5000 persons will die per year in the EU due to diesel cheating. 15000 persons will die per year due to excess Nox emissions i.e. the result of selling in "clean diesel" by the car industry when in effect it is very dirty.
it is not like here in Europe people drop down dead like flies because the Nox allowed is more than 5 times that allowed in the US and the PM 4 times (besides any cheating).
The Volkswagen (and Audi, etc.) guys lied, broke the Law, and those found responsible should be adequately punished, but it is not like they are responsible for the death of tens or hundreds of thousands of people and of accelerating the extinction of the humanity.
The estimations (to be taken with more than a pinch of salt) by some MIT researchers is of 60 (sixty) premature deaths in the US:
calculating the amount of premature deads in 1200, which is of course a very high number in itself but - even if actually proved/provable - nothing compared to (say) the number of deaths by fire or road accidents that could be prevented.
It's probably a terrible idea for me to do this as I am completely unqualified, I don't have all the required numbers, and I don't have much time to double check or even think this through properly, but it seems that on the back of an envolpe, everything goes!
The average diesel passenger car emitted about 8kg of NOx in 2008 and a third less in 2015 according to [1] and [2], so on average that's 6.6kg per car per year. If VW emitted 20 times that much since 2009, as alleged, that's 6.6 * 20 * 6 years = 792kg. An average diesel engine would have emitted 40kg, so that's 752kg extra for VW.
Multiply by 500,000 cars = 376,000 tons of extra emissions. [2] claims that cutting emissions by 187,000 tons saves 4000 lives. Hence, 376,000 tons should cause about 8000 deaths. That's assuming NOx levels and deaths have a linear relationship, which is highly doubtful.
So it appears that my feeling/belief that 500,000 cars could not have caused 100,000 deaths is correct. But if all 11 million VW cars of that type worldwide have that same "defect", then of course the number of premature deaths rises to 176,000.
All of this is most likely complete bullshit, but you are right, it makes sense to at least try to run some numbers ;-)
[Edit] I already found a mistake in my estimate. The NOx numbers in [1] don't seem to be for diesel or not only for diesel engines. But other sources give similar averages for diesel engines (after the catalytic converter does its job of course)
Diesel vehicles kill people, period. It's very difficult to reduce emissions sufficiently to change that but it's nigh impossible to ban diesel cars and trucks from the road. Given that, the only reasonable alternative is stringent tests that push diesel technology to the limit in terms of minimizing health impact. Which is what we have. Could the tests be better? Certainly. But that doesn't excuse the cheating. Imagine if airplane manufacturers had been found to be cheating on safety tests. That's how serious and how immoral this cheating is.
Note that (a) European NOx emissions standards for diesel cars were made more than twice as strict in 2014, and (b) VW and perhaps other manufacturers were cheating American diesel emissions standards.
It’s not an outrageous leap to suspect they may also have been cheating the new European emissions standards. If those are properly enforced, diesel cars could be in trouble.
> Emissions measured in road tests of 15 new diesel cars were an average of about seven times higher than European limits, according to a study ICCT published last October.
Curious what will happen in Europe the next coming years with respect to emission control and verification.
There is a lot more riding on these tests than is currently being admitted. The simple fact is that based on the tests and the impact of NOx on population health, the sale of diesel cars should be stopped immediately.
Even London has doubled the congestion charge fee for diesels.
A further step would be to recognise that petrol cars also emit NOx and that the long term goal should be the removal of these from the road.
This is going to hurt the car industry in ways we don't fully understand yet. In the short term I would be end-of-lining their diesel production and restructuring to electric.
According to this[0] MIT study, the excess emissions will cause 60 premature deaths. If you commit 60 violent offenses you can expect well over 7 years in jail.
Googling for numbers, many sources quote these EU tests which everyone's cheating on. Out in the real world it sounds like switching Petrol -> Diesel saves maybe 20-30% CO2, and emits 10-20x the NOx.
It's going to be difficult to prove that VW cheating led to asthma deaths and pollution. It's easy to say that VW is the root of all evil, but the most popular vehicles sold in the US are pickup trucks, which have a diesel engine variant.
But pickup truck are not classified as cars, so their emissions were complying to the higher truck limits of 0.4g/mile of nox, unlike VW which was supposed to comply to the stringent car limits of 0.07g/mile. And of course they found that cummins diesels also cheated (less blatantly).
And anyway, the US is still the biggest contributor on earth of air pollution, and I doubt that it comes from the few VW vehicles sold there
Emissions from Volkswagen cats above those permitted by the Clean Air Act (enabled by cheating on emissions tests) are estimated to have caused a significant number of premature deaths in the US:
> According to the study, conducted by researchers at MIT and Harvard University and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, excess emissions from Volkswagen’s defeat devices will cause around 60 people in the U.S. to die 10 to 20 years prematurely. If the automaker recalls every affected vehicle by the end of 2016, more than 130 additional early deaths may be avoided. If, however, Volkswagen does not order a recall in the U.S., the excess emissions, compounding in the future, will cause 140 people to die early.
> regarding the health effects of diesel vs petrol
There's a known solution to sort out the SO2 emission, but it would cost a bit more.
The problem isn't pushing diesel over petrol, the problem is letting the car vendors cheat so blatantly, apparently with political backing (in Germany at least).
I wish people would stop acting like this was just VW. Every major manufacturer in Europe was found to have either emissions-cheating code, or to have emissions levels wildly higher than what the manufacturer claimed, because the EU regulators just trusted manufacturers to test and report CO2 and NOx figures. Shockingly, they all lied.
And if you live in America, diesel pickups have to meet a far less stringent set of emissions standards.
On top of that, many people who own duramaxes, powerstrokes, and cummins diesels strip out the emissions control equipment and run modded firmware on their ECUs to not throw a code...spewing far more pollution than these "dirty" diesels.
Anyone know if this "defeat device" would be a violation of the various Euro* regulations in Europe? It's been widely reported [1] that diesel cars emit more NOx than the specification allows, but so far no consequences. More than 50% of all cars sold in the EU are diesel fueled, and many countries are breaching the EU air quality limits. This causes an estimated 400,000 premature deaths each year [2]
> The automotive industry says it has cleaned up its act. But this week the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, revealed it has discovered a whole new form of cheating – this time on CO2 emission tests.
The 2016 scandal concerned air pollution tests on diesel vehicles, where automakers were using so-called ‘defeat devices’ during tests to make the cars seem like they were emitting less pollution. Now, the carmakers are accused of doing the opposite – artificially inflating the level of carbon emissions produced by new cars coming onto the market now.
Why would automakers want their cars to look more emissions-intensive than they are? Because a new EU law will require automakers to reduce their fleet average CO2 emissions by 15% by 2025 and 30% by 2030 – based on 2021 levels.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-e...
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