RotaryKid,
Your argument doesn't factor in market change.
It easy to say "Diesels only occupy this X-amount of the market so they should have massively reduced emissions regulation".
The problem is if a modern diesel car, with massively reduced emissions regulation, had to compete against a modern gasoline engine, with massively increased emission regulation, theres a high probability you would begin to see a market shift towards diesels.
A diesel car might be much closer to initial price parity and the overall Fuel efficency difference would be much greater. So thus as was the case in Europe for many years, theres a high probability that diesel cars would occupy a much greater share of the market, if not dominate it.
What would the end result be in all of this? Massively increased emissions from diesel cars.
So the issue is your "facts" don't account for any kind of market change. So lets quit it with some of this political conspiracy against diesels garbage. Because if you want to talk "Facts", then you can't talk unfounded political conspiracy.
I grew up in up state New York. I can drive through dozens of former major industrial cities and towns: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, virtually the entire Erie Canal/Hudson River belt and can't begin to count the superfund sites that exist. Our creation and consumption comes at a price, a price that in most cases is not paid by the companies that created it decades earlier, but by the tax payers, in the magnitude of billions of dollars, who are left to deal with the aftermath long after those companies no longer exist. So lets not pity VAG for purposely breaking the law. As Donald Trump said "We are a nation of laws".
OilHammer, thanks for your feedback. You're certainly right thats its not as easy to try and simply level the playing field, I just have to imagine a calculation could be made that can account for the fuel burned/fuel efficiency, CO2, particle matter, NOx, etc emitted, etc to create a point of "general emissions competitiveness". And like you said, its all moot because the F-150, and the Silverado/Sierra Twins occupy 1,2,3.