You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest this week is John Lancaster, whose many books include Whoops, Why Everyone Oars Everyone and No One Can Pay on the 2008 Financial Crisis, How to Speak Money, and Most Recently, the collection, reality and other stories, two of which appeared in the NRB.

He has a piece in the current issue of the paper on two colossal frauds carried out by two very different German companies. It's a review of

moneymen, a hot startup, a billion dollar fraud and a fight for the truth by Dan McCrum,

and also looks at faster, higher farther, the inside story of the Volkswagen scandal by Jack Ewing.

Hello, John, and thank you very much for talking with me. Hello, Tom. Thank you for having

me on. So the first of these two scandals, the first one you discussed and also the earlier one

involves Volkswagen, the world's biggest car manufacturer, cheating on its diesel emissions

tests. So maybe you could talk us through how that came to happen. So it's really a story about

climate change and the fact that coal manufacturers became

aware around the turn of the century that they had to do more to reduce their emissions.

The track which gets all the kind of glamour and attention is to do the electric vehicles,

companies like Tesla, Prius and things like that.

But the other thing that manufacturers try, led by Volkswagen, was diesel, because diesel engines are more efficient

than petrol engines, and they emit less CO2. So Volkswagen made this huge bet on what they're called

clean diesel, which had this slight technical problem that at that point it wasn't actually

possible to do. It wasn't possible to make clean diesel engines at the price points and with the

level of convenience that Volkswagen's consumers have been trying to expect. I mean, there were ways

of doing that involved, you know, changing filters every few thousand miles and things like that, but they didn't think people would be willing to do that.

They probably correctly didn't think people would be willing to do that.

So Volkswagen makes these diesels, and in order to get around the regulations controlling their

emissions, particularly of nitrousoxalized, which are these, A, superpluting and climate

terms, and B, incredibly noxious for all other, a whole set of health and environmental impacts.

...