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The Groom said:
By the way, the German Industry Minister caved in. The mandatory target will be 120g/km as planned.
I just means the price of P/F/L/MB will go up by Euro 5 to 10k. I suspect most customers will not care about such a price hike, especially if all competitors are equally hit.
Global Warning FlapdoodleDr. Michael ColganHaving been a consultant to several administrations of varying stripes, I have yet to meet a party in power willing to tell the public what a mess we have made of the environment. And they will not even whisper how that mess is causing much of the degenerative disease that plagues our Western lives.1,2 The business of government is foremost to stay in the business of government, and the truth would topple the strongest. Instead both public and media are fed carefully worded porkies, framed solely to make the ruling party look good and indict the parties in opposition. That's where we stand with global warming.
We Cannot Control the Environment
It is an arrogant conceit that human discovery of immense powers of destruction somehow confer powers of creation. You can fell the mightiest oak tree with a handful of plastic explosive. But science still hasn't the faintest idea how to create a single living blade of grass. Yet it is common conviction, and carefully conjured media madness, that we can create whole forests to replace those we destroy. Only the truly uninformed believe that a tree farm is a forest. We haven't an inkling how to make it so. Yet children are taught to plant seedlings and rejoice, deceived they are re-greening the Earth.
I wish I had the space to present the evidence of man's environmental ignorance. But one telling example will have to suffice. With great fanfare, and 200 million tax-free dollars seeded by Texas oil baron Ed Bass, in 1987 a series of interconnected sealed domes were built covering three acres of the Arizona desert, 20 minutes north of Tucson. For nearly a decade the Biosphere employed the best scientific minds in the world, to create a miniature Earth-like environment which would sustain a variety of plants, insects, food crops, fish, 25 species of animals and eight humans indefinitely, completely independent of the outside world for air, food and water. No expense was spared to make it as perfect an ecosystem as man knew how, complete with a 900,000 gallon little tidal sea. Anti-aging scientist Roy Walford spoke in glowing terms of the triumph of science before being sealed in with his seven carefully chosen companions on 26 September 1991.3 Media buzzed with speculations of vast cities in space built on similar lines. At last humans had triumphed over Nature and freed themselves from the confines of the third little rock from the sun.
Not a chance. Within weeks the oxygen inexplicably began to dwindle from the normal 21% in the air. Then the water became undrinkable and had to be laboriously filtered. Within months, 19 of the 25 animal species went "extinct". After a year the "Biospherians" were struggling to survive, and fighting like cats and dogs. Finally they had to crack the seal and let themselves out to save their sorry lives.3 Even so, Dr Walford developed the illness that finally killed him, some 20 years shy of his centenarian dreams.
Biosphere: Scientific Disgrace
In March 1994 they tried again with seven people, new animals and much hubris. Within months the whole thing failed miserably. The Biosphere became a scientific laughing stock, and was ditched forever. Taken over by Columbia University of New York in 1995, and renamed Biosphere 2, it reopened unsealed in November 1996, as an "Earth Systems Laboratory, with much humbler goals of studying microbial, plant and small animal life. Once again it still aimed to be the place that taught us how to understand the environment of Earth. There were even some desperate experiments on greenhouse gases in a bid to regain credibility.4 All the promises came to naught. No one had the knowledge even to approach the problem. Biosphere 2 today is little more than a student classroom and a lame tourist attraction. Latest word: it is slated for redevelopment as a new bedroom community for ever expanding Tucson.
Think about it. The best of modern science, and more money than you can poke a stick at, could not maintain eight people in a man-made environment. That tells us for sure that science is nowhere near to tackling the environment of the planet. Global warming was in the news when I was a child, before the Second World War. Then, of course, it was believed to be happening naturally, a swing of the temperature pendulum that has gone back and forth for millions of years. Now there are gazillions to be made by the financially cunning convincing the scientifically stupid that it is mostly man-made, and that they can do something to stop it.
Pork Barrel Hurricanes
I have spent 30 years working in favor of reducing our fossil fuel waste and the man-made spewing of toxic vapors and greenhouse gases into the air, but global warming is way beyond our ken. Real scientists, who have examined the temperature and weather calendar over millennia, bow their heads in humility before the might of the system that sustains us, and our helplessness before it. Meanwhile pork-barrel businessmen and their scientific toadies have leapt on the lucrative global warming wagon, and tied it to everything uncomfortable that the normal cycles of Nature throw at us, from floods and snow, to heat waves and cold snaps, to tidal changes and hurricanes.
Hurricanes!!? Visit the National Meteorological Office if you don't believe me, but hurricanes run in cycles too. They were big in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the 1960s. Then they declined from 1970-1990. Now they are still on the upswing. But Katrina was not the biggest on record by far. The two strongest hurricanes were Labor Day 1935 that hit the Florida Keys, and Hurricane Camille in 1969. And the two most deadly were the Galvaston hurricane of 1900, and the Lake Okeechobee hurricane of 1928, the latter killing over 8,000 people, more than three times the death toll of Katrina5. Of course the evening news doesn't mention these things: it would reduce the drama of blaming global warming.
I will take anyone's bet, that, no matter if every government on Earth drastically cuts back emissions tomorrow, it will not make a whit of difference to the rising temperature in the next 40 years (about how much longer I hope to live). We have not the faintest notion how to alter the current warming trend by even one-tenth of one degree, and whatever action is taken will fail miserably, crooked folk
Human habitats and population distribution are much easier and cheaper to change than the planet. Better to focus our efforts on adapting to the extra heat, and the rising tides, and the mass migrations of starving people from countries near the Equator, all of which are happening now unplanned, while politicians argue about who did worst in failing to fulfill the Kyoto Protocol, and who has bullying rights in buying and selling "emissions credits". Meanwhile, If you live only house height above high water mark, it might be good thinking to move up the hill.
Lets propose this and we will feel good about ourselves. What they are proposing won't do squat on the world stage. If you are really serious about global warming and greenhouse gasses you must address the hundreds of coal burning power plants and the millions of cars that will be in use by the Chinese in the coming years. Otherwise you are just spitting in the wind. 
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. We won't see a 2.4 L Carrera, but Porsche certainly will have to invest in fuel saving technology in order to comply with the rules.
, he knows how to deal with the government prats, we need more guys like him in the motor industry....
