With a new Democratic Congress and a full-throated MSM campaign of Green indoctrination promising a new playing field, this week’s annual Society of Automotive Engineer’s (SAE) World Congress here in Detroit is understandably abuzz with climate-change and fuel-efficiency talk.

But SAE engineers paint a different energy reality than the alternate fuel fictions of Schwarzenegger, Pelosi & Co.

At a Tuesday afternoon panel called “High Performance and Fuel Economy: Can We Have Both?” General Motors Executive Director of Powertrain, Larry Nitz, said: “Customers are absolutely unwilling to give up performance for fuel economy.”

“The press misses that most of the time,” added fellow panelist Don Whitsett of Aisin, a major auto supplier of transmissions and power trains.

“We have to produce cars that customers will drive, not just that reporters will write about,” Whitsett continued matter-of-factly. “We must produce profit, otherwise we cannot produce new product.”

One would hope such fundamental statements about market economics would not be necessary in the 21st-century United States, but it is refreshing to hear given the propaganda spewed daily by an ill-informed political and media class claiming a switch to alternative energy is free.