This article was written by Eric Peters and originally published at Eric Peters Autos

The press wonders – or pretends to wonder – why it’s held in contempt by more than just a small handful of people. Maybe the pressies should read what they publish.

The other day, Automotive News published the following:

“Dozens of U.S. cities are willing to buy $10 billion of electric cars and trucks to show skeptical automakers there’s demand for low-emissions vehicles, just as President Trump seeks to review pollution standards the industry opposes.”

This slurry of dishonest or simply idiotic “reporting” is stupendously revealing – all the more so because it is representative of the norm. Where to begin?

Let’s work from the back, since the worst lie – and that is exactly the correct word – squats toward the end of this vile dreck:

“…to review the pollution standards the industry opposes.”

Utter falsehood. I mean, other than the industry opposing part. Which of course is portrayed as all-but-demonic, with sulfurous undertones that practically waft off the page.

The lie worthy of Dr. Goebbels at his best, though, is this business about carbon dioxide being a “pollutant.” In which case – uh oh! – it is time to put giant cones on top of volcanoes and catalytically converting muzzles on cows and for that matter us, too. Carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” in the same way that di-hydrogen monoxide (water) is a “pollutant.”

It does not foul the air. Even slightly.

It does not cause cancer or respiratory problems or acid rain.

Or even acne.

The Automotive News story is despicable because it purveys without comment or qualifier the package-dealing of an inert, non-reactive gas – C02 – with the byproducts of internal combustion engines that do foul the air, contribute to the formation of smog, irritate people’s lungs, create public health problems and cause acid rain.

Those compounds which are pollutants, properly (scientifically) speaking.

Carbon dioxide is a natural constituent component of the atmosphere, like water vapor and nitrogen and oxygen. To characterize C02 as a “pollutant” is either a titanic imbecility or a purposeful attempt to mislead.

It is of a piece with the progagandizing the media performed for the government when it decided it was time to conflate those who (so they said) attacked America on 9/11 with the Iraqi government. You may recall. One minute, it was al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then – as if a batch fax had been sent to every media organ in the country – it was non-stop Saddam. Just as C02 isn’t a “pollutant,” Saddam didn’t attack America. But the press did its best to purposefully confuse the issue, aiding and abetting a Nuremburg-worthy high crime – aggressive war – that went unpunished. Reichsmarschall Goring is smiling cynically, somewhere above . . . or below.

The new Fake News is that carbon dioxide is something like carbon monoxide, or unburned hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, or particulates – a danger that must be regulated and controlled. Not only is the untrue (see above) but unlike the actually harmful compounds classified (accurately) as pollutants, carbon dioxide can’t be “cleaned up” because of course it’s not “dirty” to begin with. The only thing that can be done – here it comes – is to reduce the volume produced and the only known way to do that is to . . . burn less fuel.

In other words, it’s a fuel efficiency fatwa masquerading as an anti-pollution measure. And the object is not to increase fuel efficiency. It is to reduce the size of engines (and so, cars) and make them expensive – so that fewer people can afford to buy them. This is not spoken of openly, but it is the end goal. It must be; a single fool or demagogue could be dismissed as aberrant; this is systematic, organized.

The government – which is a bunch of people – calculated, drew up ad then decreed (in the waning days of Obama’s presidency, knowing his successor might be . . . skeptical) that henceforth carbon dioxide would be considered a ”pollutant.”

The media lapdogged that up. No “excuse me, but…”

Nada.

Just willing, complicit, lazy regurgitation. Or something much worse . . .

The reaction of anyone reading the Automotive News pabulum who is in possession of junior high school-level chemistry knowledge will – rightly – be one of outrage. Unfortunately – deliberately – a working majority of the public is not in possession of junior high school-level knowledge of chemistry.

Next item up for dissection:

“Dozens of U.S. cities are willing to buy $10 billion of electric cars and trucks to show skeptical automakers there’s a demand for low-emissions vehicles.”

God, my teeth ache.

Firstly, it’s not not “dozens of cities” who will be buying these force-produced electric Edsels. It is the taxpayers of these cities who will be forced to buy them (but not own them) via the extorted funds they are compelled to provide, so that government workers can drive around in the electric Edsels.

This isn’t supply and demand, market forces. It is make-work and wealth transfer. To characterize it as “demand for low-emissions vehicles” is another despicable upchuck of putrefying propaganda that depends upon the stupefaction (or enstupidation) of the reader, who will only allow the morsel to pass by if he is utterly in the dark about basic economic laws.

And “low emissions”?

Seriously?

How many times must this be whack-a-moled? Electric vehicles do produce emissions, just not at the tailpipe. Does the source of pollution matter? Or just that it is produced?

Bingo, if you picked the latter.

First of all, the raw materials necessary to make the hundreds of pounds of batteries per electric car are not gently taken from Gaia’s willing bosom – and the batteries themselves are mini-Chernobyls of toxic waste. Oh, but they’ll be recycled! Except when they’re not. What then? Out here in The Woods, decrepit olds cars abound, left to rot in the backyard. The same fate awaits even shiny six figure Teslas. Which – one day – will be paint-blotched old hoopties left to rot – and leak – in someone’s back yard. Only instead of one roughly 45 pound led acid battery leaching into the earf, it’ll be 400-plus pounds of life-unfriendly compounds.

Does anyone care? Shouldn’t “environmentalists”?

Electric cars, by the way, also produce C02. In fact, they produce more “climate changing” C02 than a conventional car. Not at the tailpipe, perhaps.

At the smokestack.

At the “tailpipe” of the coal and oil-fired utility plants that generate the electricity which powers electric cars. If hundreds of thousands – if millions – of these electric cars are put into circulation, the demand on the grid will be great and the output of C02 even higher.

What then?

The press does not ask such questions. Instead:

“Demonstrating demand” . . . so reads the subhead in the Automotive News propaganda piece.

And yes, again, propaganda.

Words matter. Using certain words conveys a certain meaning. People who deal in words professionally know this, instinctively. As the hawk knows how to dive.

“Demonstrating demand” is a statement, as if of fact, that an entirely fictitious and fraudulent thing is the same thing as the real thing.

Government buying things isn’t “demand” anymore than one is a “customer” of the IRS.

Whatever “demand” is created, is artificial – dependent on wealth transfer, on the coercive power of the government. It is the same sort of “demand” that built the Volga canal in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Automotive News quotes – without comment – a statement made by a Seattle bureaucrat named Chris Bast, who is a “climate and transportation policy adviser” to the city of Seattle:

“If you build it, we will buy it.”

He means: If the government forces car companies to build electric cars, the government will force taxpayers to buy them. This, of course, is not translated thusly.

The loathsome “news” article concludes:

“Tailpipe fumes (my italics) are crucial in the fight to stop global warming.”

The illiteracy is almost as striking as the dishonesty – or the imbecility, you decide which.

Note the conflation – the inert, non-reactive gas (C02) is now a fume. And it is “crucial” in “the fight to stop global warming.”

Not the galloping unchecked assumptions; the blithe acceptance, as of gravitation, of the political “science” of “global warming.”

The awful construction would be enough to make my teeth feel loose. But the oily proselytizing is just too much.

And they ask me why I drink . . . .