There's plenty of toxic air spouted in Washington on any given day, but at least this time, the foul emissions were coming from truck engines and not pundits, politicians and the like. The U.S. government decided to take Swedish truckmaker Volvo Powertrain Corp., a unit of Volvo AB, to task for violating a consent decree it signed in 1998, and fined the company $72,006,337 in penalties and interest.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order to Volvo on April 13 to make the payment on a dispute relating to emission compliance of 8,354 model year 2005 Volvo Penta engines.

In 1998, the U.S. brought enforcement actions against numerous truck engine manufacturers, alleging that a feature of their fuel injection systems violated the Clean Air Act. The government argued that the engine manufacturers were purposely dodging the regulations with creative programming of those systems, which the manufacturers denied.