Technological Solutions and Contested Interpretations of Scientific Results
Risk Assessment of Diesel Emissions in the United States and in West Germany, 1977–1995
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21392364 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Neumaier, Cornelius Mduduzi Masuku (0000-0003-0556-4588, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 547-588 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften Technik und Medizin (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0036-6978 • E-ISSN: 1420-9144 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s00048-020-00276-2 |
| OpenAlex | W33026470 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
This article traces the different classifications of diesel emissions either as “safe” or as “hazardous” in the US and in West Germany between 1977 and 1995. It argues that the environmental regulation of diesel emissions was a political threshold. It contributes to our general understanding of how politicians, environmental lobbyists, scientists, and engineers constructed the standards and norms that defined the “safe” limit of environmental pollutants. After discussing how diesel emissions came under review as a potential carcinogen, I will show that the coding as “safe” or as “hazardous” resulted from negotiations that were entirely dependent on the temporal, geographical, and intellectual contexts in which diesel technology, scientific research on their emissions, and political regulation were embedded. In particular, I trace the differences in German and US regulatory policy. While US regulation relied more on epidemiology that provided only weak data on the carcinogenicity of diesel particulates in the early 1980s, German government agencies tended to base their policy around the mid-1980s more on the results of animal tests and shortly afterwards also on epidemiology. Furthermore, the article reveals how US and German automakers tried to foster doubt on the carcinogenicity of diesel emissions and how their approaches differed and shifted. Thereby, it sheds light on the triangular relationship between technology, science, and politics in regulatory processes by analyzing the different roles of the state, automakers, scientists, and environmental agencies in Germany and in the United States
Consumption (sociology) · Economics · Energy (signal processing) · Energy consumption · Energy demand · Environmental economics · Fischer–Tropsch process · Natural gas · Natural resource economics · Physics · Process (computing) · Waste management · Catalysis · Catalysis for Biomass Conversion · Catalysts for Methane Reforming · Chemistry · Computer Science · Engineering · Subcritical and Supercritical Water Processes
| Highly cited | No |
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