Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [17]
Add to all of this the intense competitive pressure for scoops! With speed of the essence, quality and accuracy are relegated to the back of the bus. I have many good friends in the journalistic community. “Listen, Bob, the Wall Street Journal just published this negative piece on GM,” one would typically call to say. “I know it’s wrong, but my editor is pushing the hell out of me and wondering where my negative piece is. I have to write something, and it’ll be a rehash of the Journal piece. Just wanted to let you know I’ve got no choice.” This is journalism? This is an institution we are supposed to revere and respect?
Nowhere has my faith in media integrity been destroyed more thoroughly than in the so-called “global warming” discussion. Resolutely parroting the now-discredited prophecies of Al Gore and his absurd movie, An Inconvenient Truth, hardly any of the so-called mainstream media ever gave fair coverage to the large and growing army of CO2–caused AGW (anthropogenic, or human-caused, global warming) skeptics. Every network (Fox excepted) and every major newspaper gives endless coverage to disappearing glaciers (they’ve been melting for almost four hundred years), polar bears on ice floes (hello—they can swim! And far from being “endangered,” the population is up sharply), rapidly rising ocean levels (they aren’t), and higher ocean temperatures (they’re actually lower).
It’s all harmless, one could say, and how does this impact the automobile business anyway?
Once again, as happened so often in the past century, personal transportation, especially the automobile, has been singled out as the number one menace to the continuation of life on our planet. “Cars, Trucks Create 20 Percent of CO2,” the headlines continually blared. It’s simply not true. Even Timothy Wirth, the global warming guru under Clinton and Gore, was once forced to admit, under my somewhat insubordinate questioning, that vehicles contribute far less than that amount to carbon dioxide levels.
The math works like this: according to accepted computer simulations, the Earth’s natural “carbon sinks” can absorb only 98 percent of the CO2 created in a given period. Two percent is “excess” CO2 and allegedly the cause of global warming. Cars and trucks emit 0.4 percent of total global CO2, and this is the source of the infamous “20 percent” lie. Mathematically, 0.4 percent is, of course, 20 percent of 2 percent, so if the reporting had been about 20 percent of excess global CO2, I would not have objected. I spoke to journalists about this many times and all understood (having done their own research at my urging) that you could pour concrete down the engine bores of every car and truck on the planet and the reduction in CO2 would be a rounding error. But all claimed that “editorial policy” was that AGW was real and that cars and trucks were the major cause. It was useless, they said, to fight it.
Meanwhile, things are getting increasingly tough for the “catastrophic global warming” gang, with renowned climatologists jumping off this limping, flat-tired bandwagon by the hundreds. The current state of the “movement” (religion, actually) is succinctly summarized by author Art Horn in his May 17, 2010, contribution to the Washington Times entitled “Wounded Warmists Attack: It’s What Happens When Prophecy Fails”:
The global warming “science” community is feeling threatened by evidence and revealing emails—their funding, and therefore their careers, may be in peril. In reaction to this, they will mount an even more alarmist campaign to convince the world—and themselves—that humans cause global warming and that it must be stopped. As global temperature fails to rise in the future, we will be bombarded by increasingly shrill cries of global warming catastrophe. All will be considered