[speaker001:] [sneezing] [sniffing].
[speaker002:] [clicking] [sigh] Well, here in Logan, Utah, [sniffing] we've got a nice little valley here and it's like crystal clear all the time except for during the winter [pause] when the inversion sets in and then we get a little bit of pollution in the valley.
[speaker001:] [breathing] Huh. [Lipsmack] Well, here in Seattle, uh, it's g-, the air's getting more and more polluted. We're, uh, we're in kind of a basin [inhaling]. And, uh, [sigh] [lipsmack] Seattle is on Puget Sound which is a inland waterway between two mountains. And, uh, there's been a lot, a lot of growth, population growth around here [inhaling]. And, uh, [sigh] it's, uh, it's getting worse [LAUGHTER]. I think
[speaker002:] Yeah.
[speaker001:] most of it is from cars.
[speaker002:] Yeah. Definitely. Here in Utah up along the Wasatch along the western side of the, of these Rocky Mountains here, where a lot of the big cities are Salt Lake and Ogden and Provo and Logan's up in the valley a little bit further north, we get a lot of pollution and it's like seventy percent of it is from cars.
[speaker001:] Uh-huh [music].
[speaker002:] And, uh, it always really hits hard during the winter when we get the inversion [clicking]. And when we get,
[speaker001:] [NOISE].
[speaker002:] get cold air down in the valleys and warm air up above and it just sits and sits and sits and we're starting to hit pollution levels now on the Wasatch front which match that of L A a few years ago.
[speaker001:] Oh.
[speaker002:] It's not, it's almost sad. Because when I grew up here, it was just always the crisp air up in the mountain valleys and now it's not in the mountain valleys.
[speaker001:] Yeah. [inhaling] Yeah, I live in the,
[speaker002:] [sniffing].
[speaker001:] university district and, uh, uh, it's supposed to have about the worst air pollution [LAUGHTER]. I think probably due to, uh, a lot of students going back and forth to school.
[speaker002:] [talking] Huh.
[speaker001:] And then we're right next to Interstate Five also.
[speaker002:] They're getting serious about things like, uh, mandatory, well they've already passed laws where you have to get your cars checked for pollution if you're in certain counties, emissions.
[speaker001:] Oh, yeah. have they started doing that yet?
[speaker002:] Yeah. They've actually started doing it down along the, not in Logan up here cause we're doing a lot better. We have a lot, population is a lot lighter up here.
[speaker001:] [inhaling] We have that here and, uh, they're, they're expanding it to, uh, more counties here. Uh, as the population spreads out [sigh] and I think they're also going to be making it, uh, [lipsmack] mandatory for more cars. Th-, th-, there was, uh, something in the law about if your car was over a certain age, like over twenty years old, you didn't have to get it done anymore. And
[speaker002:] Yeah.
[speaker001:] I think they're eliminating that, uh
[speaker002:] Yeah. They're ge-, eliminating that out here.
[speaker001:] that loophole. Yeah.
[speaker002:] They're also talking very seriously about the thing called a dirt gun. Where they're, uh, looking at the emissions from the car using basically a spectrometer and looking at the, basically how much of what is coming out of the exhaust. Kind of like a radar gun. And...
[speaker001:] Oh, really, You mean they could
[speaker002:] Yes.
[speaker001:] do that remotely?
[speaker002:] Yeah. Do it remotely just looking at the, what they do, they do several different types of things. Sometimes they put a source light and they look at the source light and then as the car goes by, you can see the exhaust pipe and the source light behind it and you can look at the emissions actually.
[speaker001:] Huh.
[speaker002:] And...
[speaker001:] Now where does the source light go?
[speaker002:] Like across the street. They'll set up
[speaker001:] Oh, I see.
[speaker002:] like a trap or something like that in some sense. And they're also looking at, uh, other, you know, ways of monitoring this and, cause they've found out something basically that, uh, and a poorly tuned car can emit something, it's an incredible amount. It was like four hundred times as much
[speaker001:] Jeez.
[speaker002:] uh, of certain pollutants, and it was like unburned hydrocarbons, then a properly tuned car. And, and the idea being that if you just tuned up all the cars, well if you tuned up this ten percent of the cars that were producing like fifty percent of the, the pollution then, you know, you, it'd be one way to cut the pollution in half.
[speaker001:] Yeah. That's neat [inhaling] [sniffing].
[speaker002:] [sniffing] [sniffing].
[speaker001:] But it's also been, uh, oh, you know, everybody [sigh] is talking about using more mass transient here but it, uh, it's tough, you know. Like I've, I've looked into riding the bus to work and I can drive to work in, uh, and get there in twenty to twenty-five minutes over a very congested corridor. Which goes over Lake Washington on one of the floating bridges.
[speaker002:] [clicking] Uh-huh.
[speaker001:] But if I, uh, [lipsmack] if I take the bus, it requires several transfers and it takes over an hour.
[speaker002:] [NOISE] Huh.
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER] So [LAUGHTER] so it
[speaker002:] Yeah. And they're...
[speaker001:] it's, it's not hard to see [LAUGHTER] why, why I keep driving. And you know, I feel guilty cause I'm driving a [music] [breathing],