Re:Decades of diesel use in Europe have created a public hea...
by jabl on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @11:20AM
(#21204033)
Where I live, and I believe many other European countries as well, diesel is about 5-10% cheaper than gasoline (due to less tax). OTOH there's a yearly fixed tax for diesel cars (some hundreds of EUR).
So the intent at least originally was to discourage the plebs from buying diesel cars, whereas those that used a lot like trucks, taxis etc. got cheaper fuel (for them the fixed yearly tax was a trivial cost compared to the advantage of cheaper fuel and a more efficient engine).
I agree this is a mistake that should be rectified, but it is of course politically very difficult.
One cheating diesel car in 1000 cars increases ozone, PM2.5 pollution by 1.33%, 1.99% respectively.
Each additional cheating diesel car in 1000 decreases child birth weight by 0.19%, causes low child birth weight 1.9% more often and causes 8% more visits per quarter per 1,000 children of age 0 to 4 to doctors because of asthma.
So yes, comparable American cities would be healthier. Having less taxes on diesel was a huge mistake in Europe. My guess is it was an attempt to burden transportation industry less with taxes. Plus lorries can do tax arbitration by filling up outside of countries with high diesel tax (so you wouldn't want too high of a diesel tax because of the "laffer curve"). This caused this whole innovation of having consumer diesel cars, even though they are more expensive, complicated and heavy. If you take into account weight and production cost it becomes difficult to justify a diesel engine via CO2/fuel savings outside of tax advantages (this doesn't apply to lorries).