As you might remember from last month, General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz recently took well-deserved heat for calling global warming a “crock of s***” as well as continuing to voice his opinion that the Prius did not make sense.

While GM Chairman Richard Wagoner quickly noted that Lutz’s interesting new marketing approach was not representative of GM as a company, Lutz himself actually backtracked a bit on the Prius. In front of a town hall-style meeting to promote the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid concept, Lutz had this to say:

We had the technology to come out with a hybrid at the same time as Toyota...In hindsight, it was a mistake...We made the mistake and we won't make it again...I think the whole company has learned when you step out and do bold things, you win and when you're cautious and let other people do the bold things, you lose.

All this sounds great, and, of course, we’re rooting for GM to make its Volt technology work and get it on the market. But as exciting as that potential is, if General Motors is to truly be a part of a clean vehicle future, it must focus on the technologies it already has to give drivers more efficient options in every vehicle class. One promising new GM technology is its “two-mode” hybrid drivetrain. But, as I noted upon the debut of the Yukon and Tahoe Hybrid’s introduction at the LA Auto Show, GM’s impressive engineering achievement has unfortunately been stymied by the usual GM use of technology to boost power instead of fuel economy. It sure looks like GM is making that “mistake” all over again.

Of course, when Lutz really wants to get “bold” on reducing global warming pollution and gasoline use, he relies on his old standby—the Flex Fuel Vehicle and corn-based ethanol. Here’s some of what he had to say about that in an interview in this week’s Wall Street Journal:

Well, to make the biggest environmental impact and displace as much petroleum as quickly as possible, and drastically reduce CO2 creation in the operation of motor vehicles, and create the least disruption to America's driving habits, there's only one technology that will get all of that quickly and at very low cost per car. And that is a conversion to basically bioethanol.

Better corn strains are being developed. They're developing corn with a shorter growing season, which was going to permit shifting the Corn Belt way to the north. I would point out that the vast majority of corn acreage in the United States is still not producing corn. It's getting $500 a year per acre not to plant corn.

So I think that people who say, well, the ethanol industry is taking food from the mouths of babies and it's driving tortilla prices up -- I think these are highly suspect conclusions. General Motors is the world's largest producer of ethanol-capable vehicles. We produce over one million a year. We've got 4.5 million on the road and constantly growing. We've committed to doing 50 percent of our vehicles to be E-85 [85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline] capable, and it's only about $150 per car.

There are so many misstatements here it makes my head spin. But let’s deal with the primary assertion, that the silver bullet is corn ethanol. As we’ve shown numerous times before, the best short term path to reducing U.S. gasoline use and carbon emissions from the transportation sector is with better fuel economy, certainly not corn ethanol alone. And if biofuels are to play a positive role in decreasing carbon from our fuels, something Lutz seems to care about in this context, a simple “grow more corn” message is about the least helpful one possible.

As our report Biofuels: An Important Part of a Low Carbon Diet showed, not all biofuels are created equal, and the current way most corn ethanol is produced could actually be a net loser over gasoline in terms of carbon emissions.  To ensure biofuels help lower our fuels’ carbon footprint, we need a Low Carbon Fuel Standard (.pdf), akin to what they are creating in California. This standard will give farmers the tools they need to ensure that ethanol is part of the solution to global warming, and that the full lifecycle impacts of using land for fuel production are accounted for.

As for his "mouths of babies" line—I'll let Lutz speak for himself there. His comments totally belittle the very real complexities that must be addressed in order to make biofuels work, which range from potential effects on food prices, to increased global warming pollution from land use, to increased water use and pollution, and to nitrogen levels from fertilizer. Ultimately, GMs efforts to “do bold things”—creating a concept plug-in, two-muscle hybrids, and a bunch of Flex Fuel Vehicles that can jump through the loophole in federal fuel economy regulations—does not actually result in anything bold. It is simply putting a slightly greener face on GM’s business-as-usual approach.

If we are really going to drive some change, we need to engage GM head-on—and they’ve given us a great opportunity. General Motors has set up an online program called GMnext that, according to their website, is “a dialogue-based campaign that engages people via social media and interactive experiences. As a platform to showcase GM's commitment to transportation solutions employing technologies that are relevant to consumer needs, GMnext will demonstrate our focus on solutions to the challenges that will shape the future of transportation.”

Please head over to our latest HybridAction and engage in GM’s dialogue to let them know it’s time for GM to turn its bold words into real action.