Here is a paper using diesel cheating to estimate health effects of diesel cars: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12427.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp12427.pdf One cheating die

Here is a paper using diesel cheating to estimate health effects of diesel cars: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12427.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp12427.pdf One cheating diesel car in 1000 cars increases ozone, PM2.5 pollution by 1.33%, 1.99% respectively. Each additional cheating diesel car in 1000 decreases child birth weight by 0.19%, causes low child birth weight 1.9% more often and causes 8% more visits per quarter per 1,000 children of age 0 to 4 to doctors because of asthma. So yes, comparable American cities would be healthier. Having less taxes on diesel was a huge mistake in Europe. My guess is it was an attempt to burden transportation industry less with taxes. Plus lorries can do tax arbitration by filling up outside of countries with high diesel tax (so you wouldn't want too high of a diesel tax because of the "laffer curve"). This caused this whole innovation of having consumer diesel cars, even though they are more expensive, complicated and heavy. If you take into account weight and production cost it becomes difficult to justify a diesel engine via CO2/fuel savings outside of tax advantages (this doesn't apply to lorries).