After Gutenberg

Subtitle: Transportation History Lesson for Emperor Fossil Followers

Joe Romm responded to a typical post from Planet Gore. The post attacked Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) for trying to drag the car industry into the 21st Century with fuel economy standards. (The operative word here is try.) In his attack on Reid, PG poster Henry Payne presumed to claim:

Of course, it’s Ford’s ingenuity that invented the gas engine, a vastly superior technology to steam and electrics that has given Americans unprecedented freedom. It remains superior today (along with oil-cousin diesel) even against new challengers like biofuel.

A claim that was a source of amusement at Climate Progress (An Insider’s View on Climate Science, Politics and Solutions):

Uhh, no. Not even close… Ford’s big contribution was inventing the moving assembly line around 1913, decades after the gas engine was invented. It would probably stun Payne to learn that Henry Ford’s Model T was the first flexible-fuel vehicle, running on gas, ethanol or both… The automaker foretold the future when he said fuel could be gotten from fruit, weeds, sawdust, or anything else that could be fermented.

Unfortunately, such an observation fails to acknowledge that the dominant paradigm did become petroleum, which was fine with most everyone (“Yes, we know we stuck you on this reservation, but you would be much more comfortable in this other God forsaken place where the ground does not weep with black tears”) for most of the 20th century.