How are deaths related tk falsified fuel emissions calculated?
Edit: a word
Edit: a word
Also, 59 seems like a statistically insignificant number when compared to the overall population. Or maybe I'm interpreting it incorrectly?
What if you were one of those people? Or someone you loved?
There is no way you can pin the death of anybody on VW diesel emissions. It's a statistics game that that's it. You might as well blame Tesla for the extra deaths caused by the increase coal plant emissions created by owners charging their cars. Or make up any other example of any activity that increases some polutant. The only difference is that VW violated an arbitrary number in a government regulation.
There are millions of vehicles on the road today with worse emissions than the violating VW diesels. They are all killing people (statistically) and the government and therefore you and I are complicit in this murder by allowing it to continue. I am sure everone on this thread will endorse punitive tax increases to punish us all for our negligence, and to buy out the owners of these polluting cars so that they can all buy clean-and-green new ones (conveniently ignoring the rather massive environmental impact and attendant premature deaths caused by junking and replacing perfectly serviceable vehicles).
Consider the fact that in some states, heavy duty diesel trucks (8,500 lbs or more) and trucks older than 1997 are completely exempt from all emissions testing.
I bet a single one of those trucks produces more emissions than the "actual vs claimed" emissions delta of dozens of VWs combined.
That's a bullshit attitude. How about cancer from smoking? Is that also a statistics game? The effect of NOx on human health was studied the same way that smoking was.
2. There is a confidence interval around 59 in the study which doesn't include 0, so it is statistically significant according to the analysis they did. Not sure what sort of analysis would say that 59 deaths is statistically insignificant unless it was a difference between two groups, but that's not the case here.
3. There's a problem here with news articles boiling down an estimate with a wide confidence interval to a single number. There needs to be a way for the public to start understanding statistical conclusions and confidence intervals.
...I should have said “worse off than if VW had not cheated and all other variables remained the same”.
I don't question that more emissions results in more deaths. I question their ability to reliably calculate the number of deaths caused when dealing with numbers that small (~0.0003%) and leaving out some very important variables (which they do reference but don't incorporate). Of course, the publication was meant to compare the claimed vs actual emissions, but I'm talking in the more general case of overall emissions.
The publication claims that:
>> [Finally, we note that there may have been environmental benefits of the defeat device that we have not computed. For example, the reduced use of diesel exhaust fluid in selective catalytic reduction may potentially have also reduced ammonia slip, and therefore associated PM2.5 exposure and health impacts. In particular, Dedoussi and Barrett (2014) find that total PM2.5 exposure attributable to road transportation is caused approximately equally by NOx and NH3 emissions.]
I can think of a few more inadvertent environmental/health benefits of the defeat device:
For example, suppose that VW hadn't cheated and instead spent more time and money on R&D to come up with a legitimate solution. They would then have to pass this cost on to the consumers in the form of a more expensive car.
Would all of the people who purchased diesel VW's still have purchased them if they were more money?
If not, would they have purchased a car that produces worse emissions instead?
The VW Jetta has a 5 star crash rating. Would all of the people who purchased other cars purchased cars with the same crash rating, or perhaps a car with a worse crash rating?
There are a bunch of things that you could list that could all have an impact that rivals the 59 cited in the publication.
We're talking about 59 out of 17,500,000 (number of annual deaths integrated over 2008-2015). It wouldn't take much to actually find out that the VW emissions scandal actually resulted in more lives saved.
EDIT: That said, the publication isn't really trying to measure the amount of deaths caused by the scandal itself, but rather the increased emissions portion of it. Perhaps my original comment was out of line now that I think about it.
Would you agree with something like "the emissions they caused by cheating killed people, and our current best estimate of that is 59 (+- the confidence interval in the paper)".
It's true that the decision to cheat may have had the benefit of getting safer cars to more people, but that is even harder to measure than deaths caused by emissions. To me, the decision to cheat wouldn't be justifiable and I would still be outraged because they knowingly did harm to the environment and society with the hopes that there would be a nearly un-measurable side benefit: increasing the average safety of cars relative to a world that doesn't exist. To me, it seems despicably irresponsible to gamble the well being of many human lives against something so hard to measure.
On the other hand, consuming more fuel, making car ownership more expensive etc also carries real costs. People can't get work done, spend more of that lifetime tAking less efficient means of transportation, doing less enjoyable things like waiting on a greyhound bus, etc.
The sensationalist 'caused x deaths' headlights are very hard to reason With and usually one sided. That being said, car emissions are still a problem and there is a reason for these(and other public health) rules -- the response should perhaps be a little bit less emotional though. ( there are plenty of scandals that are probably more worthy of this emotional response, e.g. Illegal dumping or contamination, unhealthy foods, antibiotic overuse, etc.)