From Henry Payne, the Detroit News editorialist and cartoonist, writing at National Review Online’s Planet Gore blog, “Environmental Progress: The Parked Mustang Test“:
Detroit — As Greg noted yesterday, activist Bill McKibben took to the pages of the Washington Post’s Earth Day edition to moan, “Forty years in, we’re losing.”
It is a sentiment echoed by his green allies in the media and public office. To admit progress would strip them of the power of perpetual and proliferating regulation that, incredibly, now encompasses CO2 — the very air we breathe. And yet McKibben’s comment is demonstrably false.
Take a simple benchmark: the iconic American muscle car, the Ford Mustang.
The Mustang’s evolution is a marvel of the relentless advance of engineering in a demanding, competitive consumer market. As Autoweek magazine explains, “the 1970 Ford Mustang pollutes more parked in a driveway than a 2010 Mustang does traveling down the road.”
A further excerpt follows.
Payne, by the way, is always a good read, sharp with the writer’s pen as well as the cartoonist’s. We especially liked the comparison of greenhouse gas emissions, Michigan versus Eyjafjallajökull. What that volcano needs is a good, long recession.
