"If I crank up my 2-stroke weed-whacker and chainsaw and do yard maintenance for a few days each year... I’ve likely polluted much more than a modern VW TDI pollutes in it’s lifetime. The current crisis is being reported as if VW was committing a significant crime against nature (pollution), when in fact the real crime here is little more than deception.
The TDI’s biggest crime was that it traded a tiny amount of pollution for a significant amount of resource conservation. When you advance fuel injection timing in a diesel, you get higher peak cylinder pressures which extract more energy from a given amount of fuel. As peak cylinder pressures increased, more NOx was formed than the EPA/CARB allowed. So this tiny bit of pollution was just a trade: the TDI drivers have been sending fewer dollars to oil barons in the middle east.
NOx emissions are complicated, and in certain exceptions to the rule, adding NOx to the atmosphere can actually increase the natural decline of ozone/smog. If pollution is created predominantly by gasoline vehicles, there is a pattern of smog worsening on the weekends, presumably because big trucks that emit NOx are not running. The EPA actually acknowledges this fact, appropriately referred to as “The Weekend Effect”
(NO + O3 ___> NO2 + O2)
“In a city centre for example, where NOx concentrations are high, a reduction in VOC is likely to be more effective in reducing photo-oxidant concentrations than cutting NOx, and the centre is said to be ‘VOC-limited’. Conversely in the surrounding countryside, where the NOx concentration is much lower (Fig 2), cutting NOx emissions is likely to be more effective than reducing VOC emissions; it is thus ‘NOx-limited’. “
-http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld...
The amount of NOx emitted by these “dirty” VW diesels is tremendously less than that allowed in diesel vehicles produced in 2005, and thousands of times cleaner than that of a diesel from the 70’s. The outrage should be over VW’s ethics, not the pollution (which is negligible. The EPA limit for NOx emission is so close to zero, that multiplying the permissible emissions leaves us still pretty darn close to zero.)
The EPA policies were flawed from the beginning. Instead of cracking down on the biggest vehicles traveling the longest distances, they cracked down on us at home. It would have been more effective to target larger polluters: large transport trucks, trains, ships, tractors/combines, and old machinery. Offering farmers, truckers, construction workers, fishermen, and other commercial industries subsidies to retrofit old equipment with additional pollution control, or subsidies to purchase low emission commercial equipment.
Our beautiful Animas river was destroyed by EPA negligence at best.. but powerful and obvious motives exist which point to a conspiracy to acquire Superfund money (which they did receive). I know this looks like a non-sequitur, but the irony is thick here. Why are we allowing an incompetent organization that destroyed large swaths of the environment (and does not have any way to pay penalties itself) to decide how much money to collect from others who have done an infinitesimal amount of damage to the environment?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-1... "
Not my words but I found this online, I dislike the medias focus on this issue and their click bate titles that make out like the cars are pouring cyanide out their exhausts.
Molly
Yellowbird
"GRAY"
muhahahaha
Boxster
Linear Mode
