So, Now We Switch To Coal-Powered Cars In Europe -- February 20, 2017

See also: the global warming scam. 

President Trump has a voracious appetite for current events. He says he gets most of his news from Fox News. In print media, my hunch is he gets much of his news from The Wall Street Journal. This article will be filed under "Global Warming" by Steve Bannon and placed on the president's desk. The article is a Holman W Jenkins, Jr, op-ed in TWSJ earlier this week.

I don't know if folks recall but recently Paris, and I think London, also, had poorer air quality than Beijing (China). It was either Paris or London or both.

The reason:

Contrary to usual practice, we’ll begin with the punch-line: less than 4/1,000ths of a degree Celsius.

That’s how much warming might be spared half a century from now thanks to Europe’s decision, starting after the Kyoto treaty in the late 1990s, to switch more than 50% of its passenger cars to diesel.

For this negligible result, Europe got significantly dirtier air. Paris, on some days, suffers worse smog than Beijing. Though his methodology may be questionable, a U.K. government scientist estimates that thousands of citizens die each year because of increased nitrogen oxide and soot emissions.

The word “microcosm” was invented for Europe’s diesel snafu—a microcosm of the governance failures that are breeding political revolt in much of the advanced industrial world. Europe has gone overnight from pushing and subsidizing citizens to adopt diesel vehicles, to punishing them with taxes and excluding them from downtown areas. Britain is contemplating a scheme to pay owners to scrap their diesel cars.

And a bit more.

Europe’s entire auto industry was led down the primrose lane of adopting a technology that now appears to be a commercial and regulatory dead-end. More than 70% of BMW and Daimler cars made for the European market last year were diesel. When honestly tested, one study shows the latest “Euro 6 Standard” vehicles miss their pollution targets by a whopping 400%.

Virtually everyone agrees Europe’s “dash for diesel” was a monstrous policy error, not to mention the proximate cause of the emissions-cheating scandal that has engulfed Volkswagen and other auto makers.

Yet the overarching imperative today is to vilify the car companies and insist they do better at achieving meaningless reductions in CO ₂ emissions, now by forcing them to build electric cars that customers must be bribed and pressured into buying. Not to be questioned, though, is the green agenda or the competence of Europe’s political class.

We'll stop there. I think we get the picture. As smoggy as it is.