Drew Kodjak (’91) Delivers Max M. Shapiro Lecture on Volkswagen Emissions Scandal
The executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation spoke about failures in emission control regulation.
On February 29, 2016, Drew Kodjak, Boston University School of Law Class of 1991, delivered the Max M. Shapiro Lecture on his role in uncovering the Volkswagen’s emissions scandal. Kodjak is executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit organization committed to helping “governments around the world to write regulations and policies to deal with air pollution from motor vehicles.”
The Volkswagen emissions scandal was caused by the car company’s deliberate installation of software designed to evade US and European emissions regulations in diesel models of their Beetle, Passat, and Jetta vehicles. The software allowed the emissions output to meet the standards while undergoing testing, but would emit a much larger amount during real-time driving. Kodjak and his team of 40 engineers played an integral role in the discovery of this deliberate evasion of emissions standards.
In 2013, Kodjak’s staff in Berlin, Germany raised concerns that air pollution rates in major European cities were not decreasing as expected. Since the expected reduction of emissions was dependent on standards being followed by major car companies, the ICCT began to investigate. In approaching the research to address this critical issue, Kodjak stated that the ICCT’s initial hypothesis was that United States regulations were more robust than European standards and that this testing would demonstrate to Europeans that diesel vehicles could be developed to use clean energy.
The ICCT partnered with West Virginia University to perform the testing. Researchers rented three diesel passenger vehicles that employed emission control technology, two Volkswagens (a Passat and a Jetta) and one BMW, for the testing (the BMW had no problems). Reducing emissions in diesel vehicles is particularly important, Kodjak noted, because while the number of passenger vehicles that run on diesel remains small in the United States, roughly 50 percent of all passenger vehicles in Europe are diesel.
In contrast to the hypothesis, the results from the Volkswagen vehicles rented in the United States were staggering. The emissions were 5 to 35 times the legal limit. To put this into context, Kodjak stated that the emission levels being released from the Volkswagen Jetta passenger diesel vehicle were “about as high as a medium or heavy tractor trailer,” amounting to “essentially uncontrolled emissions.” High levels of emissions have been shown to cause ground-level ozone and exacerbate the impact of acid rain, making the regulations controlling vehicle emissions critical to mitigating climate change.
The ICCT published a report in May 2014 detailing its findings. Based on that report, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandated that VW couldn’t sell any of these types of vehicles in 2016 unless the problem was fixed and issued a Notice of Violation in September 2015. The United States Department of Justice then filed a complaint on behalf of the EPA seeking significant damages from Volkswagen for Clean Air Act violations.
So how could all this go undetected? The difference was the real-world testing performed by the ICCT. “Volkswagen would have gotten away with cheating for a long time had we not pulled those vehicles and tested them under real-world conditions,” Kodjak said. “Diesel is not a bad technology,” he added, “you can make diesel clean.” However, he noted, Volkswagen must have known that no one would be able to catch them due to the lack of real-world testing and were “thinking that they would probably get away with it.”
Kodjak asserted that the Volkswagen scandal represented a wake-up call to the United States and the rest of the world that car manufacturers are capable of skirting emissions regulations. He believes there is a “culture in Europe to allow manufacturers to skirt the law,” noting that a number of European leaders believed that the public and governmental outrage from the United States was “politically motivated.” According to Kodjak, it remains very clear that the US has superior clean air standards for motor vehicle emissions. European countries are only concerned with emissions standards during the manufacturing process and do not track the emissions levels after vehicles leave the manufacturing plant as regulatory bodies do in the US. Further contributing to the problem, the enforcement of emissions standards is done by each EU member nation, and the member nations “do not have a lot of incentive to enforce against their own domestic industries.”
Kodjak concluded by detailing what will come next in the Volkswagen emissions scandal. The company has not found a way to meet emissions standards with its diesel cars and has not released a 2016 diesel model of the Jetta or Passat. There are a number of pending consumer protection and environmental lawsuits ongoing at the state and federal levels. Meanwhile, European countries are considering a major overhaul of their program and may “require manufacturers to submit software codes” regarding their emission-control technology.
Kodjak’s lecture highlighted key areas of emphasis in the ongoing battle over emissions standards and its effect on air pollution and climate change. Kodjak and his team were at the ground floor of an important environmental protection discovery, one that will play a major role going forward in how motor vehicle emissions are regulated.
Reported by Brendan Slean (’17)