I know I’m supposed to be smug for driving an electric car run on 100% solar, but geesh, I’ve been doing this since 2005. My first was on a shoestring budget, and I’m beginning to think this is the way to go. No, I actually know it is.
It was announced on Tuesday that Volkswagen had suspended its head of external relations and sustainability, Thomas Steg (former government spokesman under German Chancellor Angela Merkel) after he admitted he knew about experiments in which monkeys were locked in small chambers and exposed to diesel exhaust.1
According to the German tabloid Bild who saw a bill, 11 monkeys were purchased for 3,500 euros each from China. As the diesel exhaust experiments did not kill them, they are believed to have been moved to a study on the effects of tobacco. (This is unacceptable- we already know what happens when we inhale tobacco. This is nothing more than animal torture.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XU7qS6Uls
“Initially reported in the New York Times, the tests, carried out in May 2015 by the New Mexico-based Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute (LRRI), involved locking 10 Java monkeys in small airtight chambers for four hours at a time.
The animals were left to watch cartoons as they breathed in diesel fumes from a VW Beetle. The ultimate aim of the tests was to prove that the pollutant load of nitrogen oxide car emissions from diesel motors had measurably decreased, thanks to modern cleaning technology.
It also emerged that a study in Germany measured the effects of inhaling nitrogen dioxide on 25 human volunteers.”2
VW didn’t need any additional bad press; in 2015 the carmaker manipulated tests on about 11 million cars worldwide, making it seem as if they had met emissions tests when in reality they had actually exceeded levels many times over when used on the road, a scandal that became known as “dieselgate.”
But it wasn’t just the suspension, it was also announced that the German car industry has spent nearly 10 years encouraging scientists to play down the health hazards of diesel fumes, “According to evidence seen by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and broadcasters NDR and WDR, the EUGT even tried to prevent the publication of a key World Health Organisation study that in 2012 declared diesel exhaust, which for years had been widely viewed as better than petrol, to be carcinogenic.”3
The EUGT has been disbanded but the damage has been done with Daimler and BMW now trying to distance themselves as well.
The Guardian reports that just before Steg’s suspension was announced, he told Bild that he was ashamed of the study and worried about what the fallout would mean for the German car industry, “My main concern is that the study should never have taken place with animals or with humans. What happened, should never have happened – I regret it greatly. It has nothing to do with scientific clarification.”4
The Green party wants the scandal debated, as a matter of urgency, in the Bundestag.
