In the Dieselgate affair, which shook the automotive industry to its core a few years ago, consumers, nature, and the economy were deceived, after which diesel as a fuel slowly began to be discarded by the entire Western world. In Croatia, however, things are just starting to move from a standstill, is the brief conclusion of the expert discussion ‘Dieselgate – how Europe deceived itself, destroyed an industry, and what it means for Croatia’, organized by the Energy and Environmental Protection Sector of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce and held on Thursday at the Zagreb Fair.
Josip Kelemen, Deputy President of the Community for UNP of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce, guided the attendees through the entire history of this affair in his introductory lecture, highlighting that diesel was declared ‘an environmental friend of the European Union’ in 1998, only to be determined 14 years later that it is a carcinogenic fuel from the category of chemical weapons.
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When the scandal with false data on harmful gas emissions broke out in the United States, Kelemen explained, more than half a million vehicles were recalled from sale, and the European Union briefly became an ‘island of diesel’ with as much as 70 percent of cars using these fuels.
