Tune your fiddle and die

The CEI is smoking cigars while the world burns. They've put a lot of work into their "Movie Parodies". Avoid the first two. They're crap, but not of the so-crap-it's-funny kind.

Everyone in the "institute" is utterly without talent. But Myron Ebell is wise enough to actually know how talentless he is, and keeps off the screen. Instead, he's reported here by Eileen Buckley at WBFO trying to put the other side about the death of the electric car.

Energy and global warming expert, Myron Ebell, says car-buyers didn't show enough interest in electric cars. Ebell is a director with the institute. The organization is a non-profit public-policy group. Ebell says GM made a good faith effort to comply with a California law that requires auto-makers to sell a certain percentage of zero-emmission vehicles. Ebell says he's positive GM is not to blame for the end of electric vehicles.

"There's pretty clear evidence that GM in particular, but the auto industry in general took the mandate seriously. California is a very important market to the auto industry. They spent a lot of money, particularly GM, and they failed."

Ebell says GM invested and lost over a billion dollars developing electric cars. But he says GM has made an effort to design other new engines.

"They are one of the companies that has lead the way in developing a new internal combustion engine that, when it's idling or just sitting, some of the cylinders will turn off. So, for example, if you had an eight cylinder engine and you were just sitting at a stop sign, six of the cylinders would stop and there would be just two of the cylinders keeping the thing going until you needed it, which would save a huge amount of fuel for people who drive in stop-go traffic."

Setting aside this reporter's idiotic puffing of Ebell's self-generated credentials which don't rise to the level of a mail-order college degree, and the fact that he doesn't refer to a single claim made in the documentary, marvel at this amazing level technological stagnation. Switching off parts of an over-sized fat-assed engine at a stoplight is the best example of technological development he can come up with. It makes you want to cry.

We do have General Motors to thank for closing down the LA trolley system in the 1940s and 50s, and shredding the evidence like they have done to electric cars.

I leave you with an antidote to this lack of style. The Myron Ebell Climate really enjoyed the movie Thank you for Smoking, which is about a cool business lobbyist for Big Tobacco called Nick Naylor. Myron Ebell is no Nick Naylor. He's not even fit to join his Merchants of Death squad. It's worse than that. Ebell is the swollen face of our own extermination from this planet. There is no way to make what he does sound funny.

Get one fact straight

Could it be true that:

Ebell is polished and personable, obviously intelligent, and comes off sounding so reasonable that a hapless reporter can begin to second-guess himself.

Most of our interview consisted of Ebell smothering me in data that would have left me fact-checking for weeks, even if I had managed to write it all down.

As those already in the hell-hole that is the Myron Ebelll climate know, every claim that Ebell makes is a lie.

In those rare cases where he is forced to speak the truth, you will always find that he has lied in the past.

Let's take the first Ebellian statement this reporter thought he heard:

Global warming is real. CO2 emissions play a significant role.

You don't have to go far back to find his BBC interview where Ebell said that Global Warming was a fraud perpetrated by European government funded scientific stooges. Also, in his sadly discontinued Boneheads Newsletter, he wrote the paragraph:

Professor Oleg Sorokhtin from the RAS's Institute of Oceanography was quoted by TASS as saying that, "The Kyoto Protocol is not needed at all, as even considerable emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have almost no effect on the Earth's temperature but contribute to agricultural productivity and to the restoration of forest resources."

while appearing to imply that he accepted this as true.

We move on to the next lie...

No, we don't need to move on to the next lie.

Why should we waste time fact checking everything Ebell says? We only need to show that he is a liar once, and then everything he says can be canned forthwith. Not one word can be trusted, so you might as well find the facts for yourself in the first place. If there was any merit to his argument, he wouldn't need to lie, would he? Case closed.

Finally, a big thumbs up to the reporter who acknowledged making a correction to his article, rather than fitting it in silently. The footnote said:

We incorrectly stated that Ebell was a former lobbyist for ExxonMobil. He was a lobbyist for a coalition of grassroots property rights groups. Wired News regrets the error.

I'd say that "grass-roots" is an interesting term to use for a tobacco and oil funded wank tank. However, there is evidence that this correction was made at the behest of Ebell, because it moves the statement away from the truth. The true fact would be:

Myron Ebell is currently a lobbyist for Exxon.

Only the money and employment contract have been laundered through the rat-hole that is the CEI in an attempt to distract the easily fooled. It's kind of like CIA agents who get arrested in a foreign country doing something severely embarrassing. They get officially disowned. They were working on their own initiative without authority. We only flew him in with the guns and the maps.

Yeah right.