GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz recently labeled global warming "a crock," before finishing the phrase with an off-color refrain.

Lutz defended his comment, which has been fodder for hundreds of bloggers on the Internet. "An offhand comment I made recently about … global warming seems to have a lot of people heated, and it's spread around the Internet like ragweed," Lutz wrote Feb. 21 on a company Web site.

Lutz then wrote that he was entitled to his own opinion, even if it differed from GM's stance of taking "cars and trucks from the environmental equation, period."

At a media event, Wagoner distanced the company from the comments and said "the data (are) pretty clear that the temperature on the Earth is rising."

"There's all sorts of debates as to why," he said before reaffirming the company's position "where we can participate proactively in reducing the amount of emissions," he said.

Wagoner said, "the comments weren't coming out of our company," The Detroit News reported.