As many as 11 million Volkswagen–Audi vehicles are said to have been rigged to bypass environmental checks around the world. Damage to the environment on an unimaginable scale, as calculated by British newspaper The Guardian.
"If Volkswagen cheated in America, couldn't it have done so elsewhere too?" Luca Poma asked in an article published a few days ago about the scandal engulfing the German company. A few hours later, came the confirmation. The attempt to falsify checks on pollutant emissions is said to involve eleven million vehicles sold worldwide since 2009. Not just the 482,000 in the United States. The news sent the carmaker's shares tumbling by a fifth of their value on the Frankfurt stock exchange in the space of a couple of days. More than 23 billion euros. On top of that, senior management decided to set aside 6.5 billion euros in the third quarter to cover costs from losses and fines.
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The most staggering figure, however, is this. According to British newspaper The Guardian, the fraud is said to have caused emissions of pollutants amounting to one million tonnes every year. The same as those produced by all the power stations, vehicles, industries and agricultural land in the United Kingdom.
The diesel cars sold in the United States are said to have polluted the air with somewhere between 10,392 and 41,571 tonnes of toxic gases, based on the average mileage of an American car. By contrast, had the five models badged as Volkswagen and Audi complied with the limits set by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they would have emitted no more than 1,039 tonnes of nitrogen oxide (NOx), the main pollutant produced by internal combustion engines in cars.
If this calculation is extended to the entire world, the total amount of harmful gases produced would be somewhere between 237,161 and 948,691 tonnes per year. The impact of those that could have been avoided in the European Union is far greater than in the United States. While across the Atlantic diesel accounts for just 3 per cent of the cars on the road, in Europe diesel vehicles make up almost half.
Should any further comparison be needed, here is one more figure: the largest power station in the whole of western Europe, Drax in the United Kingdom, emits "only" 39,000 tonnes of NOx in a year. Much to the frustration of all those — professionals, technical experts and activists — who negotiate every last detail day after day in order to reach agreements that reduce our impact on the environment.