Guardian - What Volkswagen Says About The Imperatives Of Business Vs. Us And The World

Liike the slowly stewed frog, the world has grown steadily used to the banditry of its banks. The remorseless drip of revelations about laundering, rate-fixing and mis-selling have built up too slowly to provoke a violent reaction, but they have seared a distinction in the public mind – that between despised and predatory finance on the one hand and, on the other, more reputable lines of business that make real things. This is the backdrop against which an esteemed global manufacturer, and emblem of Germany’s purposefully productive capitalism, has been caught doing something that would make the most shameless banker blush. Volkswagen has been applying the technical acumen for which it is so admired to the task of tripping up the American regulators that are tasked with protecting the air that citizens breathe.

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The next wave of questions affect the wider car industry. If it was this easy to clean up emissions for inspection, one has to wonder whether other manufacturers were at it too. The tobacco sector has a long and shaming history of damaging lungs while concealing the evidence; any motor manufacturers who have been doing something can expect to face similar disgrace. There are more particular questions about diesel engines. VW has been a commercial advocate, but many European governments have also been privileging the fuel through taxation because it tends to be more carbon-efficient than petrol. That is an important consideration, but it needs to be carefully weighed against other pollutants – nitrous oxide and sooty particulates. If the authorities have been operating on an incomplete picture here, then public policy will have been distorted.

Presuming, of course, that public policy would otherwise have been protecting the environment, rather than lending industries mercantilist support. It was American, not European, regulators who caught VW out. In the darkest scenario of all, the authorities will not want to probe too deeply into the pollution data that puffs out of engines produced by domestic “champions”. If the mismeasurement of pollution is so easily contrived, there will be political as well as commercial imperatives to distort. Boris Johnson didn’t need devious software to spray water around at those points in London where European monitors measure pollution, a bizarre distraction from tackling air quality across the city as a whole.

If Flash Boys-style coding is moving from financial markets into consumer products and environmental audit, the dodgy pursuit of dodgy targets could soon be taken to new heights. The planet should be very afraid.

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http://www.theguardian.com/business/commentisfree/2015/sep/22/the-guardian-view-on-the-vw-crisis-the-planet-should-be-afraid