What started on 18 September 2015, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to German automaker Volkswagen Group, that had an American attorney, specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution oversee their U.S. compensation of VW diesel owners affected?
Volkswagen emissions scandal The Volkswagen emissions scandal (also called "emissionsgate" or "dieselgate") started on 18 September 2015, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to German automaker Volkswagen Group. The agency had found that Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate some emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing. The programming caused the vehicles' NO output to meet US standards during regulatory testing but emit up to 40 times more NO in real-world driving. Volkswagen deployed this programming in about eleven million cars worldwide, and 500,000 in the United States, during model years 2009 through 2015.
War on coal In the United States, the war on coal is a phrase used by the coal industry and its supporters to describe what they claim is an effort by the Obama administration to impose stringent regulations on coal power in the United States and thereby make such power uneconomical. Proponents of this phrase also often identify the Environmental Protection Agency as one of the chief entities waging this putative war, although Michael Grunwald has claimed that the war on coal, although real, does not primarily happen at the national level but at the state and local level, and that the "boots on the ground" in the war are lawyers from the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. During Obama's tenure, the Obama administration denied that they were waging a war on coal, noting the possibility of upgrading older power plants with more efficient turbines, and also pointing to the possibility of carbon sequestration techniques.