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Comment by MrZongle2 | Hacker News Reader

FTA: "Dieselgate killed people"

What's the source for this claim?

Every year a shocking number of people die from illness caused by air pollution [1]. While it might be difficult or impossible to put a head count on "Dieselgate," the increased emissions certainly killed some.

[1] http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e...

If you go down that route, you farting contributed methane to the atmosphere, increasing global warming and thus contributed to killing someone somewhere.

So are we going to start banning the passing of gas at the dinner table?

The problem is that it cheated the air quality standards society has set. Our government (regardless of how representative) decided on an amount of acceptable illnesses (regardless on whether you agree with it or not) due to industry in general, and transport in specific, and the company cheated it. The implicit social contract assigns the government the responsibility for deaths due to societal issues like this, once a company violates the law, they have broken that contract hence, they are no longer protected by the government's shouldering of the burden. They killed people.

Why are you totally obviating the ridiculously huge scale difference, and therefore impact, of the two mesures in your comparison?

> So are we going to start banning the passing of gas at the dinner table?

No, we are going to enforce the existing pollution control laws and punish cheaters.

Yeah, if it 0.01% kills a million people, then that's statistically some people being dead.

"While it might be difficult or impossible to put a head count on "Dieselgate,"..."

Well, that was kind of my point. It's no less of a scandal, and BMW still deserves to be punished, but just casually linking their actions to deaths seemed hyperbolic. Assuming the MIT study is solid, it's still possible that BMW's malfeasance has resulted in zero deaths.

I don't mean to distract from Doctorow's article -- I don't disagree with the central premise -- but "Dieselgate killed people" just struck me as casually lazy. It's the kind of probably-technically-right-but-unproven meme that, repeated enough, is accepted without question. We have enough of that in society today.

Common sense? If some quantity of emissions n causes a number of illnesses resulting in death D(n), then n + x will result in D(n + x) illnesses/deaths. So, if 'dieselgate' resulted in some sizeable quantity of pollution increase, then it also resulted in increased illness/death.

The author seems to be asserting that, indeed, that x was positive and therefore people died as a result of dieselgate.

Probably the study discussed here https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/10/vw-emissions-fraud-w... (edit: slightly more specific link)

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