The government is bent on destroying fuel-efficient diesel engines in favor of less efficient and more environmentally destructive electric cars. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:
For reasons that aren’t inscrutable (give me a minute – I’ll explain) the jihad against diesels is metastasizing to include FiatChrysler.
The combine – which subsumes the Jeep and Ram truck brands – has been accused of selling diesels that emit “as much as 20 times” the maximum allowable quantity of an exhaust byproduct, oxides of nitrogen (NOx).
This is exactly what got VW nailed to the cross. And it’s exactly the same demagogic coverage. “As much as 20 times” the allowable maximum!
Good god, it sounds apocalyptic! A lung-melting catastrophe!
Except of course it’s not.
A bureaucratic standard may have been affronted – that is all.
Note the “as much as . . .” verbiage. As in, could be – or might be. As opposed to something exact.
Weasel words, the sort of copy an advertising shyster would use to hawk a product that didn’t actually do a damned thing but the words implied it did because it might. It is of a piece with third-empty cereal boxes – the box itself meant to make you think you are getting what you just paid for.
Only, it’s worse, because in this case there is nothing in the box.
Nothing in whole numbers, that is.
As in the VW crucifixion, the standard affronted amounts to a difference of less than half of one percent. If you don’t know this, you don’t know your Tiers and Bins – EPA-speak for the various levels and thresholds for allowable exhaust emissions. The difference between one Tier and Bin and the next is fractional.
I bold this out of exasperation.Because it is never explained by the media. Search for yourself and see. It is outrageous, a monstrous dereliction of duty. Because with explanation, without qualification, the “as much as 20 times” business creates an egregiously false impression.
People have been grossly misled about misled about the extent to which new cars do not pollute. The whole aim of practical politics, as H.L. Mencken once said, is to menace the public with dangers – all of them false – so as to instill in them a hysterical fear and make them clamorous to be led to safety.
Exactly so.
To continue reading: The Anti-Diesel Jihad Expands
