The Diesel Love Affair Was A Toxic Relationship
Europe especially, has had a love affair with diesel over the past thirty years or so. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, diesel cars were still noisy, heavy, and often unreliable machines. I remember my father’s first diesel car, a Ford Granada car in 1990. In the middle of winter, he would turn it over early on a cold morning and I could hear the chug-chug of the engine as it sparked (or glowed rather) into life. With just a few months on the clock, it spewed black smoke when it started. Diesel was not fashionable back then, not sexy, it was reserved for farmers, truckers, and taxi drivers. This all began to change as the price differential between petrol and diesel grew wider and the technology began to improve. The big German manufacturers began major research and development programmes on diesel engine efficiency, noise and performance in the mid-eighties. The result of this work produced quiet, smoother and more powerful engines.
Diesel cars are not all bad. They are the most efficient form of internal combustion propulsion. This is thanks to higher air compression ratios compared to gasoline. They are great for heavy equipment and machinery, generators, and locomotion. Lower fuel prices, often combined with road tax incentives for diesel, mixed with great technological advances, plus marketing, ensured a golden age for diesel cars. With better fuel economy, performance matching petrol, and an altered consumer perception, diesel gradually became the favourite of European car buyers. Clean diesel cars seemed to have arrived and no longer were they seen as the heavy, unglamorous workhorses, but rather as the new thoroughbreds. “Diesels are cleaner than petrol cars per kilometre and they last longer.” This was the generally held perception of the motoring public for at least twenty-five years. It was, however, all built on a lie.
DIESELGATE
Diesel is dying. The once wonder fuel has been tainted beyond repair, like cigarette smoking. The OEMs, (original equipment manufacturers) were lying, diesel is not clean. Diesel is a killer fuel. Toxic poisonous gas and particular matter are expelled from every diesel engine today.
The great advances in engine technology did make them quieter, smoother, and faster, but it masked what was really going on. The technological improvements largely eliminated the obvious black soot tailpipe smoke from diesel cars, but the invisible chemical output remained. The extent of these emissions was deliberately hidden from regulators and environmental testing by clever engine management software known as cheat devices. This was deliberate, orchestrated and endorsed by the senior management of major OEMs.
Volkswagen was caught in the act and fined €31.3 billion by the EU. In the US, a federal judge ordered VW to pay a $2.8 billion criminal fine for "rigging diesel-powered vehicles to cheat on government emissions tests”. Without the ’cheat device’, VW diesel cars produced NOx emissions up to 40 times the EPA permissible limit.
Not just Volkswagen, but several major diesel engine manufacturers were also caught red-handed. This was similar behaviour to the major tobacco companies in the 1950s lying about the effects of smoking. They knew smoking was causing cancer but deliberately pushed misinformation into the public domain to confuse the public and create doubt using orchestrated marketing and media campaigns. As this came to light in the 1990s, the subsequent class action lawsuits cost the tobacco industry billions and forever destroyed the ‘it’s cool to smoke’ public face of tobacco. Advertising bans, health warnings, together with public anger has forever relegated smoking to an outlier, outcast, dirty habit.
AIR POLLUTION IS THE NEW SMOKING
Air pollution shortens life expectancy. Chemicals such as those released in internal combustion cars, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) cause cancer. Diesel and petrol exhaust gases contain some of the following killer chemicals, classed as group 1-2 carcinogens and group 3, possible carcinogens: carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, nitric acid vapour, benzene, chlorine, acetaldehyde, mercury, and arsenic.
If you live next to a major road, street or highway, your chances of developing lung cancers increase by at least 10% according to a study by King’s College London.
In the US, air pollution is responsible for approximately 200,000 deaths each year and creates a 4% hit on GDP, equivalent to around $790bn per year. Compare this to the investment made in electric charging infrastructure, representing just over $500m according to the US-based Alliance for Transport Electrification, just 0.6% of the air pollution cost.
ICE cars should have health warning stickers on them like cigarettes have: "WARNING! MAY CAUSE CANCER" or “THIS CAR REDUCES YOUR LIFE SPAN” etc.
Of course, this is unlikely to happen, but why not? Big Oil and vested interests are today spreading misinformation just like tobacco companies did from the 1950s through to the 1990s. They are also running superficial ‘greenwashing’ programmes to fool the public. The scale of deception and misinformation through lobbying and marketing is incredible and I will elaborate on this in future blogs.
