More monkey business at Volkswagen

Seems like only yesterday, we were reading (and writing) about the Volkswagen emissions scandal, in which engineers jimmied with software to falsify results, colossal fines were paid out, and the CEO’s head rolled. And now, this: the suspension of VW’s chief lobbyist who’s taking the fall for VW’s latest attempt to demonstrate the diesel fuel is good for the environment.

It’s not 100% clear whether diesel is better or worse than gasoline when it comes to polluting the air. It may come down to diesel is dirtier but gets better mileage, so it about nets out. (Frankly, I was too lazy to read through all the articles out there on this topic. This is what I gleaned from a completely half-baked cruise through a few of them.) Anyway, Europe does have some pretty terrible air quality, and vehicle emissions contribute plenty to the problem.

I’m generally not in Europe during the winter, but on a trip to Berlin to help topple The Wall over New Year’s 1989, I can attest that something was rotten, if not in Denmark, then in Berlin. The culprit was the soft coal that was being used for fuel in East Germany, which was nasty and sulfury, brown and almost palpable. How much traffic contributed to the miasma hanging over the city, I have no idea. But, yes, it was pretty nasty breathing out there.

And, according to the European Commission, things haven’t improved all that much over the past few decades. On Tuesday, the Commission declared:

…that Germany and eight other countries had not done enough to combat dismal air quality. The commission said it planned to pursue legal action against the nine countries at the European Union’s highest court for their chronic failure to enforce air quality standards. (Source: Boston Globe)

The German auto industry is front and center of their country’s anti-pollution efforts (or non-efforts). Part of the fallout in this latest round involves experiments using monkeys, a rather high level and sentient animal to subject to hours of diesel exhaust breathing. And both politicians and industry leaders have pounced on VW, condemning:’'

…experiments at a lab in Albuquerque, N.M., in which monkeys were exposed to diesel exhaust. The project was financed by German carmakers, who wanted to show that diesel cars were less of a threat to human health than groups such as the World Health Organization have claimed.

The experiments on monkeys at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque — carried out in 2014, a year before Volkswagen was caught using software to cloak excess diesel emissions — involved exposing a group of the animals to exhaust from a late-model diesel Volkswagen; a second group of monkeys was exposed to exhaust from an older Ford diesel pickup truck.

After breathing diluted exhaust for four hours, the monkeys were examined for signs of lung inflammation or other ill effects. The research did not kill the monkeys, but it was unclear what happened to them after the experiments were completed.

Now I’m not a member of PETA, but I’m not wild about experimenting on any animal much north of a lab rat. Dogs, pigs, cute little bunny rabbits, primates. In this age of techno-everything, surely there are better ways, simulations that can get pretty much the same results. Or robots. They’re getting mighty sentient these days. How about letting robots breathe in diesel fumes?

I guess that experimenting on animals beats experimenting on humans.

But wait just a dern minute:

A separate project financed by the carmakers subjected human volunteers in Germany to doses of nitrogen dioxide, one of diesel’s most noxious byproducts.

Sure, these humans were volunteers. And I realize that Auschwitz was liberated 73 years ago. But surely someone in the German automobile industry, someone at VW – after all, didn’t they design the beetle (the people’s car) for Der Führer?– might have asked himself, is it a good idea to put a group of people in a closed room and have them breathe in a “noxious byproduct”. Did no one pause and say the German equivalent of, gee, doesn’t this sound a tad bit Zyklon-B-ish?

Makes experimenting on monkeys look all find and dandy.

Anyway, that’s the latest from Volkswagen. Time to take a deep breath. Just be careful what’s coming in through the vents. And bring on the solar powered cars.