THE CARBON WAR

252
The Winning of The Carbon War
Volkswagen has been caught by the US Environmental Protection Agency
cheating on emissions tests for diesel cars on a massive scale. The EPA alleges
that the carmaker fitted nearly half a million VW and Audi vehicles with devices
designed to bypass environmental standards. VW is issuing no denials. Today
we read that the scandal has caused nearly a million tonnes of extra pollution
from the 11 million cars apparently involved.
The talk among the executives in my seminar group, before we start, is
about whether we have heard all there is to hear about the scandal yet. Have
other carmakers been involved in this kind of fraud? The suspicion is that
they have.
The stakes are existential, in more ways than one. A recent study from
the Max Planck Institute shows that more people die prematurely from air
pollution than from malaria and HIV/Aids combined: 3 million people each
year. Most of these are from wood and coal burning, but a significant minority
derive from auto emissions. It is easy to imagine the class actions that must be
on the drawing boards of law firms today. Can VW hope to survive, when all
the accounting is done?
The wider implications are clear. VW, or some gang of suitably senior
executives therein, has somehow been willing to engage in criminal acts in
order to maintain a lie about diesel vehicles being better in terms of emissions,
including greenhouse-gas emissions.
Another report points to a bigger context: 48 of the world’s hundred
largest industrial companies are actively obstructing climate legislation. They
may be doing so via lobbying tactics that are currently legal. But will such
tactics remain legal? And if not, what future retrospective legal action might
this group of companies, and their directors, potentially face?
My audience today will be weighing such considerations very carefully
in the times ahead.
BP tops the list of the points table of corporate climate-legislation saboteurs.
In Europe, for example, it joined with Shell to craft a winning formula
for the scrapping of the EU’s renewable energy and energy efficiency goals,
in favour of a single greenhouse gas target for 2030 that could be met by an
increased use of natural gas. The two companies are taking heavy flak already
over this kind of behaviour. Shell has just quit the Prince of Wales’s Corporate
Leaders Group of Climate Change. It is not clear whether they jumped, or were
pushed, or jumped ahead of the growing probability of being pushed.
ExxonMobil needs to worry too: perhaps more so than BP and Shell.
New evidence has emerged that they knew about the problems associated with