What fun it is watching again all those smug Volkswagen ads on YouTube, featuring men in mid-life crisis revving up their Golfs and Passats. German carmakers vie with French farmers for their sacred status in the European Union. That it has taken US authorities to sniff out the company’s cheating on emissions tests doesn’t say much for European environmental law, which is good at telling us we can only have low-powered kettles, but apparently unable to sniff out high emissions from overpowered diesel cars.
But the VW scandal isn’t just a story of corporate turpitude. It is part-product of an environmental policy in Britain as much as across the EU which has become fixated on carbon emissions to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Diesels have grown to account for just under half the UK car market thanks to changes the Blair government made to vehicle excise duty. From 2001, punitive rates of up to £500 were applied to cars which emit carbon emissions of more than 225g/km, while cars below 120 g/km were treated to token road-tax rates. As manufacturers quickly discovered, the only way to get many vehicles below these thresholds was to make them diesel.
It was well known that diesel engines produced large amounts of tiny carcinogenic soot particles, but this was brushed over. Particulate emissions were meant to be dealt with by filters, yet these are known to become blocked if engines spend too much time idling, as they do on urban roads. Diesels also produce far higher levels of nitrogen oxides, the subject of the VW scandal.
But the problem doesn’t end with diesel engines. Take wood-burning. That wood-combustion emits large quantities of soot particles was not lost on the authors of the 1956 Clean Air Act, passed to prevent a repeat of the deadly London smog of four years earlier.
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