Don’t buy a GM car. That’s right; do not buy a car from GM. Now that the Obama Administration has made each and every American an owner of General Motors, you might expect a different suggestion; however GM has decided to take a stance on Global Warming, the much ballyhooed but yet unproven theory that the world’s climate is heading towards a climactic apocalypse.
Generally companies stay out of politically contentious matters, however demonstrating their indebtedness to the Liberals, GM this week announced it would cease funding The Heartland Institute; a conservative think tank insists that global warming is “junk science.”
GM made the announcement because of a leak of confidential funding documents by the ultra left-wing website ThinkProgress in February, which showed that the General Motors Foundation provided $30,000 to the Heartland Institute over the last two years.
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“Yep, it’s true,” Greg Martin, a GM spokesman, was quoted as telling The LA Times. “Dan Akerson was giving remarks at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and the issue of GM’s very modest and previous contribution to Heartland came up, and Mr. Akerson said he’d look into it. And we’ve looked into it, and we’ve decided to discontinue it.”
“As Dan said at the Commonwealth Club, GM’s operating its business as if climate change is real.”
GM may need to pray for climate change since their taxpayer-funded blunder, the Chevy Volt, has been an utter catastrophe. Sales have been so poor that GM has been forced to suspend construction of the vehicle. The car company had hoped to sell 45,000 Chevy Volts in America this year, according to the Detroit News, but has only sold about 1,626 over the first two months of 2012. At the current rate GM will miss its sales targets by more than 50 percent and more than 1,300 union members working on the Chevy Volt are now headed to the unemployment rolls.
Did GM Cave or did they Drink the Al Gore Kool-Aid?
Early this month, the organization Forecast The Facts, which encourages TV meteorologists to discuss climate change more openly, delivered a petition to GM which they claim 20,000 signers were calling for an end to GM funding of Heartland. The organization said more than 10,000 petitioners were current or former GM vehicle owners, according to The Times.
The problem with organizations like Forecast The Facts is that the facts aren’t on their side; they should change their name to Forecast “Our” Facts. Even six years after the first pronouncements by the now discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that engineered the global warming crisis as disclosed in a series of emails that leaked in 2009, they won’t admit that there are as many facts disputing climate change as supporting it.
There is no question that the amount of hydrocarbons released have increased as China and India have become more industrialized, but unless they choose to apply environmentally sound policies there is very little the rest of the world can do. Still the science remains quite elastic and despite claims from the left-wing environmentalists there are no solid facts which prove that change in climate is anything more than natural cycles that have occurred for millions of years.
The first claims of man-made climate change appeared in 1953 in Time Magazine, when Johns Hopkins Physicist Gilbert N. Plass stated that a global cloud of hydrocarbons would engulf the planet and drive temperatures up creating a global crisis. Twenty-one years later, again in Time Magazine, the same group of scientists said, “nevermind.”
The real spike in climate change hand-wringing came about after Al Gore’s book and movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that took a collection of selectively chosen quotations from left-wing scientists and posed them as facts. People accepted Mr. Gore’s hypothesis as gospel, cause, as you know, he created the Internet; one of those other slightly inconvenient untruths spread by Liberal environmental radicals. In 2007, the UK High Court ruled Al Gore’s movie contained “Nine Key Scientific” errors,” and ruled the movie was politically partisan (i.e., propaganda,) not a scientific film.
Danial Souweine, Campaign Director for Forecast Our Facts responded to GM’s move with a statement to The Huffington Post, “We applaud GM’s decision and the message it sends — that it is no longer acceptable for corporations to promote the denial of climate change and that support for an organization like Heartland is not in line with GM’s values.”
GM had been a supporter of Heartland Institute for more than 2 decades, including the past 5 years when Heartland had insisted that climate change was little more than liberal bologna spewed by radical environmental groups.
Heartland President Joseph Bast responded that, “We regret the loss of their support, particularly since it was prompted by false claims contained in a fake memo circulated by disgraced climate scientist Peter Gleick. We once again respectfully ask liberal advocacy groups such as Huffington Post, the Center for American Progress, 350.org and Greenpeace to stop attacking scientists who question the theory of man-made global warming and corporations and foundations that are willing to fund open debate on this important public policy issue.”
So how does a company that generates the largest part of their income from carbon-belching automobiles take the position that man-made climate change is real while continuing to manufacture the source they believe is at fault? Good question. Rather hypocritical no? Why are tax dollars going to prop up a company working towards putting us on the endangered list?
Since GM believes the product they produce is destroying the environment we should be supportive and take our business elsewhere.