As Ed Craig notes below, GM product czar Bob Lutz is, indeed, a breath of fresh air. He is also one of a dying breed.

Lutz is a swaggering product guy in a corporate world inhabited by high-paid bureaucrats.

While Lutz honestly believes global warming is a “total crock of ****,” his industry colleagues are determined to mine prevailing environmental fads for profit (with mixed results). Toyota has famously cultivated a green image with the hybrid Prius even as its over-all fleet mileage has fallen with the introduction of huge, profit-making trucks like the Tundra. Bill Ford, guilt-ridden by his great-grandfather’s invention of the automobile, recently tried to change Ford’s blue oval to green – a luxury the company can no longer afford now that it is fighting for its financial life.

But perhaps most telling are utility executives like Tony Earley, CEO of Detroit Edison – right in Lutz’s back yard. Rather than fight the green lobby’s explicit effort to abuse science in order to demonize coal — which fuels 85 percent of DTE’s plants – executives like Earley instead see the an opportunity to end-run deregulation and re-monopolize the energy sector. DTE knows that cap-and-trade laws and renewable portfolio standards are also a crock of – but they are convenient conditions to accept in exchange for guaranteed financial returns.

For such corporations, green is the color of money.