Good point. Furthermore, those deaths would have probably been caused anyway, since diesel technology doesn't suddenly make 2x less emissions. Maybe fewer diesels would have been sold, so
there would have been 800 deaths instead of 1200
deaths, because the drivers would have bought one running on gas, but yeah, the law isn't designed for these number games.
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.
The level of emissions achieved by the "cheating" was perfectly legal only a few years ago, just for perspective.
And in the USA at least, there just aren't enough diesel cars to really make a difference. Almost all diesel vehicles here are heavy trucks and busses and they dwarf the emissions of the cars to the point of making them inconsequential.
> couldn't figure out how to meet US emission standards for diesel without cheating
Isn't it less that they couldn't figure out how to meet the standard, but rather that they did not like the consequences? Evidently the cars in question could operate in a lower-emission mode.
And we have already seen glimmers of such behavior with all the emissions scandals around diesel cars... the outcome is not immediate death of passengers, but car companies were/are skirting health regulations to increase profits.
They cheated on an arbitrary number in an EPA regulation, with emissions that were completely legal only a few years earlier. You might as well complain that all car companies are killing people because whatever their emissions levels are, it's more than zero, and therefore cumulatively, statistically, causing some number of deaths.
Yes, it's very tricky to take an action as complex as the decision to cheat on emissions test and boil down numbers describing the damage done to society. Having numbers like "they killed 59 people" certainly makes it easier to stir enough outrage, but it is an oversimplification.
Would you agree with something like "the emissions they caused by cheating killed people, and our current best estimate of that is 59 (+- the confidence interval in the paper)".
It's true that the decision to cheat may have had the benefit of getting safer cars to more people, but that is even harder to measure than deaths caused by emissions. To me, the decision to cheat wouldn't be justifiable and I would still be outraged because they knowingly did harm to the environment and society with the hopes that there would be a nearly un-measurable side benefit: increasing the average safety of cars relative to a world that doesn't exist. To me, it seems despicably irresponsible to gamble the well being of many human lives against something so hard to measure.
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)
The difference is that the government has put in place systems to deal with these higher polluting vehicles. It taxes them more, to discourage people from owning them. By lying about the pollution levels, the engineers are encouraging people to own more polluting engines. Not only is this obviously unethical since it involves lying with the purpose of breaking a law, but this law also happens to be designed to try and reduce the deadly effects of pollution. So such behaviour is, I say again, obviously indirectly linked to more people dying.
You don't know how emissions should be regulated, but somehow you know the regulations aren't working b/c they are too lenient?
My hypothesis is that all of the diesel-powered cars sold in the past 20 years in the US could vanish tonight, and there would be no significant change in the planet's climate vs. had people continued to drive them.
The real motivation for strictly regulating diesels is their predilection to produce oxides of nitrogen and particulates, which contribute to smog and respiratory distress.
While one has to make allowances for the climate and traffic in a particular place (the LA basin is always going to be smog-prone, and probably should be able to set its own regs for mobile pollution sources), the point of diminishing returns for adding more pollution controls to cars probably past at least 15 years ago.
There's been some articles on the subject (which is, admittedly complicated, since so many things shoot toxins into the air, and our understanding of its impact is still uncertain):
I guess it's possible to look at these numbers, and compare them to the number of deaths caused by autos in general (even the ones that follow all the rules), and consider it a small thing; something that doesn't justify a massively disruptive response.
But, from my perspective, VW made a conscious decision, and an ongoing choice over many years, to violate the law, and caused illegal levels of dangerous emissions in exchange for greater profits.
So...I don't think I'm responding irrationally when I am extremely critical of a company that would make those decisions over a span of many years, knowingly trading human life and human health for greater profits.
I'm critical of internal combustion auto companies, in general, but I'm not calling for them to be destroyed, and I don't go out of my way to talk trash about them. I'm pretty specific in my ire toward VW (though others have suggested several car manufacturers are pulling similar tricks and emitting illegal and dangerous levels in real world environments), and if that's the case, I'd consider those to be criminal companies, as well. I hope such companies will also be investigated, and also face consequences. But, "everybody's doing it" shouldn't be a defense when the stakes are this high.
I'm inclined to believe the pollution from just 500,000 of these vehicles across the country hasn't harmed as many people as the GM scandal, but that isn't the whole story.
The basic idea behind the regulation is that if every manufacturer didn't follow it, there would be a lot more pollution and many more people could be harmed.
Whether or not we agree with that prediction is irrelevant. The people elected representatives who made this law, granting regulatory authority, at least in part to prevent it from happening. They have the authority to collect the fine. How many people were actually harmed has nothing to do with it (at least directly).
It makes more sense to be upset at how GM (partly owned by the government at the time) got off so easy.
Why was it OK a few years earlier when the emissions regulations were more permissive? Were the people killed by those emissions not worthy for some reason?
Why were the new emissions targets the "right" ones? Why not make them half again and save even more lives? The answer is that they are numbers pulled out of the ass of some CARB or EPA bureaucrat.
In reality it's impossible to say that "1200 early deaths" were caused by VW emissions. It's statistical smoke and mirrors and doesn't even show up as a blip in the normal variation of total mortality of any given year.
How many early deaths were caused by California's refusal to allow or perform proper forest manangement, resulting in this year's devastating wildfires and the pollution they caused? Sorry for the whataboutism. Deaths are deaths.
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.
NOx emissions are not a new problem, and our ability to estimate its effects are pretty good. The exact number is an estimate, but the real number is very unlikely to be off by more than a factor of 2.
If you randomly shoot 30 people, what is the appropriate penalty? What if you were shooting blindfolded and couldn't see when or who you killed? What if you were being paid money to take shots?
That is an exact analogy to what Volkswagon did when it sold cars that exceeded regulatory limits.
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