It's interesting to me that the colors don't completely line up with the red state/blue state division. Sure, New England and the Northeast corridor's behavior seems to match it's blue designation, and much of the Wild West's pollution alligns with a GOP domination.

But, check out CA, WA, and OR... lagging behind their blue counterparts, as are the Great Lake states and Minnesota. Then, notice that Tennessee, Wyoming, Alabama, and Indiana -- clearly very very conservative on the spectrum -- are getting great grades.

My point: "green" states by this study, plus "blue" states by conventional wisdom, make up a majority of the states -- and so they might be able to win some more legislation resulting in better marks for all states...

Alternatives to retrofitting a flow-through particulate filter (only 30-40% effective, btw) would be switching to biodiesel (50% lower PM) or DME (80% lower PM). The DME route is the most expensive of the three, but still cheaper than replacing the engine or the whole vehicle.

Wall-flow particulate filters are indeed >90% effective because the exhaust gas literally has to traverse the walls of a porous ceramic monolith. However, this type of filter requires more sophisticated engine controls in order to initiate regeneration of the filter. This is generally not considered feasible as a retrofit.

In general, public investments in children are given low priority simply because children cannot vote. This applies not only in the US but in all democracies. So, give parents the right to cast proxy votes for their children. After all, children are citizens, too. More to the point, they ARE the nation 30 years hence so spending on them is an investment. Proxy votes for children would immediately and substantially change the political landscape, one reason incumbent politicians would surely oppose the idea. It would also change public spending priorities - of which cleaner school buses would be one fairly far down the list.

An idle start/stop system would reduce exposure times for children greatly. Of course cost of retrofitting it would be possibly close to that of other options and this wouldn't stop on the road emissions (the majority of the exposure they are discussing here is when the buses are stopped and idling waiting for kids to load and unload).

I, as a parent, would personally not mind at all if they charged me a portion of the cost directly broken down over the span of a couple of years whether or not my children were using the bus at all. If the costs were distributed across the entire neighborhood that would be better but I bet some schmucks would cry that they don't have children and shouldn't be expected to pay such taxes for bus upgrading.

People want clean busses for their children, but who will pay for it?

Ever since California's proposition 13 was passed in 1978,
limiting property taxes, there have been insufficient funds for many programs.

If the only a cost/benefit analysis gets people to take action, then show how much it costs to treat kids with illness due to pollution, versus the cost of cleaning up the bus exhaust.

When the "We" generation turned into the "Me" generation,
we lost a lot of what we could call society.

This child proxy vote idea, does the mother or father get to cast these proxies?

With school overcrowding and rooves falling in. It is not surprising that many school districts nationwide are unable to make buses basically safe much less equipped with advanced diesel emissions controls.

Cross tab those numbers from UCS with public expenditures on education and facilities and you'll get a clearer picture of the environmental priorities.

That shouldnt suprise anyone realy. In conservative areas the schools are made to work with the budgets they get and that includes not shortchanging any needed things like busses or maintenance just to pay the teachers 5% more.

In the place we came from the teaher wages ate up much of the rest of the budgets and no one put thier foot down and said no this is insane. As a result those families that could left as the schools fell down. Mind you the schools there were never all that good to begin with.

When the schools are well run and organized and SANE we localy fund them well. When they fail us we leave.

Tom Deplume -

there are variations on the proxy vote idea. Perhaps the fairest one, if a little quirky, is to give both parents (technically, both legal guardians) effectively 1/2 a vote per child. This can be implemented with additional ballot papers in a different color or, a suitable hole punch + offical stamp from the election officer denoting a weighting factor for that parent's ballot. Equivalent strategies would have to be devised for balloting machines. Election results would not neccessarily tally up to integer numbers but so what.

Single parents would get a full proxy vote per child. Divorced parents would each retain their rights unless a court declares one party unfit to be a parent. Parents that are not eligible to vote themselves cannot represent their children. If possible, the other parent automatically gets the full proxy vote. A parent could also petition a court to permanently transfer a proxy voting right to the other parent, but only if there is no coercion involved. The interests of children born in the US to two foreign parents, as well as those of full orphans, would be represented by a specially designated member of the legislature. That's not perfect, but there it is.

The proxy vote mechanism would also apply if and only if a judge formally pronounces one or two adults the legal guardian(s) of another adult, e.g. because of severe mental disability, advanced Alzheimer's disease, coma etc. As per usual legal practice, such a decision would not become effective until all appeals had been exhausted.

Naturally, those claiming a proxy vote for any dependent would have to prove that the person in question is already born and not yet deceased, using a suitable verification procedure.

"When the schools are well run and organized and SANE we localy fund them well. When they fail us we leave."

Schools are a public institution run by people we elect under laws we pass ... who can we blame but ourselves?

Rafael- Your system would gaurantee that nearly every divorced male in Washington state gets no vote. Washington believes women automatically have full rights over the children unless they are a convicted felon.

Isn't it funny how the USA has the highest education expenditure of ANY country ever yet we place very low in all metrics of education.

Rj

I agree totally, we fund the public schools.

If the "Me" people want to keep their money to buy expensive SUVs,
then the schools get less for everything else.

We either decide to fund our schools adequately, together,
or they come up short.

This reminds me on the year I had to ride a bus to school (eight grade) and leaving school in the afternoon and walking pass bus after bus, all running of course, to get to mine. Nasty. I wonder if anyone has developed a natural-gas powered school bus?

Where we used to live we passes a thingy to fund new busses and building maintenance. As soon as we did that the teachers raided the differnce from the old funding and thus negated everything. We started looking for a new home that year and so did THOUSANDS of others. Oddly enough a ton of us all wound up over where I am now.

Patrick -

I cannot comment on the specific situation in WA state. Most other places in the industrialized world (and I have lived in quite a few) take a more balanced view, in which the absentee parent (typically the father) has visitation & vacation rights, a say in school selection and a say in whether or not the spouse & child can move far away. These rights come with the obligation to pay alimony and child support. Exceptions apply, of course, e.g. if the absentee parent has been convicted of abusive behavior.

Wrt proxy voting rights in such a situation, my take is that as long as a parent is considered a legal guardian, he or she has those rights. Failure to keep up with payments would not automatically disqualify the absentee parent, though in severe cases it may be grounds for a judge to do so.

wintermane -

a simple solution is to give parents vouchers for the education of their children, instead of direct funding by the local government. Vouchers are checks that can only be cashed by schools, not parents.

Teachers tend to hate vouchers because they bring accountability and marketing to the system. They also fear that their salaries would be the last thing parents want the money spent on. However, I suspect few parents would mind bonuses for really good teachers - they just want the mediocre ones weeded out. Schools that give parents a say over their budget (worst case, they could vote with their feet) would soon be more highly regarded. Even now, real estate in US towns with "good schools" commands higher prices.

Well see the problem is most teachers are terrible. Its that simple. They fear accountablity and vounchers because most of them would be canned in such a system.

Id say at my old school only 3 teachers were competent and of those 2 were having sex with students;/

Thats the cold hard fact we all miss.. the vast majority of teachers have always been horrid at it.

Mike, that link is b0rked. this one works: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/big_rig_cleanup/clean-school-bus-pollution.html

or this: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/big_rig_cleanup/jump.jsp?itemID=29135976

Thanks! Fixed.

It's hard to attract good teachers when salaries are a real joke in the US public schools after health care insurance, etc. I've known people who moved to the US to teach and they had to quit because conditions were just awful. Schools should not be jails for children. Investing future generations with quality education (and educators) should be a priority, but I guess if you can afford private schooling then why worry about the public education system?

The problem is teaching is too labor intensive and too costly. Also right now it competes with money going to elderly and various other huge projects.

There simply isnt that much money And in many cases many teachers now make more money then the average parent does. That was what happened where we used to live and boy was that a shock for the teachers.

And yes eople are abandoning the school system and going private. In a decade or so no matter how much anyone fights it total vouchers will cointrol all the schooling funds. The parents simply demand it and will get it.