This past week, Ford Motor Company scion Bill Ford hosted a dinner “for a small group of journalists at the Detroit auto show.”  The purpose?  To burnish Ford’s green claims, of course.

Highlights [via Automotive News]:

Ford has been thinking about “how we’re going to have mobility in a world of urbanization and 75 percent of the world’s population living in cities. We’re going to have 4 billion cars and 9 billion people by midcentury.

There are currently just over 1 billion automobiles, counting cars, trucks, and buses, on the planet, btw.

So, ROFL on that one.

Meanwhile, Bill Ford also told the assembled reporters that cars-first transportation isn’t like selling nicotine:

“I never wanted us to be like the tobacco [companies], where our employees would have to apologize to their family and friends for working there. If that happens, we are not going to get the best and brightest.”

It’s an interesting contrast, isn’t it? If Ford’s products are freedom vehicles and wonder machines, why this apparent slip into cigarette talk?

Perhaps it’s because Ford knows the numbers are rather comparably large and the deaths equally stupid. In the USA, lung cancer now kills about 160,000 people a year. If one assumes that tailpipe exhaust accounts for 25% percent of air pollution deaths and auto use accounts for 10% of deconditioning deaths, cars snuff out about half that amount every year.

And, of course, the era of war over access to tobacco-friendly climes has passed. Now, if there is to be a World War III, does anybody doubt it will instead have rather more to do with what goes into gas tanks?

As Noam Chomsky observes, cars-first transportation in the United States “was not put to public judgment.”  Nor will it ever be, barring a popular rebellion addressing its existence.

But does that mean the population is as brain-dead on the topic as our many capitalism excusers would have you conclude?

Consider the news today that the average age of light vehicles in the United States has now reached an all-time high: over 11 years for cars, and slightly under that for “light trucks.”

No doubt much of that is simply a result of economic hardship among the bottom 90 percent.  But DbC would wager that some of it is also a sign of the rationality of the masses.  Why would anybody be buying — not to mention marketing — more cars at this point in human history?  Inquiring minds want to know.

That, of course, is a truly forbidden question.