Hooray for that old warhorse Bob Lutz, a car boss prepared to speak his mind. Just before the Geneva motor show, Lutz – General Motors’ head of product and the most entertaining figure in the car industry – said publicly what he’d been telling many journalists privately for years. Man-made global warming, he reckoned, was ‘a crock of shit’.
GM’s PR machine, carefully nurturing the image of a loving, ecologically friendly General – never mind the horrible Hummers, vast fuel consumptive pick-ups and a century-old reputation for energy profligacy and anti-environmental lobbying – swung into action to remind us this was Bob’s ‘personal view’ and did not represent corporate policy. When recent press conferences have been devoted to ‘green tomorrow’ (but when?) hybrid electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, you don’t want your big car boss to come out and question the whole raison d’être of this new enviro-focused thrust.
Car industry bosses – the public face
Lutz’s views are, of course, privately shared by many car bosses. They just don’t say it publicly. Better to toe the company’s ‘thin green line’ – never mind how insincerely – than say what you think. Car bosses become ever more like politicians, dictated by spin rather than sincerity. If the people want you to believe in man-made global warming, thou shall (at least in public). Disbelief is no longer a politically correct option. It’s almost sacrilegious.
Global warming and car bosses
Just the other day I spent time with one of the most senior engineers in the Volkswagen Group. He, like Lutz, thinks global warming publicity has become hysterical and cited many scientific studies (and he is a scientist himself) to back his view. But it was all ‘off the record’.
I don’t know if man-made global warming is real. Nobody does, although the more posturing politicians and globe-trotting BBC environmental correspondents (whose carbon footprints must be almost as big as Al Gore’s) harangue me, the more I want to disbelieve. I have, however, long thought that good engineering is first and foremost about efficiency and innovation, and if BMW can make a five-seat family car that can do 130mph and average 59mpg then why can’t the others? If Mini and Fiat can make hugely desirable small cars that are fun to drive yet sip not slurp fuel, why can’t the others? If Toyota/Lexus has a successful hybrid today (no matter that the hype doesn’t always match the facts) then why can’t the others?
The second – greener – industrial revolution
Furthermore, as the first industrial revolution – despite its huge benefits – has put billions of tons of waste into the air, damaged our forests and poisoned our oceans, the upcoming second greener industrial revolution, of which we’re on the verge, can’t be an altogether bad thing. Waste is always wrong.
But so is a climate where intelligent people are dissuaded from saying what they think. Just as independent thinkers are always more appealing than groupies, so real debate is preferable to the current state-, media- and industry-supported diktat we have on man-made global warming.
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