Geoffrey Chaucer says of the Prioress in his Canterbury Tales that her grasp of French was limited to the way it was spoken in rural England. So too is my knowledge of French limited to the way it was taught to me at an Ohio university by an Egyptian expatriate. Really, I should keep it to myself, but there are some things that are best said in French, like "affaire de coeur" or "Je ne t'aime pas."

To that list we can now add "obligation dramaturgique," which roughly translates as "the need to be seen to be doing something." It's the sort of affliction that primarily strikes the insecure, the moronic, and the governmental. Case in point: According to Greenpeace, road transportation accounts for under ten percent of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. Yet in their haste to honor the obligation dramaturgique, officials of the European Union and Britain enacted laws that made the construction and sale of diesel-powered automobiles all but mandatory. Why? Well, diesels tend to emit less CO2 because they tend to have less power because diesels have traditionally been weaker and slower and... you know what, that's a rabbit hole all by itself, so let's skip it.

The important thing is that Western democracies encouraged diesel even though they were perfectly aware of the health hazards posed by diesel particulate exhaust. Those risks are far better documented than even the most "settled" climate science, and they are very real. Yet the Eurocrats chose diesel in order to be seen to be doing something about global warming, and the manufacturers had to abide by their choice.

The result? Paris has had to ban cars for hours or even days at a time because of smog. According to The Guardian, "diesel-related health problems cost (the British National Health Service) more than 10 times as much as comparable problems caused by petrol fumes. Last year the UN's World Health Organisation declared that diesel exhaust caused cancer and was comparable in its effects to secondary cigarette smoking."

And that was when people thought that these diesels were meeting pollution standards! Now, of course, we know that many of them were not, and that even the diesel cars that weren't designed to cheat the tests are not performing in the real world the way they do in the test labs. In other words, diesel-powered automobiles are killing people, and in not inconsiderable numbers. The jury is in and the evidence is clear.

So let's ban them. Let's wipe the diesel-powered passenger car from the earth. Maybe we can't do anything about diesel heavy-duty trucks, although the idea of creating a proper gasoline-powered Kenworth seems slightly less difficult than, say, landing a remote-controlled vehicle on Mars and having it live on distant sunlight. But we can absolutely put the kibosh on diesel cars and light trucks.

Not everybody will be pleased by this. The modern diesel pickup has many fans who cite its near-infinite lifespan and prodigious towing power. What they fail to consider is what they'd get if they spent the six-thousand-dollar upcharge for a diesel on a gasoline engine designed for long life and high power. Diesels are more durable not because of the Diesel combustion process—that's actually kind of hellish, as anybody who owned an Oldsmobile "conversion" 350 diesel can attest—but because they are built to a higher standard of materials and engineering. There's nothing that prevents the automakers from building a gasoline engine that lasts as long as a Cummins diesel, except your willingness to pay the cost of that option.

There are also some people who really like the high torque and carefree nature of diesel passenger cars. Again, they can have that same engine characteristic in a gasoline-powered car. Just ask anyone who owned a BMW 528e. That thing revved and behaved like a diesel. It's not rocket science, or if it is it's at least not the very forefront of rocket science. Many of the modern small-turbo gas engines, with their computer-controlled torque plateau and dislike of high revs, might as well be diesels.

What other reason is there to love fuel oil? Certainly not the characteristics of the chemical itself. It's slippery, it stinks to high heaven, it doesn't evaporate. In the winter it's fussy and in the summer the fumes are miserable. In 2006, I drove a Mercedes E320 CDI diesel around the country for the Cannonball One Lap and at no time whatsoever did I not wish that I was in an E320 gasoline-powered Mercedes. Particularly not when I was dodging lot lizards and tidepools of rainbow-slick spilled diesel in order to get to the commercial counter at the Pilot station so I could stand for ten minutes behind some leviathan trucker in sweat-stained overalls who wanted to play the lottery one dollar at a time.

For me, the final nail in diesel's coffin was my trip to Barcelona earlier this year to drive the new Miata. Few places on this still-green Earth are as lovely as Spain in the spring and as I hustled the little Mazda up and down the coastline I felt blessed to be alive. Yet every time I pulled up behind another car, I was choked by the Freightliner stench of an imperfectly-tuned diesel engine. Every small car, every minivan, every family sedan. Diesel all of them, and most of them stank, and some of them smoked. It made me wonder why anybody in Europe would buy a convertible.

Maybe the unelected mandarins of Brussels thought diesel would be good for the planet, but were their luxury apartments and private-jet travel so elevated, so rarefied, that they were unable to smell the evidence of their stupidity? Or are the sort of people who feel the obligation dramaturgique simply unwilling to accept the evidence of their own noses?

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