Me and My Jetta: How VW Broke My Heart - The New York Times - 0 views
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Those of us who purchased the Jetta TGTBT (too good to be true) are now stuck with vehicles we cannot drive without making other people our victims. That’s because the copious NOx and hydrocarbons they emit become low-level ozone pollution. Ozone clings over urbanized areas — notably the Boston-to-Washington corridor and much of California — and the deaths it causes are a lot more real than the “kills” taking place around a Volkswagen conference table. Human-caused ozone pollution inflames and injures lungs, aggravates cardiovascular disorders, and contributes to the 500,000 or so asthma hospitalizations every year, many of them among children under 15. According to a 2013 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters, it also kills about 470,000 people a year worldwide.
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I stayed awake much of Monday night fretting about this, and about a poisonous stew of corporate scandals — the news that Johnson & Johnson, my old paragon of corporate decency, had deliberately promoted off-label sales of a drug that caused old people to suffer strokes, and teenage boys to develop breasts; the smart-aleck investor who jacked up the price of a 62-year-old drug by 4,000 percent; Takata’s exploding airbags; G.M.’s deadly ignition switches; and of course the guy who knowingly sold tainted peanut butter that killed nine people and sickened hundreds.
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we need to acknowledge that some of our favorite phrases — “clean diesel,” “green car” and apparently also “corporate responsibility” — are just a contradiction in terms. But that shouldn’t let us off the hook either. Every time we complacently accept some company’s green-scamming promises, we allow ourselves to become the gullible partners in crimes against one another, and the Earth. And that makes us all just a nation of willing fools.