) cause of urban smog. Interestingly, "Cleaning the Air" reveals that sources such as manufacturing facilities and utility plants, are the primary causes of pollution, accounting for 57% of the VOC and 63% of the NOx emissions nationwide! The rationale for the car-damaging dynamometer test is thus negated.

If automobiles are not the major offenders in the quest for clean air, why is emissions testing, costing motorists millions of dollars and thousands of hours, being forced on us against the consent of the people? (In California alone, motorists have spent an estimated $2.4 billion since 1984 on emissions tests, using up more than 100 million hours of their time!)

Finally, the proposed emissions testing programs have not demonstrated their effectiveness. As University of California at Irvine researchers found, "We have theoretical models of how they [emissions testing programs] are supposed to work but almost no measures of actual effects. What data we do have are hardly reassuring." Similarly, studies conducted by Douglas Lawson, a professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, have found that vehicles in states with emissions inspections do not have lower pollution levels than vehicles in states with no emissions tests.

The American people will hold accountable in their state legislatures and in Washington who are forcing this wasteful nightmare of automobile emissions testing upon all car owners. Please reel in the EPA to focus on the real threats to clean air before millions of dollars are wasted on unnecessary testing, and thousands of cars are destroyed due to misguided "pollution-control" hysteria. Thank you.

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