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Diesel Cars Contribute To 5,000 Premature Deaths a Year In Europe, Says Study (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Emissions from diesel cars rigged to appear eco-friendly may be responsible for 5,000 air pollution deaths per year in Europe alone, according to a study published on Monday. The numbers are in line with previous assessments of deaths due to the so-called "Dieselgate" scandal, which erupted when carmaker Volkswagen admitted in 2015 to cheating on vehicle emissions tests. Many other carmakers have since fallen under suspicion. The researchers from Norway, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands calculated that about 10,000 deaths in Europe per year can be attributed to small particle pollution from light duty diesel vehicles (LDDVs). Almost half of these would have been avoided if emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel cars on the road had matched levels measured in the lab. If diesel cars emitted as little NOx as petrol ones, almost 4,000 of the 5,000 premature deaths would have been avoided, said the authors. The countries with the heaviest burden are Italy, Germany, and France, the team added, "resulting from their large populations and high share of diesel cars in their national fleets." Touted as less polluting, the share of diesel cars in Europe rose fast compared to petrol since the 1990s, and now comprise about half the fleet. There are more than 100 million diesel cars in Europe today, twice as many as in the rest of the world together, said the study authors. Diesel engines emit less planet-warming carbon dioxide than petrol ones, but significantly more NOx. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Tailpipes for the win!
Are, are contributing...
Then we're even, right?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
100 million Volkswagen diesel shit cars sending mass pollution into the sky and killing people. The US caught them doctoring the test results!
Missed your latest cognitive therapy session, i see.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Usually, if you read the small print, it means something like 'someone who was seriously ill and would have died a few weeks later anyway.' In other words, pretty much totally irrelevant to anything but the Green agenda.
What's the definition used in this study?
The biggest factor should be that technology and industries move a lot faster than bureaucrats. By the time laws get passed, what they're trying to regulate has already changed.
#DeleteFacebook
Not sure about the study, but the author of the article clearly has no clue what he/she is writing about. First the article says "10,000 deaths in Europe per year can be attributed to small particle pollution..." and then it continues "Almost half of these would have been avoided if emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel cars on the road had matched levels measured in the lab".
These two types of emission must be viewed separately. While small particles are solid particles in the size of less than 10 m, while NOx is an odorless gas. Both can be harmful, but in completely different ways. If you reduce the NOx emission, it will not reduce the healt impact of small particles in any way.
The author should read a book before writing about a subject that he/she doesn't understand.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
A small price to pay to silence the horde of VW driving neckbeards prattling on and on about their 85 mpg diesel Jettas and Golfs. And no more eurotards yapping about the miracle of diesel and stupid 'murka with its gasoline cars.
A fucking bargain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust_fluid
Trucks use it to clean exhaust, industry is used to it, when you refill your gas tank, you also refill DEF. Why don't the cars use it?
If teh free market was in charge we'd be driving coal powered cars.
Illegal aliens are killing more tham 5000 people per year? What are you smoking?
Does their deceit about the emissions levels on VW diesel engines, that contributes to deaths, lead to any criminal charges? Nope. Just fines and a round of golf. Corporations have no true accountability when the leaders get to go home and a lonely engineer is set up to take the fall.
Its even worse than that..
NOx reacts with Methane to remove it from the atmosphere, and Methane is much MUCH worse that CO2 with regards to greenhouse effects.
Estimates vary, however the accepted figure appears to be that the net effect of global diesel use is 20% net cooling effect.
So yes, Diesel contributes to global cooling! Climate change! Disaster!
(Also, lightning creates about the same amount of NOx as small vehicles, and both are much less than shipping, aircraft, or heavy industry..)
I doubt greatly that the emissions is contributing that much to the health of individuals.
All it says is "premature" death. What is not clear is by how much - shaving a day off the average life of 5,000 people is not that much statistically speaking. Shaving 10 years off is a lot. I also have to wonder that if diesel cars are having this much effect what is the effect of diesel lorries? These burn a lot more fuel than cars per kilometre and are driven far more too. If the effect of lorries is to cause the premature deaths of 50,000 people by whatever standard they are using then we should not be worrying about cars.
It's 5000 premature deaths over the average lifespan of all Europeans....so yeah illegal immigrants are way worse.
The amount is 10x that when the pollution abatement algorithm of the car's ECM sn't running :)
For killing those hapless fools!
There is absolutely nothing presented in that letter that suggests the 10,000 deaths or the 5,000 that might have been saved is anything more than conjecture. Use of those numbers is intended to shock readers and engender hate towards car manufacturers. Fabricating numbers to suit a political agenda and attaching the word "study" to it is irresponsible in the extreme.
Tesla is a coal powered car, depending where you live. Just sayin'
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I hate to say it but so what? I tend to be on the left environmentally but that statistic is not compelling at all. Five thousand people out of the hundreds of millions in Europe die early deaths because of diesel emissions? Far more deaths can be attributed to all kinds of every day things then that.
I think significantly altering our atmosphere is a bad idea and I like clean air and all but that statistic isn't compelling in the least.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
as the leading cause of premature death in the EU.
I'm talking abortions idiot.... yeah... 5k ain't shit compared to the monthly mass murder of humans due to some dumb whore who hadn't heard of a condom, birth control, iud or just keeping her filthy disease spreading legs closed.
Nope, murder baby, activate!
Just look at smoking-related deaths and you see that the diesel figures are no more than marginal noise.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Without agreeing to or objecting to the specific number of deaths per year attributable to cheating on environmental testing compliance, it would appear that Brad Kuhn (former Exec. Dir. of the Free Software Foundation, current Distinguished Technologist at the Software Freedom Conservancy) was right in his article "Software Freedom Doesn't Kill People, Your Security Through Obscurity Kills People":
This is the time to cite the cheating scandal as a reason why car owners should actually own their car including the complete corresponding software for the car and the software build instructions. We know what happens when the manufacturers are allowed to use the power of a proprietor. It's time we get vehicles that respect our software freedom.
Digital Citizen
There was more than 5 million deaths in the EU in 2015. Life expectancy is like any other optimization problem, to get the most bang for your buck focus on the real bottlenecks.
You are a grade A asshole.
> reality is that powering electric vehicles with coal-generated power is worse than just letting people by gasoline-powered vehicles.
study : http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-ve...
yeah, because the free market regulates itself soooo great in the US.
If the diesel users where the ones breathing the emissions you would have a point.
I'm not outraged at the tobacco users because the higher death rate is for themselves, not others.
"Far left, politically."
Only to someone on the far right. See how this works?
You deny all of the evidence that second hand smoke causes cancer? Or the fact that tobacco smoke consists of large amounts of particulates?
The US - which includes Silicon Valley - doesn't have a far left. You have a far right, and a further right.
Socialists are left, communists are far left. Heck, over here, even the social democrats have become right over the last decade or two.
Hang on, is it "illegal aliens", "immigrants", or "asylum seekers"? It seems to change every time I hear the claim.
>he thinks the US is anywhere other than far right on the spectrum
enjoy your for-profit healthcare. im sure you matter almost as much as their profits. keke
Doesn't matter, these myths are about scary foreigners. The details are irrelevant.
Diesel isn't the problem, particularly with super-clean fuel. The problem is diesel when there isn't enough oxygen ... for example when accelerating.
If mechanical super chargers are made mandatory the particle emittions problem is eliminated. Add mandatory pre-heaters and AdBlue with a big tank for NOX reduction and it becomes cleaner than gasoline, with better fuel economy to boot -- which means fewer tons of carbon emissions.
Note: Diesel engines benefit from super chargers more than mechanical engines.
The politicians' decisions were informed by data on emissions, which was faked. That's part of why "Dieselgate" was so heinous.
The concern to me about figures like this is that it's a guess. They "may" cause 5000 death, or they may not. When people start warning people with possible results and not factual ones. It gives you pause to look at who is coming up with those figures. If they were to say 5000 will die because of excessive diesel emissions that would be more credible but of course they have no ability to make such prediction.
The free market is much better at properly allocating resources than bureaucrats could ever hope to be
Interesting. In the age of machine learning and Big Data, is that assertion valid?
The way that Uber, Amazon and Facebook work (other examples exist) suggests to me that while free markets yield better results than 1950s central planning, the central planning of this decade and the next one can be even better!
The real reason we have a lot of Diesel cars in Europe is because of taxes.
Gasoline is taxed more than diesel and cars tend to consume more. People are quick to do the maths and opt for the more economical solution, especially those who drive a lot.
Should make a study about Diesel trucks, especially in the US where trucks have barely any emissions restrictions.
... and other vegetable oils...
The inventor mysteriously died while on a ferry or boat or something, and then the petrol industry introduced the filth that they renamed 'diesel', to go in the engines instead of vegetable oils...
Buy a diesel car and modify it to use used vegetable oil, and you'll find it isn't polluting anywhere near as much as if run on 'real' diesel...
Not touching the immigration issues, but in general that statement is true: when it comes to environmental problems, politicians in Europe almost immediately jump on a minor problem: cars (personal transportation, not including trucks, delivery vans, etc), while ignoring other far greater sources of pollution. While it makes sense to reduce the number of diesels and promote cleaner trucks, cars in general aren't that big a contributor to NOx or emissions of fines anymore. Still the family car is always the target, and the public are still made to believe - not with fact and numbers but with a weird mix of emotional environmentalism and good old Protestant guilt - that they should feel bad about driving. Sure, every bit of reduction counts, but for the vast majority in my country there are few good alternatives to cars even though we have an extensive public transport network. Politicians shouldn't forget that... and I am sure they haven't. Because it means they can (and have been able to) tax the crap out of car owners: they are made to feel guilty as hell and have no alternative, so most will pay without much protest. Even the right wing parties, traditionally on the side of low taxes and car owners, are trying to green up their image by imposing taxes on cars (instead of proposing far less popular but far more effective measures)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Hence why everyone wants to move away from coal. Except the US....
Of those three terms, I think "illegal alien" probably is the most accurate.
They aren't "immigrants". Immigrants voluntarily go through the legal immigration process of their destination nation, even if this is costs a lot of money and takes a long time. They would never pay smugglers to help them violate the border security controls of their destination nation, for example. They would never use fake IDs, as well.
They aren't "asylum seekers" or "refugees" either. Asylum seekers and refugees have safety, rather than movement, as their primary goal. They stop as soon as they reach safety. In the case of Syrians, this would mean a safe place within Syria (they do exist!), or the furthest they'd get is Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, or Lebanon. They would never end up in places as far away as France, Germany, or even the UK.
They are "illegal aliens". They intentionally go out of their way to ignore and bypass any and all immigration processes that exist in their destination. If their destination is several countries away, they'll violate immigration laws repeatedly. Sometimes they'll pay smugglers to assist them with intentionally breaking immigration law, acquiring fake ID, and otherwise violating border controls. They are foreigners who have intentionally entered another nation illegally, hence the term "illegal aliens".
Intentionally misleading terms like "immigrants", "asylum seekers" and "refugees" are used by people with a political agenda to push, and who want to benefit from the social disruption and harm caused by allowing unskilled, unemployable, criminal third-worlders into civilized nations.
The term "illegal alien" is used by honest people describing the reality of a dangerous situation.
Is there anything more useless than a Meta-analysis?
How many times have eggs been bad for you, then good again?
Butter?
Fats?
Etc?
Brought to you by Meta-analysis.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The article seems to mix small particle and NOx emissions in a way that is confusing. These are two very different forms of pollution. It doesn't appear there is a link to the original study, unless I've missed it. I would lean to the microparticle pollution being the cause of the deaths.
Far left? No, more like weenie corporate all-things-to-all-people PC left. SV companies will pride themselves on their transgender bathrooms while censoring viewpoints they consider "radical" from their parts of the Internet.
I am the AC who asked the question. I asked it precisely because one post said "immigrants" and the follow up said "illegal aliens".
Every time I hear a claim of this kind it's a different claim. And you can bet money that tabloid journalism and populist politics are even less consistent. Trying to understand if there is a valid statistical argument anywhere here is like clutching sand.
I know it's Europe and European bureaucrats involved, but maybe they should just stop with all of these artificially-imposed economic distortions and just let the free market make decisions like this. The free market is much better at properly allocating resources than bureaucrats could ever hope to be.
I wish that libertarians would, someday, take the trouble to learn some real economics. Maybe take an introductory course in it, why not. Economics is actually a very interesting field, but just blindly saying "the free market solves everything and has no problems" isn't really economics. Even Adam Smith pointed out the problems as well as the advantages of free markets, and he was writing well over two hundred years ago, before economics really even existed.
A free market is good at allocating some resources in some situations. A free market does not deal at all with some things, however, and one of the things it does not deal with is the case where there is a resource that is not owned. In the case of pollution, cars take in a resource that is not owned-- air-- and then rejects waste without cost into the air. Humans also use that same resource. But the air isn't owned-- you can't say "OK, I will buy all the air in this city, and therefore we can breathe only clean air. "
The biggest factor should be that technology and industries move a lot faster than bureaucrats. By the time laws get passed, what they're trying to regulate has already changed.
History simply shows that this is not true.
I wish that libertarians would, someday, take the trouble to learn some real economics. Maybe take an introductory course in it, why not.
For completeness, I should add that I also wish that conservatives and liberals would take the trouble to learn some real economics.
Ignoring economics when it's inconvenient is a feature of pretty much all political ideologies, not just libertarians. (It's just more annoying with libertarians, because their ignorance is so jarringly at odds with their rhetoric.)
From the study: "About half of these cases could have been avoided if these vehicles would in real driving emit no more than the EU limit value". "These vehicles" are _all_ LDDV (light duty diesel vehicles) currently being used in Europe. But less than 10% of these vehicles contain "Euro 6" engines which claim to emit less NOx than the current EU limit value. 90% were sold when the limit was significantly higher.
Of course it would be nice if all diesel cars currently on the street would obey the current EU limit. But for 90% this is not required legally - so You can attribute only a fraction of these 5000 premature deaths to dieselgate.
Its even worse than that. NOx reacts with Methane to remove it from the atmosphere, and Methane is much MUCH worse that CO2 with regards to greenhouse effects.
News flash: oxygen reacts with methane to remove it from the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides are 0.00003% of the atmosphere. Oxygen is 20% of the atmosphere. Putting more nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere has a negative effect on health, but doesn't reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere enough to notice.
Estimates vary, however the accepted figure appears to be that the net effect of global diesel use is 20% net cooling effect.
Another news flash: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
So yes, Diesel contributes to global cooling! Climate change! Disaster!
To repeat: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
(Also, lightning creates about the same amount of NOx as small vehicles, and both are much less than shipping, aircraft, or heavy industry..)
Lightning produces some nitrogen oxides. Specifically, "over the United States lightning accounts for only about 5 percent of the total U.S. nitrogen oxide annual emissions and about 14 percent of the total emissions in July."
And lightning-produced nitrogen oxides are randomly distributed through the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides produced by automobiles are concentrated where the most automobiles are, which coincidentally happens to be where people live. Lightning-produced nitrogen oxides are important to global atmospheric chemistry, but they're not a major player in pollution. https://www.nasa.gov/home/hqne...
Or all those resulting from the government-imposed "War on Fat"... Why, shouldn't it be criminal to even produce the murderous butter, much less offer it to children?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why did you reply to me instead of the parent, which you quoted?
#DeleteFacebook
>> "Far left, politically."
>
> Only to someone on the far right. See how this works?
No. It's BULLSHIT.
I used to consider myself center-left and I agree with the OP.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Perhaps you don't remember this far back, but "global cooling" actually was the widely hyped fear back in the 1960s and part of the 1970s.
No, it wasn't. That claim is something deniers say all the time, but it just isn't true. Here, for example, is the American Meteorological Society: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do...
I know a lot of people today (many of whom were born in the 1980s or even the 1990s!) will wrongly claim that it was only "the media" pushing those claims back then, but the media was just reporting on what those in various scientific fields were claiming.
I was born in the 1950s, and you are wrong.
It wasn't until into the 1970s that the "global warming" hype really started up.
Wrong again. Here's the American Institute of Physics's history of Global Warming: https://history.aip.org/climat... -- the effect has been known for well over a century.
I remember the greenhouse effect being discussed in my science classes back in high school. Of course, back then it was "here's an effect that, if we keep on burning fossil fuels, might be measurable sometime by the 1990s or 2000" (which seemed impossibly far in the future back then.) Well, guess what: we kept on burning fossil fuels, the 1990s and then 2000 came, and the effect was measurable.
When it became clear by the late 1990s that we weren't really seeing any significant warming, the name was changed again to the much vaguer "climate change".
Wrong, and wrong. We were seeing significant warming by the late 1990s (check the data), and the name was changed by the Bush administration in order to get people less excited about the effect.
This is convenient, because it allows any normal variation in the Earth's dynamic, chaotic, and unpredictable weather systems to be claimed to be evidence of this alleged "climate change".
Now, on that one I'll agree with you: it annoys me when people attribute weather events to global warming. No single weather event, no hot summer in one location, no warm winter in another location, can be particularly attributed to global warming. Global warming is real, and is well understood-- but it is a long-term, global phenomenon. It is not a local thing.
> Socialists are left, communists are far left.
The only difference between those two is the matter of degree and whether or not you think that somehow big government will eventually lead to a libertarian paradise.
Either one still leads you to living with your parents because there is a shortage of housing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
>>he thinks the US is anywhere other than far right on the spectrum
>
> enjoy your for-profit healthcare. im sure you matter almost as much as their profits. keke
Profit means that there are people lining up to sell to me. That means a wide array of excellent options. It doesn't matter if it's housing, lattes or hospitals.
I benefit greatly from this as an actual patient. I wouldn't trade my land of plenty in for any free garbage anywhere else.
Government doesn't set prices and government control supply. That works out very well actually.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> Doesn't matter, these myths are about scary foreigners. The details are irrelevant.
These details are VERY relevant. There are subtle distinctions between INDIVIDUALS. The individual needs to be judged based on their own circumstances and behavior.
The distinctions do matter. They aren't all just "immigrants". That's just liberals trying to cloud the issue.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Tabloid journalism? It's the liberal media that distorts this stuff. They will take a criminal and pretend the person is just an innocent slob trying to make a living.
Illegal aliens are just the undocumented. They could be harmless.
The real distinction is criminal aliens where they have made it clear that they aren't just here to "pursue the dream".
Criminal aliens have been the priority during the current US administration as it was in the previous one. Within those people, certain crimes are spelled out as a high priority for deportation.
Being flooded with war refugees and migrants that have no interest in assimilation is a different kettle of fish. Compared to that Mexicans aren't so bad and Tea Baggers should lay off a little.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If all of the propaganda about solar being cheap is not total bullshit, then the market again will sort all of this out. Daddy Warbucks doesn't want to pay more for something than he has to. He's no different than anyone else in this. If anything he is MORE pragmatic and not prone to conspicuous consumption nonsense.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I was replying to both the parent (first comment) and also your comment on it (second comment).
I did assume that slashdotters recognize the doubled quote-bar to show when it is the grandparent being quoted and commented on, and the single quote bar showing that it is the immediately preceding comment being quoted and commented on. Possibly some newer slashdotters in fact don't understand the quote protocol, but they can glance upward to see who said what.
I suppose I could have made two separate comments, but since the two were immediately adjacent, one comment doesn't fork the threads quite as badly.
What is the basis for your doubt? I find it interesting that you cite your personal doubt as if it actually proves something.
Doubt doesn't prove anything. You find people who doubt literally anything. There are people who doubt the moon landing was real, or that the Earth is spherical. And what sustains them is that they find other people who have the same doubts, and they take that somehow as confirmation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In the short run, yes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Huh. Wow. Having been there, _I_ thought Europe's biggest mortality factors were the poor personal hygiene, germany's now-infrequent putsches, insufficient heating/airconditioning (seasonal, mostly France), Italy's water, and terrorists. (stayed-away from spain's food, and belgium in general).
If the results of your study is less than your margin of error you are probably wasting your time.
An older story from 500K, back when the US was in peak Climate Alarmisim.
http://fortune.com/2015/11/30/diesel-emissions-deaths-europe-ee/
At the end of the day the only thing that this latest study proves is that you can still literally make anything say anything with the right kind of half baked study. Especially when you take into account that a lot of EU nations use way more diesel powered personal vehicle than the US and other nation states or blocks do.
Please check other causes of death.
The numbers mentioned here for diesel cars are nowhere near those.
Also the study fails to mention the benefits of diesel cars that outweigh insignificant death numbers.
5000 in Europe, that is over 742 million people or so. (see wikipedia)
With how many dieing from other things? smoking? bad diets? falling down the stairs? pills abuse? alcohol? cancer?
You get the idea.
How many lives are saved per yer simply due to modern technology. Trucks bring products to build generating stations that provide electricity that allows for advanced research into medicines, fresh food available all the time, cars allow deathly ill people to reach hospitals in time before they die, refrigeration keeps people from getting sick, cell phones allow you to call for help when you're in danger, everything we take for granted as simple "creature comforts" are actually prolonging our lives. You know, modern society. I wonder what the number of ((lives modern society saves) - 5000) is? Or rather, what percentage of (lives modern saved by society) is this horrible number 5000. I wonder how many zeros would come after the decimal place before the significant figures start.
More sky-is-falling, flat-earth bullshit from liberals who would rather have us live in mud huts and bathe in our own filth than have a modern free society.
Contribute To Over 5,000 Premature Rapings a Year In Just One Country In Europe, Says Study.
You'd think the "world is overpopulated" bunch would love this! With 5,000 per year, along with the other deaths, the overpopulation problem will resolve itself!!!
Just a small blip compared to all the deaths currently being caused by carbon dioxide and global warming. Nothing to see here, folks.
Diesel engines have saved more than 1.2 billion lives annually by transporting desperately needed goods and supplies across the globe!
And you're prepared to lie about conditions in Europe to suit your ideology. Right.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Actually, it works out poorly. The US pays far more for medical care per capita than literally any other country on the planet, and it's nowhere near close. The difference between 2014 US per capita medical costs and the runner-up Swiss per capita medical costs comes to a little under a trillion dollars a year that the US would save if it only had the second most expensive medical care on the planet.
You can also look at public health measures, and see that the US doesn't do very well compared to other developed countries.
It this is "very well actually", I'd hate to see something you considered merely above average.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Electrical motors are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, and there are ways of generating electricity that don't involve coal.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
All media distorts this stuff. I brought up the tabloid media because they are the ones making THIS argument, whatever it is.
There are other slippery arguments made by others. No argument there. It's hard enough to pin down the claim being made here without confusing it with other bad arguments.
I consider myself The Grand And Ultimate Arbiter Of All Things, and consider it wrong.
There's a reason that repeating dubious and obviously incorrect claims often ends by saying "Riiiiight"
The individual needs to be judged based on their own circumstances and behavior.
I agree with this, which is why I oppose fascism, an ideology based on quashing individual behaviour for the benefit of the state.