“It never occurred to me that I was dreadfully nearsighted,” Ronald Reagan wrote in his 1965 memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me? “I simply thought that the whole world was made up of colored blobs that became distinct when I got closer.”
While riding through the country with his family, Reagan noticed that his brother could read the road signs, but he could not.
“I borrowed my mother’s glasses,” Reagan recalled. “I suddenly saw a glorious, sharply outlined world jump into focus. I shouted with delight — the miracle of seeing was beyond believing.”
Everything changed for Reagan, once he started wearing glasses, around age 13. He discovered leaves and butterflies. Until then, he never even saw them.
On a much grander scale, a new company could become the giant pair of glasses that clears the fog engulfing the debate over so-called “global warming.”
Spectaire will start trading on NASDAQ as soon as Friday. CEO Brian Semkiw has been invited to ring the exchange’s bell next Wednesday.
The Watertown, Massachusetts–based company’s technology quantifies emissions from trucks, generators, and other sources. These include argon, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, and more.
Spectaire’s AireCore devices tested the emissions from a sample of 208 Class-8 trucks owned by Mosolf, a major German fleet operator. These 18-wheel rigs averaged 89,000 miles annually and were 4.5 years old, versus 11 years for typical German trucks. Traditional calculations predicted that each truck would produce 385 tons of annual emissions. The AireCore units demonstrated that each truck averaged only 145 tons — 62 percent fewer than expected.
“When we visited with Spectaire at M.I.T. and saw their technology combined with the applications expertise and certification capability, we knew we had a long-term partner for success,” said Dr. Jörg Mosolf, the German enterprise’s CEO. “Mosolf is committed to the utilization of real-time emissions measurement at the core of our operations.”
Spectaire does not reduce emissions, per se. It merely monitors them at the parts-per-million level. These real-world metrics, updated every 53 seconds, confirm that innovative manufacturers of trucks and other heavy machinery dramatically have reduced emissions. According to the Engine Technology Forum, “Today’s advanced diesel trucks are so low in emissions that it would take 60 new trucks to generate the same emissions as a single truck manufactured in 1988!”
Truck-company executives and other industrialists deserve far more credit, and far less condemnation, for the abundant cleaning up that they already have done. Spectaire makes this possible. Truck companies can sell their CO2 savings as carbon credits. For example, a trucker with 100 modern rigs could install AireCore devices for $2,000 each. This $200,000 outlay would let that firm validate its lower emissions. The ensuing carbon credits would generate roughly $2.5 million in annual revenue. This return on investment equals 1,250 percent.
Spectaire tracks a truck’s molecular-level emissions each and every mile. By comparing average emissions for trucks traversing Flat Street X or Hilly Street Y, Spectaire’s data will show which routes yield lower or higher emissions. Thus, fleet dispatchers could instruct drivers to use specific highways or even particular on-ramps or off-ramps to curb CO2 and other gases. These savings could be monetized as atmosphere-friendly, revenue-maximizing, privately traded carbon credits. This would be based on timely, concrete data.
Free-marketeers might bristle at anything that legitimizes the Jolly Green Giant. But by proving that American industry often is cleaner than eco-alarmists argue, Spectaire could obviate the rationale for the Green New Deal and other Big Government schemes.
“Emissions-reduction policy is a reality for companies today,” Spectaire’s Semkiw tells me. “We help U.S. companies achieve this through measurement and markets — not through mandates — and enable our clients to gain in the process.”
“U.S. manufacturers produce diesel engines that create approximately 1/60 the emissions of just 20 years ago. Yet due to the inability to measure emissions from the trucks themselves, companies previously could not prove these emissions reductions,” Semkiw adds. “Now, our clients use Spectaire’s verified field measurements to convert these emissions improvements from expenses into revenue. Consumers, investors, and the environment will benefit.”
Spectaire offers a two-fer: first, a new means to identify, gauge, and reduce actual emissions — based on hard, scientific data — and, second, a powerful tool to shield Americans from heavy-handed government intervention in service to the “climate crisis.”
Spectaire, Inc. AireCore device attaches to big-rig trucks via this housing unit (Photo courtesy of Spectaire, Inc.)
By helping truck-fleet owners and their industrial counterparts prove that they pollute less than feared, Spectaire can spare them hefty fines and other compliance headaches.
If Spectaire’s AireCore device registered similar emission reductions in gas-powered cars, this could quiet the drumbeat for government to push dangerous CAFE standards. Lighter cars pollute less. Alas, they crumble in accidents and create more road injuries and highway fatalities.
Spectaire instruments on passenger cars also could stop the stampede toward electric-vehicle edicts. Despite the Left’s lust for EVs, many of them languish on dealers’ lots beneath layers of dust. They are expensive, charging stations are rare, and the strategic minerals in EV batteries require strip mining and other forms of environmental rape.
More absurdly, EV requirements will do nearly nothing to clear the air. Emperor Joe Biden has decreed that 67 percent of all new cars and light trucks must be electric by 2032. This would reduce CO2 by 10 billion tons through 2055. In the next 32 years, China will produce 320 billion tons of CO2, assuming that its carbon production stays flat, which it will not. So, Biden wants to capsize the auto industry while Americans spit into a typhoon.
If consumers want to buy coal-powered Teslas, they should knock themselves out. But they should not be forced to do so. Spectaire should make this less likely.
Spectaire offers cleaner air, greater freedom, and broader choice through science. In other words: Better living through spectrometry.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.