From the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal to Helping Global Regulators, Drew Kodjak (’91) Makes an Impact

As executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, Kodjak helped uncover the car company’s diesel emissions fraud.

When the Volkswagen emissions scandal broke last fall, Drew Kodjak (’91) found himself in the middle of the news story. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he was at the beginning of the story since the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), where he is executive director, conducted the emissions testing that led to the discovery of VW’s deception.

Kodjak explains that the ICCT, an international nonprofit organization, was founded to provide technical support to environmental regulators. Its mission is to improve the environmental performance and energy efficiency of road, marine, and air transportation to benefit public health and mitigate climate change. To this end, the group conducts a significant amount of original research, including its own testing of vehicle emissions.

A few years ago, the ICCT’s European office became aware that passenger diesel vehicles in Europe were emitting high levels of pollutants in real-world driving conditions. “We were convinced that this was partly due to less robust testing protocols in Europe. So we decided to test a few vehicles in the US to bring that data to European governments and show them how robust compliance and enforcement programs can lead to clean vehicles,” he says.

Kodjak’s team chose three diesel vehicles—two VWs and one BMW—to test, which they fully expected would pass based on their emissions control technology. With the help of a research group at West Virginia University, they put a miniaturized emissions lab in the back of each vehicle and then proceeded to drive the cars under a set of preselected conditions ranging from highway to rural to city.

While the BMW passed, they were surprised by the VWs’ results. Kodjak says that the VW cars passed with “flying colors” when in test mode, but their emissions during normal driving were five to 35 times the standards.

“Initially, we thought we must be doing the normal-driving test wrong, but we repeated the test enough times that we knew the results were correct. We brought that information to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the California Air Resources Board, and VW,” he says, noting that the ICCT published its test results in May of 2014.

Kodjak says that he didn’t hear much more about it until the EPA and California announced a Notice of Violation in September 2015, finding that VW had installed a “defeat device” on its vehicles.

The “device” is actually a piece of software code that senses when the vehicles are in testing mode and switches all emissions controls on. The problem, he says, was that the code also tells the vehicles to switch off those emissions controls when they are no longer being tested.

“It’s very disappointing that a major auto manufacturer, especially one that publicly prides itself on being a green company, would have allowed deliberate cheating on vehicle emissions standards,” Kodjak says. “We’re talking about 11 million vehicles around the world, dating back to 2009.”

However, Kodjak observes that it was a “useful wakeup call” to governments globally that they need to be more vigilant about emissions standards. “We need a major commitment by governments to beef up their compliance and enforcement divisions.”

Discovering a Passion

Kodjak wasn’t always this focused on the environment. He came to BU Law—after working as a journalist in the British Virgin Islands—thinking that he would pursue a career in First Amendment Law or possibly even criminal law. But in his first year, a seminar about cleaning up water and air pollution hosted by the Environmental and Energy Law Association inspired him to consider a different career path: environmental law.

“I was attracted to its multidisciplinary nature, as it involves topics like economics, law, and biology,” he says. To learn more about it, he spent the summer after his first year clerking for the US EPA regional office in New York City with financial support from the BU Law Public Interest Project. In his second year, he clerked for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. Those were such positive experiences that they “pretty much cemented” his path going forward.

After graduation, Kodjak joined the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group (now Environment America), founded by Ralph Nader. There, he gained a “foundational experience” working on citizen suits under the Clean Water Act, drafting legislation for the NJ legislature, and serving as the group’s spokesperson to the media.

Four years later, he joined Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), which he says sought to align the eight Northeast states’ environmental policies. Working mostly on automotive issues, he focused on low emission vehicle policies and compliance. That experience led to a job at the US EPA Office of Transportation and Air Quality in Michigan, where he focused on drafting regulations.

“I was a very enthusiastic federal employee because I had spent years trying to influence the drafting of regulations and suddenly I was drafting them myself. I even remember one instance where I had written extensive comments on a regulation at NESCAUM and then was put in charge of that regulation at the EPA. Essentially, I had to file responses to my own comments.”

During his time at the EPA, he took a few years leave of absence to work as program director for the National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP), a climate change think tank. He was planning to return to the EPA when he received an intriguing offer to become the first executive director of the ICCT.

“It was quite a gamble because the ICCT was brand new. It hadn’t even been incorporated yet so my job would basically be to build this organization from soup to nuts. There was no ‘Building an Organization for Dummies’ book to follow. That also made it incredibly exciting,” he says.

That was back in 2005 when the five-person staff had an operating budget of $1.2 million. Now, the group employs 40 people and operates with a $10-million budget and offices in Washington, DC, San Francisco, Berlin, and Beijing. It runs programs in the largest vehicle markets in the world, including the US, Europe, China, Mexico, Brazil and India.

“This has been a great career path for me, and it all started with the ability to explore my interests at BU Law. I would certainly not have gone into environmental law without having had those opportunities,” says Kodjak. “BU Law is where I discovered my passion and developed the foundation of knowledge and skills that have enabled me to make a positive impact on the environment throughout my career.”

Reported by Meghan Laska