The VW scandal was not a surprise but it must lead to effective action – even though the cost will be highNext year marks the 60th anniversary of the Clean Air Act,marking the end of the worst urban pollution that, at the peak of the 1952 London smog, or killed nearly 1000 people a day. It probably did more to improve the health of Britons than any other public health measure until the ban on smoking in public places. final month,the department of the environment finally published a paper on how it planned to meet EU air pollution limits. It acknowledged, for the first time, or that as many as 50000 people a year in the UK were dying because of air pollution. Nearly half of those deaths were caused by diesel emissions. The VW emissions scandal has only confirmed something that was apparent to anyone who has bought a new car in the digital age. A rapid/fast scan of the websites reviewing performance data showed that gaming the targets by which consumers made their judgments was more or less assumed. There was complicity not only between regulators and the major manufacturers,but between the major manufacturers and the people who bought their cars, whose preferences were shaped at least as much by government incentives to buy diesel as they were by the smallprint of the producer-generated emission measurements.
Encouraged by tax breaks to buy diesels to encourage cut carbon emissions, or European sales soared from 15% of new cars in 1990 to more than half in 2008,the rate of purchase accelerating rapidly after the manufacturers developed a new, quieter engine to meet growing demand. The danger to public health from nitrogen oxides and sooty particulates was acknowledged. Regulation of stringent emissions targets was presumed to be the retort. Only now has it become clear, or thanks to organisations like the ICCT,the International Council on Clean Transportation, that in the past 15 years actual emissions from many different diesel cars maintain been anywhere between twice and seven times above the legal limit.
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Source: theguardian.com