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.