RUSH: ‘If California regulators get their way, auto makers may soon be forced to rewrite a cliche from the Ford Model T era and start telling customers they can have any color they want as long as it isn’t black. Some darker hues will be available in place of black, but right now they are identified internally at paint suppliers with names such as ‘mud-puddle brown’ and are truly ugly substitutes for today’s rich ebony hues. So buy a black car now, because soon they won’t be available or will look so putrid you won’t want one. And that’s too bad, because paint suppliers say black is the second- or third-most popular vehicle color around the world. The problem stems from a new ‘cool paints’ initiative from the California Air Resources Board. CARB wants to mandate the phase-in of heat-reflecting paints on vehicle exteriors beginning with the ’12 model year, with all colors meeting a 20% reflectivity requirement by the ’16 model year.’
A cool paints initiative. See, black absorbs. You wear a black shirt in the hot summertime you feel a little warmer than if you’re wearing a white shirt. So the theory is that a black car is absorbing all kinds of heat, making it hotter inside your car, they’re going to ban black interiors as well. If you’re in the summertime and you’re driving around with black seats and upholstery in your car and it’s exposed to the sun you know how hot it can get in there. So you ban these colors. The governor wants to regulate fuel economy by mandating only lighter colored cars. They think these lighter colored cars will stay cooler on sunny days and will not use as much air-conditioning. They are serious, the California Air Resources Board. They are serious about this. Now, you take a look, the last time you watched the Epidemic Awards and you watched the red carpet ceremony, they show you the caravan of stars arriving, what is the predominant color of the limousines and the SUVs delivering these people? Black. White’s considered tacky.
What’s the predominant color of the Chevrolet Suburban fleet that follows President Obama around, and what’s color of his Cadillac limousine? It’s black. So now they’re even going to control what color your car can be. Reminds me of the energy crisis of the seventies, TWA experimented, or American did, by taking all the paint off the airplanes to see if it would save fuel by reducing the weight. They couldn’t calculate it, it was so small, so many other variables, head winds and so forth. Passenger loads, fuel loads.
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RUSH: Indianapolis. This is Bill. Glad you called, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Yes, sir. Twenty-year-listener, first-time caller.
RUSH: Great to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: Any time.
CALLER: I listened to your show last hour, but I don’t know who came up with this, but I think they have it backwards. If you want to cool the air or the atmospheric you should paint all cars black.
RUSH: Explain this.
CALLER: Well, black absorbs. I have a black car. It’s warmer only on the inside. The air above it is actually cooler. If you want to warm the atmosphere, you’re going to paint all cars white. It reflects. It reflects what? Heat and light.
RUSH: Well, but see, we’re a little confused on the intention here. Because the story only says that they want to reduce the heat inside cars to reduce automobile air-conditioning usage, and the less automobile air-conditioning usage, the less emissions, the less gasoline used, and therefore the less damage to the planet. Now, what you’re saying is —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — that if you’re right, if these white cars, if these light colored cars are going to reflect the heat then that’s just going to make global warming even worse, right?
CALLER: I would think so.
RUSH: Yeah. And so what you need to do is have every car be black like the old Model Ts were, so that the earth gets cooler.
CALLER: Yes, it will use a little bit more air-conditioning in the summertime than a person with a white car.
RUSH: I bet you don’t. I’ll bet you that’s bogus.
CALLER: Well, no, that is technically true. The car is actually a little bit warmer on the inside, a black car. But, it balances out —
RUSH: Okay, you get in the car in the summertime, let’s use Florida.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I have black cars, and I’ll guaran-damn-tee you, if I’m playing golf for five hours, and I got a white car or black car, if I get in either one of those cars, it’s gonna be an oven because I lock it and keep the windows up, because everybody knows my car, don’t want any vandalism, I don’t care if it’s ten degrees cooler in the white car or the black car, it’s still going to be an oven in there —
CALLER: Oh, yes.
RUSH: — and the AC is going on full blast!
CALLER: It’s hot either way.
RUSH: All right. So the whole thing is just bogus.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, if they want to get rid of global warming, then they should be asphalting everything, get rid of all the concrete, because concrete reflects a lot. Think of it that way.
RUSH: I know. You can walk the city of New York or any big metropolis in the summertime with the heat being reflected by the buildings. You’re exactly right. They’re stupid.
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RUSH: Hey, look, now, folks, I don’t want to get too technical on this black paint versus white paint and reflection of heat and so forth because it misses the point. The point of all this is not whether black or white makes a car cooler or warmer. The point is that you’ve got a California bureaucracy that is prepared to tell you that you cannot have a black car. The science is bogus. Look, everybody knows black absorbs heat. If we’re talking about atmospheric heat, the caller was right, you want black, black will absorb it. A white car, which would be mandated, will reflect the heat back into space. The heat is not contained at the level of your head. The heat rises, it keeps rising. That is why — as I now get technical in violation of my own commandment — that is why cloud cover is such an underused — because you can’t predict cloud cover — an underused aspect of climate modeling. White clouds reflect the heat before it gets here. Heat is reflected off of white. Plus, the water vapor, it’s so complex, nobody could create a model that would explain this, much less predict it. But none of that is the point.
Just today we learned the California Air Resources Board is prepared to dictate that you cannot have a black automobile. We have heard today that the president of the United States — and it’s in the stimulus bill — wants some sort of meter in your home to tell you when you’re overusing electricity, and he wants a government electrician to come into your home and wire it up. We’re talking tyranny here. We are talking absolute statist control. The details are irrelevant. It’s like do you remember Grandmothers for Peace? Oh, I’ll never forget these people. I remember back in the late eighties and the nineties they coincided with the great peace march for global nuclear disarmament which led to our peace update theme with Slim Whitman, and Grandmothers for Peace at one point had a great plan. What they were going to do to spread peace around the world was manufacture a bunch of Frisbees and Frisbees were going to have the word peace and love, the peace sign and so forth, and they were going to give these Frisbees to kids all over the world.
They had DVDs to show how to use the Frisbee. That really worked, didn’t it? Frisbees for Peace. It really impacted Al-Qaeda, didn’t it? I mean, it really worked, didn’t it? Turning the lights off at 8:30, that’s really gonna work, isn’t it? For those of you that mindlessly play along, all it does is send the signal that you are willing to be controlled, that you are willing to be manipulated and take actions not in your best interests, all for the express purpose of making actors and singers feel relevant beyond the roles that they play.