The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

The consequences of stupid greenwashing

Greenwashing means marketing a product by pretending it is somehow good for the environment.

This amusing example showed up on my Twitter feed.

Sometimes it is amusing. Sometimes it does some damage.

Diesels

In Belgium diesel engines have long been a popular choice for people buying a new car. It was cheaper at the pump, and it is particularly popular for the many company owned cars on Belgian roads (a bit more derisively known as salary cars — long story).

And in 2008 this popularity got turbocharged (pardon the pun) by something called the eco bonus (ecopremie). Cars which emit less than 105 g of CO₂ per km would get a 15% cashback from the government. Because climate change. It was announced a bit later that the registration tax would also get cheaper depending on CO₂ emissions. If you were buying a small car in 2010 you were strongly incentivised to look for low CO₂ emissions, which de facto meant choosing a diesel.

The observant could already quite literally see the signs that this policy would be short lived. In the form of traffic signs popping up on motorways. A speed limit of 90 km/h was introduced on motorways at times of smog alarm. Belgium is often badly affected by smog in the summer, and a main contributor to this is car traffic. If you were thinking hang on, isn’t diesel worse for smog, you would be right.

Greenwashing

If you bought a car in the past decades, chances are it has some ‘green’ or ‘blue sky’ or ‘eco’ branding on it. That is greenwashing. This ‘ecopremie’ could be considered state sponsored greenwashing. While getting a smaller or more fuel efficient car is better than a larger and more thirsty car, it is more aptly described as less bad.

If you want to actually do something for the environment when it comes to cars, the answer today (even now when electric cars are a thing) is the same as 30 years ago — if possible, drive less. Subsidising cars is always a bad idea.

Now, if this ecopremie would have just fizzled out after a few years, it would have been a be pretty benign, although quite expensive episode for the government *2. But no, various things already started to push back against pollution from cars, and especially diesel powered cars.

Burned

A first setback for all our freshly minted ‘eco’ drivers was the price of diesel. It had always been cheaper than gasoline, due to less tax. But that gap was soon after closed, and today both fuels are roughly the same price. It wasn’t a drama, but the writing was on the wall.

Soon another player entered the chat — cities. And it was not a happy player. Cities do not like air pollution. The source of that pollution is no longer heavy industry, we shipped that off to China a long time ago. It is cars. Cities started implementing low emission zones, restricting which cars could enter the city. Antwerp got in first, in 2017, then Brussels in 2018 and Ghent in 2020.

The restrictions were based on something called the Euro norm. In Brussels, right now diesels must comply with Euro 5, and gasoline cars with Euro 2 *3. Well, did you duly choose one of those cars that got the 15% eco bonus? Good chance that one is Euro 4 and no longer allowed to enter those zones. Oops. Whereas if you have some old clunker from the late 1990’s running on gasoline, it is probably Euro 2 and they can still enter.

Fool me once

The fall from grace was swift. Within just over 10 years diesel went from the Right Thing to Do™, to get out of our city with this dirty thing. Well within the life span of a car. Quite a few people are going to have to get a new car a few years earlier than expected.

So what did we get out of this episode? One thing is an abnormally high amount of diesel powered cars on the road, with the associated worse air pollution.

But another thing is a lot of people who got burned by this saga. How many did come out of it with a resolve to never fall into the trap of “doing the right thing for the environment” ever again? Fool me twice, shame on me. That is long term bad news, we do not have unlimited political capital to burn. *4

Is this story to repeat itself? Particulate matter from tyre wear is getting increasing news coverage. And there is also the other negative effects of using cars, like the danger and noise imposed on other people. Cities are increasingly moving towards measures to control car use in general to control these effects. And note how switching to an environmentally friendly electric car solves none of these problems. That Tesla might not be that get out of jail free card after all.

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