38,000 People a Year Die Early Because of Diesel Emissions Testing Failures (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Diesel cars, trucks, and other vehicles in more than 10 countries around the world produce 50 percent more nitrogen oxide emissions than lab tests show, according to a new study. The extra pollution is thought to have contributed to about 38,000 premature deaths in 2015 globally. In the study, published today in Nature, researchers compared emissions from diesel tailpipes on the road with the results of lab tests for nitrogen oxides (NOx). The countries where diesel vehicles were tested are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, and the U.S., where more than 80 percent of new diesel vehicle sales occurred in 2015. The researchers found that 5 million more tons of NOx were emitted than the lab-based 9.4 million tons, according to the Associated Press. Nitrogen oxides are released into the air from motor vehicle exhaust or the burning of coal and fossil fuels, producing tiny soot particles and smog. Breathing in all this is linked to heart and lung diseases, including lung cancer, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation, which took part in the research. Governments routinely test new diesel vehicles to check whether they meet pollution limits. The problem is that these tests fail to mimic real-life driving situations, and so they underestimate actual pollution levels. The researchers estimate that the extra pollution is linked to about 38,000 premature deaths worldwide in 2015 -- mostly in the European Union, China, and India. (The U.S. saw an estimated 1,100 deaths from excess NOx.)

Comments

And how many people died from gasoline car emissio

[caseih]

And in the same period, how many people died as a result of pollution from ordinary gasoline automotive emissions? Smog is a huge problem in the world but it's not all diesel engines. Removing diesels may help the problem but people are still going to die from health complications because of smog even if everyone just ran gasoline engines. So the deaths are tragic, but at the same time I'm not convinced they are statistically significant as a sole driver of public policy.

Reminds me of the classic scene from Yes Prime Minister where Humphries argues that preventing smoking would just cost the NHS more money and that it's far cheaper for smokers to continue to die at about the present rate. Morally Humphries is wrong of course, but economically he was absolutely correct.

Um, no...

[thesupraman]

Because its not 38,000..
Its 'researchers (who want this to matter) 'estimate' it to be 38,000. Here is how this works.

They take the number of people who die from ANYTHING that can be distantly LINKED to this, and pick a number less than that.
Since this is 'linked' to almost any lung condition..... (not through any actual evidence of course, just because it is 'obvious' - it probably
does have an effect of course, and the magnitude is anyone's guess, because it would be impossible to actually measure..)

In fact the claims are not even correct - NOx is NOT the 'soot' that comes from diesel - the two are almost completely unrelated, and quite different in both effect and risk. this is just an attempt to cash in on 'dieselgate', whos actually effect is to reduce efficiency of diesel engines and actually increase total emissions if actually complied with (because they restrict based on percentage, not absolute output).

Let alone the fact that petrol engines actually routinely produce LARGER total amounts of NOx..

Why you ask? its easy, Diesel is a lot less profitable for suppliers.
Does that make it obvious enough?

Hell, breathing oxygen is 'linked' to 60,000,000+ deaths a year... its not hard to make up stupid numbers..

Re:Not too bad

[hey!]

Of course by that argument murder doesn't really matter either.

Lives are extremely valuable, even though every single one of them ends in a relatively short time. Even an individual life is valuable.

Now it so happens that every policy ends up killing people. If you build a bridge, statistically a certain number of workers will die on the project. The difference between building a bridge and murder is that the bridge has social benefits as well as costs, and in fact some of those benefits are denominated in lives prolonged.