The days of the “dirty diesel” are over...

VW Golf diesel.  Ecowarior, yeah?

The days of the “dirty diesel” are over, it’s official.  Once regarded as the stinkiest, smoggiest way to get about the diesel car is starting to get some props for its eco-credentials.  For those who have not been keeping up with the history of the diesel car (in the UK at least) I can offer a potted history.

The first generation of diesels were generally conversions using tractor or boat related engines.  Stuff like the Morris Oxford or Standard Vanguard would be offered with a slow, clattering, smelly diesel drive train so that farmers and rural taxi fleets could run them on “red” diesel and pay no fuel duty.  This is illegal, don’t try it at home kids. 

Morris Oxford: available as a slow petrol version or extra slow diesel.

In the 1970’s a variety of energy crises, strikes and other problems along with greater acceptance of the diesel in Europe prompted a limited number of diesel versions of several popular European cars to be ever-so-slightly more commonly seen.  These were principally French brands and Mercedes.  Again, these were slow, noisy and smelly and not really mass-market cars.

In the 1980s someone came up with some research which suggested that diesel cars were more environmentally friendly than petrol powered ones and about the same time someone, probably a Frenchie, (hey, you think I actually bother to research this stuff?) had a brain wave and attached a turbocharger to a passenger car diesel motor and suddenly acceptable performance was possible on heavy oil.  Diesel pumps start to appear on filling station forecourts so you don’t have to fill your diesel car up in a truck stop and the scene is set for popular adoption of the diesel passenger car.

So for a while French and VW based cars with diesel engines, and a selection of other brands who bought in the diesels from VAG or PSA, revelled in good mileage and a good “clean” impression on the mass market who finally took the diesel car to its heart and sales of TDi cars went postal in the 1990s.  It was like Girl Power, but with soot.

And then someone says “research shows that a diesel engine car makes significantly more pollution than a petrol engine car even when the disparities of fuel consumption are taken into account”.

Ooops.   Seems all that sooty black smoke IS bad for you, and the environment, after all!

So diesel takes a back seat as an eco-fuel as more fuel efficient direct injection gasoline engines, three pass catalytic converters, and of course hybrids make news.  Diesel fuel duty is raised (in the UK) above that of unleaded petrol to signify its greater environmental impact.  The bright, clean, safe future is looking electric...

And then some folks start to question this “new truth”.  You see diesel development has not stood still in the last 10 or 15 years and new generations of diesel motors are cleaner, quieter, and more efficient than their predecessors.  This week Swiss government research lab EMPA has published research which suggests the diesel car is a better bet for the environment than the electric car...

Now for some time there has been some grumbling from the corner where people who don’t like hybrids and electric cars sit, saying “ah well, the batteries, when you take into account the batteries...” and there is a common opinion which has no apparent basis in published research that batteries from hybrids and electric cars are some uber-evil.  The truth, according to the Swiss, is more fundamental than that. 

Research says that the batteries in Li ION electric cars (and by extension hybrids too) are not a significant environmental impact either in terms of their manufacture and their end of life disposal.  The big issue with electric cars is this: How do you generate the electricity to charge the battery?  For most of us the answer is “coal fired power stations”.  There is a lot of controversy you can kick off over the cleanliness or otherwise of coal and oil fired electricity generation, and there are some claiming gas fired isn’t as clean as it could be.  The point being that if we want electric cars to be the clean sustainable future we need to be putting some significant effort into making electric power generation into a clean and sustainable business.  Now some people will be muttering that this is a lot of effort to go to when you can just get a diesel car and be done with it but it ignores two important facts (and one convenient but unrelated related truth):

1.      We need to address issues of pollution and sustainability in electricity generation anyway

2.      If we do so we can make electric cars which are more eco-friendly than diesel cars

Plus:  Ongoing parallel research will also result in cleaner more efficient diesel cars...

This isn’t about finding one absolute and perfect solution which will work in all cases.   Sadly most people take a polar view on environmental issues with all-or-nothing rhetoric and firm statements of denial.  As with much of life there is a lot of compromise involved and a lot of what the IT industry terms “blended solutions” when looking at tricky, real life situations.  For example it may be that in the future a typical family may have a Bio Diesel (or Bio Diesel-hybrid) powered mid size like a Ford Mondeo as the main family car, used for all the things you need a larger car with a long range, high speed operation and decent luggage and passenger capacity etc.  but that the second car in the family may be a small, mains-charged electric car like a Smart or some kind of Fiat  which is used for short local commuting, shopping and so forth (I’m avoiding using “husband” and “wife” tags on these but you see the distinction I’m making here).

There is also another point which everyone involved in car related arguments on the environment kinda miss out on.  The best way to reduce the tail pipe emissions from my daily hack (a V6 Omega) is for me to drive it less.  Really, this is simples, no?  If I do 200 miles a week in it, but then cut that back to 100 miles a week then we just had a 50% cut in emissions and nobody had to invent any crazy new technology to make it happen.

But how?

Again with the “there is no one solution to suit all needs”.  But really, do I need to drive into the city to sit at a desk to do my job?  Answer, no, I can work from home.  I just need an internet connection and a mobile phone to do a lot of it.  There are web based teleconference and meeting solutions, I can send emails, collaborate on documents and make telephone calls etc. and have secure access to all my company systems and files.  The only reason I don’t work from home most days is corporate culture.  There are loads of office based jobs where electronic processes could fairly easily be introduced to allow people to work from home.  OK, so you work in a shop or a bank, well, in which case then the obvious answer is a clean, reliable, cheap, efficient, well planned public transport system.  Same issues apply to busses as they do to cars regarding pollution but if you have to move people in bulk it makes sense to shift them that way.  OK, I enjoy driving as much as any other enthusiast but who enjoys sitting in a traffic jam choking slowly on the fumes of dozens of stationary cars?  People are more than happy to take public transport when it’s an airliner, you don’t see people demanding to use a private light aircraft to take their summer holiday in Majorca so why are our attitudes to commuting any different?  And yes, for some people the private car will be the only viable option since we’ve allowed so many of our cities to become poop-holes that nobody wants to live, work or shop in them any more...

A nice environmentally friendly bus

What is unfortunate is that there seems to be so much polarisation in this debate which is, after all, kinda important.  For the most part scientists agree that there is something to the whole climate change thing.  How much there is to it they may differ upon but few serious scientists actually take the view that it is a myth.  Part of the problem comes down to the fact that most people in the general public (and many in the media) seem ignorant of how scientific research is carried out.  Everybody wants a nice straight forward simple certainty which everybody can sign up to and then be done with.  The problem is that life (and science) isn’t like that. 

What happens is a continuing development of a body of evidence which is comprised of the validated results of repeated testing.  Some dude comes up with an idea, does an experiment to prove it then some other dudes repeat his experiment to see if they get the same result.  If they do then “peer review” has proved the theory, as far as it stands so far.  Even if they get a different result it may tell us useful things about the theory, how it applies, how it is bounded, etc. Occasionally a report comes out which is validated but contradicts previous research.  This doesn’t mean that all previous research is invalid.  This doesn’t mean the new report is crackpot.  What it does mean is that there is more to the original hypothesis than we previously knew.  More experimentation and investigation is necessary to find out what....

So when the Daily Mail prints “New report proves Global Warming is a myth!” you can be quite, quite sure that it does not.  What it may tell us is that there are flaws in our understanding of how global warming is effecting our environment, or flaws in our understanding of so called “man made global warming” is effecting climate change, but let’s be honest, we knew that already; this is new science and the pace of learning is fast and the amount we don’t know is pretty huge.  A good example of this being the revisions to the positive feedback theory which have made the news of late.  Its all about refining the science and improving what we do know with some certainty.

The so-called Climate Change Sceptics would have you believe that it’s all a conspiracy, and that its somehow in the interests of the scientists to “cook up” a global warming myth.  Hmmm.  Compare how many scientists who promote climate change work for solar panel companies or whatever compared to the number of people in the Climate Change Sceptic movement who work for, or are sponsored by oil companies...  I also dislike the term Climate Change Sceptic.  I would call myself that as I have a genuine scepticism about all “new” revelations in science as all estimates need to be revised in light of future, better understanding and so I take an open mind and accept the balance of the evidence.  Many of those in the Climate Change Sceptic movement are not open minded at all, and many are the same people who believe in a secret global government, the Illuminati, the 9/11 terror attack being an inside job by the CIA and so forth.  Science 101: check credibility of your experts and sources.  You can prove anything you like if you cherry pick flawed research and misrepresent and misquote the rest.

What also causes me massive irking is the “well what can you do? Let’s do nothing” attitude which is prevalent amongst a lot of folks.  An interesting report was published in the US of A highlighting different activities which result in different levels of ecological impact and the general level of misunderstanding which people have over their relative impacts.  For example, the report informs us that turning the heat down on your washing machine (say, washing at 40 instead of 50 degrees) saves more electricity / has more ecological benefit than drying your clothes on the line rather than in a tumble dryer does.  Now while this is a fascinating comparative fact it is actually valueless.  I have read a couple of articles where the fact is presented in such a way as to suggest that it’s a waste of time to line-dry clothes because, after all, you can save more power by using a cooler wash cycle.  FACE-PALM.  Why not wash at a lower temperature AND line-dry?  The two are not mutually exclusive.  Other “shock” results were that turning off your TV rather than leaving it on standby doesn’t save as much power as many people think as “most modern TVs use as little as 1W in standby”.  This assumes everybody has a modern TV for a start (mine is about 10 years old!) and also begs the question: what do you gain by leaving the TV on standby anyway?  Why do people care if it doesn’t save MUCH electricity, it must save some, and the power it uses sitting in standby gives no appreciable gain to anyone at all...  But it seems it is some unbreachable human right to leave your TV on in standby...

So what do we take away from this? Other than that I have too much time on my hands (meh, I was waiting for the bath to run, nothing good on TV).  Well, we can’t say with any certainty that

Diesel > electric

because there are so many variables in there.  We can say the case for diesel, especially bio diesel, especially bio diesel from waste products is far from dead. But don’t just think your 17 year old Volvo 2.5TD estate is suddenly an ecological wonder.  If anything I think the message here is that there is space in our future for multiple approaches as so many individual circumstances will call for different solutions.  Sadly too many people are pushing one-size-fits-all look agendas these days so my closing line has to be:  open your mind to possibilities.  Don’t believe the grown-ups, they don’t always know best...