Jon Reisman

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was Tom Wolfe’s 1968 journalistic chronicle of the LSD-inspired counterculture adventures across America of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Fifty-five years later, we have the Electric Vehicle Climate Agitprop Test, where climate “journalists,” alarmists, the environmental left, and the Democratic Party (it’s one largely overlapping Venn Diagram) will continue their efforts to bamboozle, gaslight,  propagandize, and mandate the American people into electric vehicles as part of their jihad against fossil fuels.

It is as if Henry Ford had convinced Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives to ban the raising and sale of horses in order to get Americans to buy the Model T. Of course, Model T’s did not cost two or three times what a horse did, require massive government subsidies, have half the range of a horse and have a disturbing tendency to burst into flame. If that had been the case, no doubt Wilson would have been happy to mandate Model T’s in the name of progress and saving the country from the existential threat of excessive horse manure.

Climate “journalism” is essentially misinformation propaganda to convince Americans that global warming is an existential threat to the planet and that the science is “settled”. Climate “journalists” have successfully pushed outright falsehoods such as the green lie that extreme weather events are directly attributable to climate change, a claim that even the vaunted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the agitprop central intergovernmental body of the United Nations, explicitly rejected. Climate “journalists” have censored the “hide the decline”/massage the data/cook the climate record scandal and ignored the persistent and alarming predictive validity failure of climate models, which have consistently overpredicted warming. Basing policy on such faulty models is pure folly, which is exactly what the jihad on fossil fuels is for freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Worse, even those flawed models predict that fossil fuel jihad policies will avert essentially no detectable global warming, this supposed apocalyptic problem that we must address to save the planet, or at least the power and profitability of the climate alarmist cabal.

Here in Maine, we have funding from the environmental left going to Maine Public and WLBZ to produce climate agitprop. At least WLBZ acknowledged their funding from the Nature Conservancy in their climate change reporting. Maine Public quotes and interviews their environmentalist funders like Efficiency Maine and the Natural Resources Council of Maine but never includes an advisory as to their “underwriting” (advertising) support. The non-profit Maine Monitor has two reporters specifically on the climate agitprop beat, and they are amply rewarding the leftist donor and advisory board base.

Thirty years ago, the environmental left tried to impose car testing on Mainers to implement the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments championed by Senator George Mitchell. The state threatened to deny registration to vehicles that could not pass the emissions test. When it became apparent that car testing was deeply flawed in terms of science, fairness, and transparency, candidate Angus King won the 1994 gubernatorial election over Susan Collins and former Governor Joseph Brennan after promising to put a stake through car testing. You can read about it at Maine Implements the Clean Air Act: Federalism, Environmentalism and Interest Group Accountability (umaine.edu)

Cars mean freedom to Americans, and messing with car access and affordability is politically perilous and perhaps even stupid. The climate religion cult may be so powerful that the Democrats are willing to become climate alarmist martyrs, but their craving for power may pull them back. The Electric Vehicle Climate Agitprop Test and the fossil fuel jihad are going to be huge election issues in 2024 and beyond. They will have to take my gas-powered car keys out of my cold, dead hand, but that is the predictable consequence of jihad.

Jon Reisman is an economist and policy analyst who retired from the University of Maine at Machias after 38 years. He resides on Cathance Lake in Cooper, where he is a Selectman and a Statler and Waldorf intern. Mr. Reisman’s views are his own and he welcomes comments as letters to the editor here, or to him directly via email at [email protected].