Wolfsburg, Home Of Volkswgen
The factory of German carmaker Volkswagen on September 28, 2015 in Wolfsburg, Germany.

Since Volkswagen’s massive emissions-cheating scheme was revealed last week, there’s been no shortage of appalled reaction. The company’s CEO has already resigned, and there’s talk of potential criminal charges in both US and Germany. In a flagrant example of corporate malfeasance, the company rigged computers on its diesel cars to pass emissions tests by temporarily reducing the output of nitrogen oxides (NOx), the stuff that causes smog.

Talk about German ingenuity: Once the cars sensed an emissions test was over, the engine’s gas mileage and responsiveness jumped up, and so did the amount of NOx it pumped out – as much as 40 times the legal limit.

But how bad is it, really?

We ran the actual numbers, looking at the cost of the excess pollution to society. On close inspection, it is less catastrophic than you might assume — severe, to be sure, but short of the apocalypse portrayed by some. In fact, the long-term cost looks no worse than that of the climate-polluting carbon dioxide the cars pump out legally.

This doesn’t mean the fraud isn’t important. In fact, it will exact a measurable toll in human health. But measuring the real costs against the rhetoric is a reminder of just how broadly cars affect the world, and how much progress American air-quality laws have made in getting toxic emissions under control.

First, it’s important to understand what this pollutant really is. NOx is shorthand for a family of gases  that are harmful both when breathed and as a chemical precursor to smog. Today, VW-class cars are required to adhere to an NOx limit of .07 grams per mile driven. Based on testing by ICCT, the research group that broke the story, VW’s cars have been coughing out around 12 times that much, on average.

While that’s a huge breach of the law, another way to think about it is: it’s actually better than the original NOx target prescribed in the 1970s under the Clean Air Act. If you bought a new car under those rules, it was emitting three times as much NOx as an illegal VW emits today. If you bought it before the rules went into effect, it would have emitted at least 10 times as much.

And it’s important to consider NOx in its broader context. In fact it was only one of five pollutants from car exhaust targeted in the original laws. The others were carbon monoxide, particles, “organics” and lead. Once you take all those into account, we could say as a rough approximation that each Volkswagen and Audi spewing the excess NOx is giving back one-tenth of the progress in reducing tailpipe pollution. That’s a setback, but not a reversal — and speaks to just how much difference clean air laws have made in what we expect from cars.

For years I’ve been telling anyone within earshot how much cleaner New York’s air has gotten since the 1970s. Ditto LA and pretty much the entire country. While cleaner power plants have played a part, the biggest factor has probably been the steady downward march of tailpipe emissions from the nation’s cars and trucks. The VW scandal is a bump, to be sure, but the overall slope is still clearly downward.

And there’s another, even broader way to look at the damage caused by VW’s actions: by asking how much it costs society overall. Economists call this “externality costing,” and while the process can be famously inexact, the results in this case are provocative.

I looked at the definitive studies on the health costs of vehicle emissions, and roughly calculated that the ultimate costs to human health in the form of sickness and premature death caused by the excess NOx will be around $500 a year for each VW vehicle, and thus $250 million a year from all half-million tampered vehicles sold in the U.S.

That’s a lot of damage. But it’s no greater than the eventual climate damage from the same vehicles’ legally allowed emissions of carbon dioxide, based on their estimated gas mileage. Even greater are crash damages — disability and loss of life, and the attendant pain and suffering — that each VW vehicle, or any car on the road, can be expected to inflict on other people traveling on the same streets and highways, based on actuarial data.

So, yes, Volkswagen’s NOx conspiracy was breathtaking in brazenness and scope. But cars have a long list of costs: the best exhaust controls in the world can’t keep them from crashing and killing, and climate-altering CO2 issues from “clean” tailpipes as well as from dirty ones, with no “climate fee” charged to car manufacturer or driver.

What VW did was evil and cries out for punishment. But if we focus our attention on one bad actor, we also run the risk of distracting ourselves from the larger policy success story behind the rules it violated—and the significant distance we still have to go.

Charles Komanoff, an economist specializing in energy and transportation, directs the Carbon Tax Center in New York. Click here for the Excel spreadsheet file detailing the author’s calculations.

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