At a small lab in West Virgina, it turns out. In 2012, a group of researchers at West Virginia University won a $50,000 grant from the International Council on Clean Transportation to do performance testing on clean diesel cars. Arvind Thiruvengadam, a research assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering, told NPR this week that the team was merely excited do the research—which involved driving the clean diesel cars outside the lab—and write a journal paper based on the data. They never expected that they would discover one of the biggest frauds in automotive history.
.. David Carder, another researcher on the West Virginia University team, told Reuters that the fallout at hand is surprising because this data was made public over a year and a half ago.
.. Volkswagen insisted to EPA officials that the discrepancies were due to a technical issue rather than deliberate cheating. Only when the EPA threatened not to approve Volkswagen’s 2016 clean diesel cars for sale in the U.S. did the company finally fess up.
Volkswagen Test Rigging Follows a Long Auto Industry Pattern
Beyond emissions, the industry has long been contemptuous of regulation. Henry Ford II called airbags “a lot of baloney,” and executives have bristled at rules requiring higher mileage per gallon.
.. General Motors paid $45 million in 1995 and recalled nearly half a million Cadillacs that were equipped with a chip that shut off emissions control systems while the air-conditioner was being used, to improve the car’s performance.
.. “We call it the tip of the iceberg,” said Jos Dings, the director of Transport and Environment. “We don’t think this will be limited to Volkswagen. If you look at the testing numbers for the other manufacturers, they are just as bad.”
Don’t Mess with Texas
The creators initially had difficulty convincing TXDOT to adopt the slogan. The creators said that the administrators were “buzz-cutted, conservative kind of characters.” The creators joked that the board members’ average age was 107. McClure recalled that “The crowd was sprinkled with ‘Keep America Beautiful’ and ‘Keep Texas Beautiful’ folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males.” McClure added that “The ‘Keep Texas Beautiful’ lady said, ‘Can we at least say please?’ I said, ‘No ma’am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'”[6]
Over at Medium: Geo-Engineering Doesn’t Reduce Long-Term Risk
Mark Buchanan — who is actually a physicist, after all — makes a compelling argument against relying on geo-engineering to deal with our climate change problem. For one thing, some of the proposed technologies simply won’t work, because they do nothing about the fact that the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet. For another, the geo-engineering fairy is being used to lobby against other approaches — conservation and renewable energy sources — that would deal with climate change at its source.