Sept. 26--After a week of hearing how Volkswagen's diesel emissions test scam hurt VW, VW owners, VW dealers, other carmakers, diesel proponents, Germany, regulators, clean-air standards, and on and on and on, let's make it real simple.
You know who has been hurt by Volkswagen's criminal campaign to not only flout laws but undermine policing of them?
Everyone on this planet who breathes, that's who.
So this better be a wake-up call. If not, it's a call for a wake because unpoisoned air and water are literally the least we can accept.
If people are cool with a systematic effort to put 11 million vehicles on the road around the world spewing as much as 35 times the acceptable level of pollutants into the air to further their interests, it doesn't end well.
For one thing, that "35 times" thing is not to be confused with 35 times the safe level of pollutants.
It's 35 times the amount of smog-catalysts we've decided we can tolerate in order to limit the disruption to the world -- economic and otherwise -- while those in transportation, energy and manufacturing are tasked with minimizing the effects of our long reliance on fossil fuels and maybe even ending that dependence.
We ask more of our cars, trucks, trains, planes, factories, appliances and such because we must. We don't have forever.
As is, a study two years ago from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment found about 200,000 early deaths each year in this country caused by ground-level pollution, with emissions from road transportation the most significant factor.
Vehicle exhaust pollution was cited in around 53,000 deaths, slightly more than emissions from power generation, which researchers found figured in roughly 52,000 deaths.
"It was surprising to me just how significant road transportation was, especially when you imagine (that) coal-fired power stations are burning relatively dirty fuel," one of the professors who worked on the project said at the time.
Among the most troubling aspects of the VW diesel scandal is that it revealed its much-touted and widely embraced "clean diesel" is a myth.
What if the upshot of all this is there never will be a way to make diesel burn clean -- or even just to meet established legal standards -- while delivering the performance the marketplace expects?
This was a deliberate and strategic effort to make VW and Audi diesel cars more attractive than their rivals through fuel efficiency and performance no legal diesel-fueled vehicle has been able to match.
VW got away with it through software it developed and deployed to ensure pollution control systems were turned off except during emission tests.
If competitors' cars sputtering to keep up are the benchmark of where diesel technology actually is, where does that leave us? And if "clean diesel" was never truly clean enough, don't clean coal and clean gasoline demand closer scrutiny?
It's hard not to think of periodic efforts to sell safe or safer cigarettes, at best a bridge to quitting and, at worst, a potentially dangerous delusion.
Oil and coal have their constituencies, usually arguing jobs rather than nostalgia for the famously thick London fog of yore, for which coal was a catalyst, or the way smog lent new colors to sunsets in Los Angeles.
Jobs are great, if you're healthy.
The auto industry will bring anything to market it can sell. If hybrid or electric models met everyday expectations for price, performance and reliability, they would be embraced by the masses and the business would shift there more than it has.
In that sense, the surge of interest in diesel fueled by VW's con job sold false hope as much as anything.
Those offering any kind of rationale for the carmaker dodging clean-air laws deserve to have their tap water come directly from the Chicago River untreated.
Everybody let everybody down on this.
From the now-departed CEO on down at Volkswagen, through the regulators who missed the fact they were being conned, to the media that usually can be counted on to sniff this sort of thing out, everyone bears some responsibility.
Everyone believed Volkswagen's clean diesel fantasy. Maybe we wanted it. Maybe some needed it.
Even knowing the truth, we still want that magic.
Let's not hold our breath waiting for it to become real. Then again, maybe we should.
philrosenthal@tribpub.com
