4 ms·

President pardons 9 for Clean Air violations for 'fixing their car'

92 points by OutOfHere 4mo ago

SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
All 9 should be immediately arrested again in 2029, I’m sure they’re planning to go back to their criminal ways. I’ll save this article to remind the next AG about it.
- blacksmith_tb 4mo ago
  Sarcasm, presumably, but unless they're caught rolling coal[1] again, they can't be re-arrested as they've been pardoned for the previous cases. It's a tacky crime, hardly the most serious, but that makes a presidential pardon seem especially absurd here. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
  - jdboyd 4mo ago
    I thought that most of them were in for selling/commercially installing defeat devices so that others could roll coal or do other things with defeated pollution controls. I assume that would likely be easier to identify than just hoping to someday catching them rolling coal would be.
  - OutOfHere 4mo ago
    It is a serious crime. Diesel fumes are very damaging to the lungs and heart. Imagine a pregnant woman being exposed to them. There is no logical way to make light of it. From your link: > the practice can increase nitrogen oxide emissions as much as 310 times, non-methane hydrocarbons 1,400 times, and carbon monoxide 120 times
    - pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - DangitBobby 4mo ago
        They weren't arrested for rolling coal.
        pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
        Oh oops, I should have read tfa. You’re right, this is much worse.
      - OutOfHere 4mo ago
        The crime was offering a commercial service to tamper with devices of others cars to roll coal. You won't understand until one day your lungs struggle to breathe due to pollution.
        pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
        You’re right, that’s much worse. I should have read tfa before posting.
    - g7r 4mo ago
      It's car manufacturers who should be held responsible for this. I used to be the owner of a diesel car. Diesel cars used to be really reliable. And then, in a moment, they got that ecology thing. They leaped from 500k+ kilometers until the first major expenses to just 100k+. From a consumer point of view, you were just buying the next version of the same diesel car. But in reality you get nothing even close. If that's not a deception, then I don't know what a deception is. Many modern diesel cars require very expensive replacement parts after just 100k kilometers. I mean really expensive. I had Fiat Tipo and the particle filter would cost me €5000+. Which is more or less half the car market price. After trying "cheaper" approaches that mounted to the same €5k over the 1.5 years, without resolving the problem, I decided to sell the car. On the other hand, this is just an ecology thing. Your car can perfectly live without it. You can turn it off for a fraction of that cost. After a year of trying different approaches, my mechanic even offered to do it for free. The temptation is very strong. You didn't plan financially for this kind of repair costs when you were buying a diesel car. You need your car to keep going for another 2-3 years at the very least to make the purchase feasible. Of course, you can call it a customer mistake. After all, the manufacturer didn't provide a warranty beyond 100k kilometers. But nobody tells you that the car takes €5000+ in repairs per 100k kilometers. I'm all hands for the ecology. Don't get me wrong. I didn't accept the offer to remove the insides of the particle filter. However, if I didn't have the money to buy a new car, I would certainly do that. With my conscience being clear, because I'm 100% sure that the manufacturer is the one who is responsible for this. And the governments who allowed this manufacturer to behave like that. I'm OK with paying the "ecology tax", but it should be clearly stated in the papers, and not shadily emerge after 100k kilometers.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
    I'm not being sarcastic at all. I think it's obvious that most or all of these men will interpret the pardon as permission to violate the Clean Air Act, and it's absolutely essential to the rule of law that they be punished harshly for doing so. They must understand that they are not above the law. Perhaps some of them have learned the error of their ways, and won't be rolling coal ever again; if so I wish them well. Note that at least one of the men, Jonathan Achtemeier, was caught doing much more than "rolling coal" himself. He led a nationwide conspiracy to "roll coal", charging money to help hundreds of people do it although he knew it was a crime. Career criminals like Mr. Achtemeier rarely stop when they get caught the first time.
    - blacksmith_tb 4mo ago
      Ah, sorry to have imputed sarcasm then - and I agree that helping hundreds of monster-truck owners to roll coal is more serious and polluting than the individual yahoos doing it, so more deserving of doing time (eventually, maybe).
  - anonymousiam 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - DangitBobby 4mo ago
      What was absurd about the arrest? Were clown costumes involved somehow?
    - t0mas88 4mo ago
      Did you read the article? This was not a case of "fixing their car" this was a 4 million dollar business selling illegal services to disable emission controls. They absolutely deserved to be prosecuted.
      - anonymousiam 4mo ago
        I read the article, and I've read about these cases over the past few years. Many of the emission control components degrade engine performance, decrease gas mileage, and decrease reliability. The EPA kept moving the goalposts and went beyond the limits of practicality. Congress did not set the limits, so the EPA was basically making it a federal crime to circumvent their rules (not laws). Who do you turn to when the vehicle for which you've paid upwards of $100k doesn't work right, and cannot be made to work right as designed?
  - qalmakka 4mo ago
    It is a serious crime. Diesel exhaust is s IARC type 1 carcinogen. Somehow people go nuts when companies pollute water but not when they pollute the air they breathe
    - greenavocado 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - tim333 4mo ago
        I'm in central London where there were problems with that and the new diesels are hugely better. Used to be black smoke and layers of the stuff. Now not noticable. I'm not sure the figures but 10x or 100x? Google AI has: Modern diesel engines are dramatically cleaner than older vehicles, emitting up to 95-99% fewer nitrogen oxides (NOx) and capturing up to 99% of harmful particulate matter (soot). I quite cycling around 2006 because I got smokers cough from the clouds of smoke coming out of the busses and similar. Now it's fine. Both the new diesels being better and things going electric.
      - Peanuts99 4mo ago
        Buses can carry 100 people at a time so have a far larger social utility. Besides, most are going electric.
      - qalmakka 4mo ago
        If those buses use DEF, have a anti particulate filter and are well maintained, their emissions should in theory be extremely low, with no heavy compounds. I hope local municipal authorities don't remove filters from their buses. Even then, most if not the new buses in my town are either electric or CNG/electric hybrids
wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago
I can't see any way in which a "Pardon Power" can ever result in anything except miscarriage of justice. If you think there needs to be an escape hatch to fix injustices then you have a bigger problem.
- bryanlarsen 4mo ago
  Take a look at the list of people pardoned by any president except the current one. Most (but not all) of the pardons are to correct clear miscarriages of justice.
- Y-bar 4mo ago
  I can. Let’s say for example that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was used to prosecute you for downloading JSTOR documents which you had already access to. And you are facing the cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, personal asset forfeiture. Now, would a pardon from the highest executive office be a miscarriage when the prosecution should never have happened in the first place? I don’t think so, I don’t think all laws are neutral (eg Patriot Act) or all prosecutions are equally valid, therefore a pardon may indeed be a way to tipping the scales to a more fair society. That said, I have never seen the current administration do that.
  - thesumofall 4mo ago
    But isn’t that what the parent says? Fix the underlying laws instead of relying on a single person to randomly overrule the law
    - roughly 4mo ago
      Fixing the laws takes time.
    - Y-bar 4mo ago
      I don’t think parent commenter says so, he only claims one thing for himself, that pardon power is always a miscarriage of justice. Then he asks another thing of us, which is explicitly excluding himself, indicating that he thinks all laws and all applications of law and justice is fair.
datadrivenangel 4mo ago
"Jonathan Achtemeier pleaded guilty in November 2024, admitting that between 2019 and 2022, he tampered with the monitoring devices on hundreds of vehicles nationwide so those trucks would not detect that their owners removed pollution control hardware systems. Achtemeier advertised his services on the internet and was able to tamper with the monitoring devices in diesel trucks remotely. Between 2019 and 2021 Achtemeier’s company grossed $4.3 million. " Fixing his own vehicle... for sure...
bob1029 4mo ago
The biggest problem with diesel engines is that they tend to last nearly forever by virtue of their design (tolerating high compression ratios). I see a lot of ancient big trucks on the road today that are completely legal in Texas but would probably get you sent straight to jail in Europe. The owners of these vehicles are oftentimes also diesel mechanics to some degree and can make their machine run much longer than they can. The problem with all of this is that there is this entire niche of the market that you simply cannot penetrate with policy. I think some of these old trucks should be taken off the road, but I also sympathize with the owner/operators of these vehicles. I don't think many people drive a big dump truck around for fun (even in Texas). That's mostly a phenomenon on the consumer side. Rolling coal out of your Ram 3500 isn't something that really bothers me. The optics are horrible, but the actual impact is not. The thing that concerns me is the fleet of old Kenworth trucks from 1988 that the local construction company uses all day every day. Straight pipes and a constant rumble the USGS could monitor tend to drown out the broader concerns regarding emissions, but those also pop into your mind if you happen to be riding behind one. I think a lot of the defeat device stuff is blown out of proportion for political reasons. Something approximating this has been going on since the 70s. Anything pertaining to consumer vehicles makes me roll my eyes. The studies they ran around VW are absolutely hyperbolic (hundreds of billions in damages, 100k+ dead eventually). Compare the marginal impact of slightly cheating emissions standards in a family sedan with one supermax cargo ship or a data center parking lot full of gas turbines and you'll probably find you are wasting your energy on the car thing. The deception is what makes most people angry. Not the actual impact.
- saghm 4mo ago
  > The problem with all of this is that there is this entire niche of the market that you simply cannot penetrate with policy. I don't really understand how the rest of your comment provides evidence for this claim. Not wanting to address it with policy, sure, I can see you seem to feel that way, but it's not clear why you're convinced it can't be addressed.
- roryirvine 4mo ago
  Why couldn't it have been penetrated with policy? As you note, Europe did this quite successfully with successively-tighter diesel emissions standards for new vehicles being introduced every few years since 1992. Other countries - China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, etc - have either adopted the Euro standards wholesale or tweaked them slightly for their local market conditions. That was backed up by measures such as testing individual vehicles for continued compliance at their annual inspections, banning commercial vehicles that fail to meet recent standards from using public roads, charging private vehicles which fail to meet recent standards when they enter dense urban areas, and scrappage schemes to mop up the remaining non-compliant vehicles. It took a while to produce results, but eventually resulted in pretty dramatic improvements in air quality - and we now have good evidence of improved health outcomes, particularly in children with asthma or other respiratory conditions. Perhaps too late for the US to start now given the switch to EVs, but it ought to be kept in mind for the next time a "we can't possibly do anything about this" issue comes up.
strathmeyer 4mo ago
[dead]
Surac 4mo ago
i am under the impression King Donald is missusing his might here
ada1981 4mo ago
I discovered an interesting glitch in California DOT law. If you register a vehicle in CA, you can do so with an out of state mailing address (there is no check or verification needed). Doing so automatically exempts you from CA SMOG because SMOG is a county by county law. If your address is out of state, you have no county smog obligation. I went to get my vehicle smogged and was told I didn't need to.
metalman 4mo ago
[flagged]
- OutOfHere 4mo ago
  Ergo, you're a crook, just not big enough to be jailed for it. Really, what's wrong with just using gasoline (not diesel)? These days there even exist EV trucks.
  - snootypoot 4mo ago
    gasoline trucks are inferior work vehicles and under heavier work loads gasoline is far less efficient. as for electric trucks, those are worthless. its easy to tell you have no knowledge of the kind of tasks these devices are used for if you think rural people can effectively use an electric vehicle that is impossible to fix yourself.
    - OutOfHere 4mo ago
      [flagged]
tempodox 4mo ago
Isn’t it heartwarming to see Trump lend a hand to uplift his fellow criminals and get the message out that crime pays?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- OutOfHere 4mo ago
  For some reason, he acts as if environmental crimes of any kind are not real. In effect he goes so far as to strongly encourage them.
silexia 4mo ago
These laws are extremely counterproductive to start with. They require mining huge amounts of rare earth metals and building toxic lakes to manufacture, and they do a poor job of cleaning emissions and reduce engine efficiency. Base diesel engines are much better.

92 points by OutOfHere 4mo ago

All 9 should be immediately arrested again in 2029, I’m sure they’re planning to go back to their criminal ways. I’ll save this article to remind the next AG about it.

blacksmith_tb 4mo ago
Sarcasm, presumably, but unless they're caught rolling coal[1] again, they can't be re-arrested as they've been pardoned for the previous cases. It's a tacky crime, hardly the most serious, but that makes a presidential pardon seem especially absurd here. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
- jdboyd 4mo ago
  I thought that most of them were in for selling/commercially installing defeat devices so that others could roll coal or do other things with defeated pollution controls. I assume that would likely be easier to identify than just hoping to someday catching them rolling coal would be.
- OutOfHere 4mo ago
  It is a serious crime. Diesel fumes are very damaging to the lungs and heart. Imagine a pregnant woman being exposed to them. There is no logical way to make light of it. From your link: > the practice can increase nitrogen oxide emissions as much as 310 times, non-methane hydrocarbons 1,400 times, and carbon monoxide 120 times
  - pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - DangitBobby 4mo ago
      They weren't arrested for rolling coal.
      - pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
        Oh oops, I should have read tfa. You’re right, this is much worse.
    - OutOfHere 4mo ago
      The crime was offering a commercial service to tamper with devices of others cars to roll coal. You won't understand until one day your lungs struggle to breathe due to pollution.
      - pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
        You’re right, that’s much worse. I should have read tfa before posting.
  - g7r 4mo ago
    It's car manufacturers who should be held responsible for this. I used to be the owner of a diesel car. Diesel cars used to be really reliable. And then, in a moment, they got that ecology thing. They leaped from 500k+ kilometers until the first major expenses to just 100k+. From a consumer point of view, you were just buying the next version of the same diesel car. But in reality you get nothing even close. If that's not a deception, then I don't know what a deception is. Many modern diesel cars require very expensive replacement parts after just 100k kilometers. I mean really expensive. I had Fiat Tipo and the particle filter would cost me €5000+. Which is more or less half the car market price. After trying "cheaper" approaches that mounted to the same €5k over the 1.5 years, without resolving the problem, I decided to sell the car. On the other hand, this is just an ecology thing. Your car can perfectly live without it. You can turn it off for a fraction of that cost. After a year of trying different approaches, my mechanic even offered to do it for free. The temptation is very strong. You didn't plan financially for this kind of repair costs when you were buying a diesel car. You need your car to keep going for another 2-3 years at the very least to make the purchase feasible. Of course, you can call it a customer mistake. After all, the manufacturer didn't provide a warranty beyond 100k kilometers. But nobody tells you that the car takes €5000+ in repairs per 100k kilometers. I'm all hands for the ecology. Don't get me wrong. I didn't accept the offer to remove the insides of the particle filter. However, if I didn't have the money to buy a new car, I would certainly do that. With my conscience being clear, because I'm 100% sure that the manufacturer is the one who is responsible for this. And the governments who allowed this manufacturer to behave like that. I'm OK with paying the "ecology tax", but it should be clearly stated in the papers, and not shadily emerge after 100k kilometers.
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  I'm not being sarcastic at all. I think it's obvious that most or all of these men will interpret the pardon as permission to violate the Clean Air Act, and it's absolutely essential to the rule of law that they be punished harshly for doing so. They must understand that they are not above the law. Perhaps some of them have learned the error of their ways, and won't be rolling coal ever again; if so I wish them well. Note that at least one of the men, Jonathan Achtemeier, was caught doing much more than "rolling coal" himself. He led a nationwide conspiracy to "roll coal", charging money to help hundreds of people do it although he knew it was a crime. Career criminals like Mr. Achtemeier rarely stop when they get caught the first time.
  - blacksmith_tb 4mo ago
    Ah, sorry to have imputed sarcasm then - and I agree that helping hundreds of monster-truck owners to roll coal is more serious and polluting than the individual yahoos doing it, so more deserving of doing time (eventually, maybe).
- anonymousiam 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - DangitBobby 4mo ago
    What was absurd about the arrest? Were clown costumes involved somehow?
  - t0mas88 4mo ago
    Did you read the article? This was not a case of "fixing their car" this was a 4 million dollar business selling illegal services to disable emission controls. They absolutely deserved to be prosecuted.
    - anonymousiam 4mo ago
      I read the article, and I've read about these cases over the past few years. Many of the emission control components degrade engine performance, decrease gas mileage, and decrease reliability. The EPA kept moving the goalposts and went beyond the limits of practicality. Congress did not set the limits, so the EPA was basically making it a federal crime to circumvent their rules (not laws). Who do you turn to when the vehicle for which you've paid upwards of $100k doesn't work right, and cannot be made to work right as designed?
- qalmakka 4mo ago
  It is a serious crime. Diesel exhaust is s IARC type 1 carcinogen. Somehow people go nuts when companies pollute water but not when they pollute the air they breathe
  - greenavocado 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tim333 4mo ago
      I'm in central London where there were problems with that and the new diesels are hugely better. Used to be black smoke and layers of the stuff. Now not noticable. I'm not sure the figures but 10x or 100x? Google AI has: Modern diesel engines are dramatically cleaner than older vehicles, emitting up to 95-99% fewer nitrogen oxides (NOx) and capturing up to 99% of harmful particulate matter (soot). I quite cycling around 2006 because I got smokers cough from the clouds of smoke coming out of the busses and similar. Now it's fine. Both the new diesels being better and things going electric.
    - Peanuts99 4mo ago
      Buses can carry 100 people at a time so have a far larger social utility. Besides, most are going electric.
    - qalmakka 4mo ago
      If those buses use DEF, have a anti particulate filter and are well maintained, their emissions should in theory be extremely low, with no heavy compounds. I hope local municipal authorities don't remove filters from their buses. Even then, most if not the new buses in my town are either electric or CNG/electric hybrids

wewewedxfgdf 4mo ago

I can't see any way in which a "Pardon Power" can ever result in anything except miscarriage of justice. If you think there needs to be an escape hatch to fix injustices then you have a bigger problem.

bryanlarsen 4mo ago
Take a look at the list of people pardoned by any president except the current one. Most (but not all) of the pardons are to correct clear miscarriages of justice.
Y-bar 4mo ago
I can. Let’s say for example that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was used to prosecute you for downloading JSTOR documents which you had already access to. And you are facing the cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, personal asset forfeiture. Now, would a pardon from the highest executive office be a miscarriage when the prosecution should never have happened in the first place? I don’t think so, I don’t think all laws are neutral (eg Patriot Act) or all prosecutions are equally valid, therefore a pardon may indeed be a way to tipping the scales to a more fair society. That said, I have never seen the current administration do that.
- thesumofall 4mo ago
  But isn’t that what the parent says? Fix the underlying laws instead of relying on a single person to randomly overrule the law
  - roughly 4mo ago
    Fixing the laws takes time.
  - Y-bar 4mo ago
    I don’t think parent commenter says so, he only claims one thing for himself, that pardon power is always a miscarriage of justice. Then he asks another thing of us, which is explicitly excluding himself, indicating that he thinks all laws and all applications of law and justice is fair.

datadrivenangel 4mo ago

"Jonathan Achtemeier pleaded guilty in November 2024, admitting that between 2019 and 2022, he tampered with the monitoring devices on hundreds of vehicles nationwide so those trucks would not detect that their owners removed pollution control hardware systems. Achtemeier advertised his services on the internet and was able to tamper with the monitoring devices in diesel trucks remotely. Between 2019 and 2021 Achtemeier’s company grossed $4.3 million. " Fixing his own vehicle... for sure...

bob1029 4mo ago

The biggest problem with diesel engines is that they tend to last nearly forever by virtue of their design (tolerating high compression ratios). I see a lot of ancient big trucks on the road today that are completely legal in Texas but would probably get you sent straight to jail in Europe. The owners of these vehicles are oftentimes also diesel mechanics to some degree and can make their machine run much longer than they can. The problem with all of this is that there is this entire niche of the market that you simply cannot penetrate with policy. I think some of these old trucks should be taken off the road, but I also sympathize with the owner/operators of these vehicles. I don't think many people drive a big dump truck around for fun (even in Texas). That's mostly a phenomenon on the consumer side. Rolling coal out of your Ram 3500 isn't something that really bothers me. The optics are horrible, but the actual impact is not. The thing that concerns me is the fleet of old Kenworth trucks from 1988 that the local construction company uses all day every day. Straight pipes and a constant rumble the USGS could monitor tend to drown out the broader concerns regarding emissions, but those also pop into your mind if you happen to be riding behind one. I think a lot of the defeat device stuff is blown out of proportion for political reasons. Something approximating this has been going on since the 70s. Anything pertaining to consumer vehicles makes me roll my eyes. The studies they ran around VW are absolutely hyperbolic (hundreds of billions in damages, 100k+ dead eventually). Compare the marginal impact of slightly cheating emissions standards in a family sedan with one supermax cargo ship or a data center parking lot full of gas turbines and you'll probably find you are wasting your energy on the car thing. The deception is what makes most people angry. Not the actual impact.

saghm 4mo ago
> The problem with all of this is that there is this entire niche of the market that you simply cannot penetrate with policy. I don't really understand how the rest of your comment provides evidence for this claim. Not wanting to address it with policy, sure, I can see you seem to feel that way, but it's not clear why you're convinced it can't be addressed.
roryirvine 4mo ago
Why couldn't it have been penetrated with policy? As you note, Europe did this quite successfully with successively-tighter diesel emissions standards for new vehicles being introduced every few years since 1992. Other countries - China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, etc - have either adopted the Euro standards wholesale or tweaked them slightly for their local market conditions. That was backed up by measures such as testing individual vehicles for continued compliance at their annual inspections, banning commercial vehicles that fail to meet recent standards from using public roads, charging private vehicles which fail to meet recent standards when they enter dense urban areas, and scrappage schemes to mop up the remaining non-compliant vehicles. It took a while to produce results, but eventually resulted in pretty dramatic improvements in air quality - and we now have good evidence of improved health outcomes, particularly in children with asthma or other respiratory conditions. Perhaps too late for the US to start now given the switch to EVs, but it ought to be kept in mind for the next time a "we can't possibly do anything about this" issue comes up.

strathmeyer 4mo ago

[dead]

Surac 4mo ago

i am under the impression King Donald is missusing his might here

ada1981 4mo ago

I discovered an interesting glitch in California DOT law. If you register a vehicle in CA, you can do so with an out of state mailing address (there is no check or verification needed). Doing so automatically exempts you from CA SMOG because SMOG is a county by county law. If your address is out of state, you have no county smog obligation. I went to get my vehicle smogged and was told I didn't need to.

metalman 4mo ago

[flagged]

OutOfHere 4mo ago
Ergo, you're a crook, just not big enough to be jailed for it. Really, what's wrong with just using gasoline (not diesel)? These days there even exist EV trucks.
- snootypoot 4mo ago
  gasoline trucks are inferior work vehicles and under heavier work loads gasoline is far less efficient. as for electric trucks, those are worthless. its easy to tell you have no knowledge of the kind of tasks these devices are used for if you think rural people can effectively use an electric vehicle that is impossible to fix yourself.
  - OutOfHere 4mo ago
    [flagged]

tempodox 4mo ago

Isn’t it heartwarming to see Trump lend a hand to uplift his fellow criminals and get the message out that crime pays?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
OutOfHere 4mo ago
For some reason, he acts as if environmental crimes of any kind are not real. In effect he goes so far as to strongly encourage them.

silexia 4mo ago

These laws are extremely counterproductive to start with. They require mining huge amounts of rare earth metals and building toxic lakes to manufacture, and they do a poor job of cleaning emissions and reduce engine efficiency. Base diesel engines are much better.