Next 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, killed nearly 1,000 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. Last 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, that as many as 50,000 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 quick 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 help cut carbon emissions, 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 answer. Only now has it become clear, 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 have been anywhere between twice and seven times above the legal limit.
It is appealing to make the case for sweeping change: a total ban, for example, on diesel-powered cars in city centres at least, something both London and Paris are considering. Or varying the rate of congestion charge to discriminate against diesels, as rates are already varied in favour of low-polluting cars. There could be sharper differentials of car licence fees and fuel taxes. But those would be a steep and unfair penalty on consumers who bought diesel cars in ignorance of the damage they were causing, and rural drivers who rely on their cars. Or there is the idea of a government-backed scheme to trade in polluting diesels for cleaner petrol-driven cars, put forward by the last Labour government’s science minister, Lord Drayson, who had a hand in a similar scheme to help the car market after the 2008 crash. But it would be hugely expensive, impractical in real terms, and polluting in itself as usable cars were scrapped.
In the end it comes back to regulation. It may be impossible to design a scheme that is entirely beyond gaming in the short term. But a system that monitors actual emissions, a stringent version of the EU’s proposals for more realistic testing which the manufacturers were arguing should be delayed beyond the target date of 2017, could genuinely deliver cleaner cars. Whether they will also meet consumers’ demands for high fuel efficiency and affordability will be the next big headache for the diesel car industry.
