A decade ago, before all-electric vehicles were routinely spotted on roads, drivers of Volkswagen’s diesel offerings thought they were making an environmentally conscious choice. The company had touted a “best of both worlds” approach: It said its diesel vehicles produced lower emissions than competitors, but still gave customers more energy per gallon compared to gasoline.

“It was this amazing promise in vehicle technology,” Christopher Hennigan, a University of Maryland professor of environmental engineering, told Tech Brew. “But it turned out to be a lie.”

That lie involved Volkswagen putting what the Environmental Protection Agency called “defeat devices” in model year 2009–2016 cars to deceive federal emissions tests: When the cars were being tested, emissions were low. But on the road, they emitted a “major excess” of NOx, or gas particles that can lead to illness and premature death

The entire scandal was revealed when then-International Council on Clean Transportation Senior Fellow John German and his team tested Volkswagen diesel vehicles on the road—not in a test facility. Using a machine in the car’s trunk and a probe down the length of the exhaust pipe, they uncovered extremely high emissions.

As a result, the EPA and Department of Justice found that Volkswagen, which included the Audi and Porsche brands, violated the Clean Air Act, a federal law passed in 1970 to regulate emissions from stationary sources, like factories, and mobile sources, like cars. Under the law, the company agreed to pay multiple settlements and pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

“The Clean Air Act worked as it was intended to—in the sense that we had a company that was violating it and when that was discovered, [there were] massive penalties in response,” Amanda Halter, a partner in Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman’s Environmental & Natural Resources practice, told us. “It’s the kind of law, frankly, that you just couldn’t get passed by today’s Congress.”

Keep reading here.—TC, JG

The challenge: Deliver a package.

That might seem straightforward enough, but there were multiple twists for participants in Michigan’s recent “Uncrewed Triple Challenge,” in which competitors were tasked with using driverless autonomous drones to move a package across northern Michigan at the fastest possible speed—with no human intervention, and traversing air, land, and water.

The competition, which took place May 20–22, was a partnership among the Michigan National Guard, Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and the Michigan Department of Transportation. Participants came from numerous states and countries, and represented the military, government, academia, and industry.

“The goal over time is, how can we move goods more efficiently and safer, using autonomous technology?,” Charlie Tyson, technology activation director for Michigan’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, which helped organize the challenge, told Tech Brew.

Keep reading here.—JG

If the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act’s green tax credits were a sports game, we’d be at halftime. The House passed a version of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that cuts key green tax credits, and now the Senate has to decide whether the credits will be repealed.

During panel discussions and interviews at Sustainability Week USA, Economist Impact’s clean tech conference, clean energy consultants expressed frustration over recent setbacks, as well as determination to stay the course.

David Turk, deputy secretary of the Department of Energy during the Biden administration, said in his keynote that he wished Congress had passed the IRA earlier, so Republican districts could have seen the impacts sooner.

“The reason why I don’t think [the IRA] influenced that many Republican representatives—in fact, it influenced zero at the end of the day in terms of who voted, who threatened to vote against the package—was that it wasn’t the jobs already there and they were being pulled back,” Turk told the event’s audience. “It was just jobs that were coming there in a year or two, and it just makes it that much less compelling.”

Keep reading here.—TC