“The one-eyed”

Debates about diesel engines constantly confuse fact with fiction, family enterprise lobbyist Lutz Goebel writes in an opinion piece for Handelsblatt. Regardless of the cartel allegations against Germany’s most important carmakers, seeing the shift to e-cars as a panacea for climate protection and human health is “one-eyed”, Goebel argues. “Only 7 percent of particulate matter comes from diesel engines,” he writes, adding that the lithium-ion batteries for e-cars “are almost all made in East Asia due to the horrendous emissions their production causes.” Overall, the CO2 footprint of an e-car “is no better than that of a combustion engine”, he says. Goebel also argues that old batteries cannot be recycled and had to be “treated like nuclear waste”, which is why banning combustion engines by 2030, as the Green Party demands, is far less desirable than working on a clean future for diesel.

See the CLEW article Reactions to allegations over German carmaker cartel for more information.