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The Dirty Truth About 'Clean Diesel' (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Volkswagen persuaded consumers it had created a new generation of so-called clean diesel cars — until investigators discovered that phony testing concealed that its vehicles emitted up to 40 times the permitted levels of pollutants during regular use. Now Taras Grescoe writes in the NY Times public outrage over the fraud obscures the much larger issue: "clean diesel" is causing a precipitous decline in air quality for millions of city-dwellers. Monitoring sites in European cities like London, Stuttgart, Munich, Paris, Milan and Rome have reported high levels of the nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, or soot, that help to create menacing smogs. Although automakers worked hard to convince consumers that a new generation of "clean diesel" cars were far less polluting, diesel has a fatal flaw. It tends to burn dirty, particularly at low speeds and temperatures. In cities, where so much driving is stop and start, incomplete diesel combustion produces pollution that is devastating for human health.
Fortunately, Volkswagen sold only half a million of its "clean diesel" cars to the American public before the emissions scandal broke. Today, fewer than 1 percent of the passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. run on diesel fuel. Europe is now scrambling to undo the damage. In London, Mayor Boris Johnson last year called for a national program to pay some drivers to scrap their diesel vehicles. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has gained broad support for a proposed ban on diesel cars. "Last month, the signatories of the climate deal in Paris agreed that the world has to begin a long-term shift from fossil fuels to more sustainable forms of energy," concludes Grescoe. "Recognizing "clean diesel" for the oxymoron it is would be a good place to start."
Fortunately, Volkswagen sold only half a million of its "clean diesel" cars to the American public before the emissions scandal broke. Today, fewer than 1 percent of the passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. run on diesel fuel. Europe is now scrambling to undo the damage. In London, Mayor Boris Johnson last year called for a national program to pay some drivers to scrap their diesel vehicles. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo has gained broad support for a proposed ban on diesel cars. "Last month, the signatories of the climate deal in Paris agreed that the world has to begin a long-term shift from fossil fuels to more sustainable forms of energy," concludes Grescoe. "Recognizing "clean diesel" for the oxymoron it is would be a good place to start."
Isn't that the crux of the problem? We have spent the past 40 years tweaking car technology to convert noxious tailpipe gases to clean, non-toxic CO2. Now that isn't good enough. Time to choose our poison.
--fatboy
Before taking a job in systems administration, I used to hold a CDL and drive regional/long haul for a trucking company. Everything we had was, of course, diesel because we run mostly on highways and at fourty tons our speed isnt a huge priority. in fact, we sometimes drive under the speed limit to make up mileage/save fuel based on projected consumption. the diesel car, for all its promises, is a break-even proposition at best.
speed: outside of a few concept sports cars, diesel isnt about speed but torque. in trucking we compensate by turbocharging our engines, to make the lives of normal drivers easier. without turbos it would take ten minutes or more to get up to speed. the tradeoff is bad mileage.
coldstart: cold start problems will always exist. for those of you in minneapolis or duluth, I see you shopping for the same antigel treatments and fuel additives for your audi that I use on my freighliner, and the truth is theyre awful for emissions and even worse for mileage. emissions systems are often programmed to detect and correct for them. they dont always work in the coldest weather, and consumer autos dont have fuel tank heaters or radiator louvres.
"cleanliness": no. hell no. On my Freightliner CL Columbia truck, I had no less than 6 gauges for the emissions system. everything from exhaust backpressure to air-in temp, exhaust temp, and temperature monitors on the scrubber DPF CV. sometimes id sit idling for 15 minutes just to make sure my emissions layout was "green" before taking off, because if its not ill blow smoke for miles down the highway. urea tanks and injectors need to be filled and cleaned respectively at regular intervals, and in long haul trucking this is a no brainer. we have a very user friendly interface for monitoring and planning refill. but car drivers? do you really want to worry about the car dropping down into "limp home" mode when you forget to top off the tank? it could strand you on the highway at 24 miles per hour.
finally, theres the godless process of smogging. what might fly in one state, wont in another, and as more states adopt emissions standards that require smog checks, more of these older diesel cars will fail outright. for most trucks, if you can smell the diesel smell, you wont pass.
Good people go to bed earlier.
1 gallon of diesel burned in a train makes a truck look like the dirty polluting piece of crap it is. Make the train electric and you'd think that truck was the source of all pollution.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
"Funny, I've never seen ANY kind of visible smoke coming out of my new diesel sedan, even under hard revving"
Thats because you're at the front driving it.
But nobody ever mentions the actual level - which is pretty damn important because 40 times 1 part per thousand is a lot more significant than 40 times 1 part per trillion.
The actual levels are posted here.
Here's the long and short of it:
Jetta (LNT system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.022 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.61-1.5 g/km
Passat (SCR/Urea-based system):
EPA Limit: 0.043 g/km
EPA Dyno Test (cheat number): 0.016 g/km
WVU Test (actual number): 0.34-0.67 g/km
These emissions levels are in g/km, which is pollutants over distance (which can probably be converted to time, if you dig around the actual study to find average speeds attained, but I'm supposed to be working right now...so you can try to dig that up on your own :). However, I do not believe that these numbers can be converted into actual pollutant volume (e.g. PPM/PPB/PPT). Perhaps you can scavenge that from the WVU study's raw data. I'd be interested in what you find.
I am also interested in finding is a trend in the NOx regulation in the US. I've dug around a bit, but have not yet found it. E.g. - did the actual NOx levels meet previous standards? Are the current standards that VW had to cheat to get around unrealistic? Beyond this, the wiki article does cite some projections regarding the number of deaths that have been/will be caused by the cheat, but I'd like to have a better perspective than that.
-Turkey
Your comments highlight the crux of the problem. Back in the day, inefficient (read truck like) diesel were shooting out black smoke. That particulate is large in size (10 or 100 of microns) that you actually "see". Improvements in efficiencies (both in combustion and trapping) made modern "clean engines" reduced the size of particulate to few microns. Those are much more difficult to see. Yet they are far more dangerous. Large particulate is trapped in your upper respiratory tract, the fine stuff gets deep in your lungs, often bioaccumulaating like abspestos does. You know how the stoey goes. Not because you don't see it it means it's not there... Next time stick a paper towel on the exhaust of your cold diesel and leave it there for a few minutes. Look at the color. Now you have somerhing to "see".
Plants need water too, that doesn't mean you can plant a cactus in a marsh or a rosebush in a koi pond. Different plants have different needs for/tolerances for water in the soil, so if the level of dampness changes at a site the population of plants will change.
This is true for any nutrient -- including CO2. That means things aren't as simple as "More nutrients == Better"; it depends where and what the nutrient is. Applying fertilizer to your lawn will help your bluegrass compete with the hardier crab grasses, which is good. When enough of that fertilizer drains into rivers and lakes those waters will become choked with aquatic weeds and algae, which is bad. So change is neither good nor bad, it's often good in some places and bad in others.
CO2 is a trace element in the atmosphere (about 0.04%), which means that some plants in any ecosystem are bound to be limited by it. An increase in CO2 will cause some plants which are minor components of a plant community to emerge as major weeds.
In agriculture, where you actively control which species is growing, crops will grow faster in a high CO2 atmosphere. However that additional growth will be in the form of carbohydrate; the protein density of crops will drop, because the synthesis of proteins is nitrogen limited (proteins are composed of amino acids, which are carboxylic acids with an NH2 group). Where crops are grown in close proximity to their wild relatives (e.g. rice) there will be increased hybridization resulting in lower food yields despite higher biomass. Overall these are changes we can adapt to, but it's not as simple as "faster growth == cheaper food".
So CO2 as pollution is far from bullshit. "CO2 == plant food" may be true in a limited sense but the whole argument that this makes rising CO2 a good thing is nonsense.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And as soon as we got rail tracks to every grocery store this actually means something.
Where I live (Los Altos, CA), there were rail tracks adjacent to every grocery store. They were ripped out to make the Foothill Expressway. http://www.abandonedrails.com/...