It's an inconvenient truth, but the global warming zealots are to blame for the deadly diesel fiasco

Daily Mail

Twenty years ago, diesel cars constituted a tiny minority. But following the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, most Western countries, including Britain, were legally obliged to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — alleged by some to cause climate change — by 8 per cent over the following 15 years. Diesel cars produce slightly less — but only slightly — carbon dioxide than petrol ones. In 2001 the Labour government introduced a new tax regime whereby cars were taxed according to how much carbon dioxide they produce, a development that enormously favoured diesel over petrol. (Duty at the pump has been the same for petrol and diesel since 2000.)   .......

I am neither a climate-change zealot nor what is invidiously termed a ‘denier’. But the fact that there has been no recorded increase in global temperature over the past 17 years — a period during which carbon emissions have soared because of the rapid economic growth of countries such as China and India — suggests to me that we should treat the more hysterical claims of the Green lobby with caution. But this is not an area of rational debate. If it were, politicians would not have given in to the bullying of the extremists who persuaded them to put the theoretical effects of climate change before the actual and proven damaging effects of pumping out nitrogen oxide and dioxide, and carcinogenic particulates."