As soon as I saw the headline, “We all pay for electric cars,” (column, June 22) I smelled a rat, and sure enough, the author is a “Morgan Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy” at the Heritage Foundation, a familiar source of half-truths, distractions and smoke screens. It’s a right-wing propaganda machine whose environmental policy is to deny climate change, and whose energy policy is to prop up the oil and gas industry, at the behest of its founders, the Koch brothers. It’s also connected with tobacco companies, to give you an idea of the kind of company it keeps.

The article in question is about government subsidies for electric cars. But what it fails to mention is that the fossil fuel industry has long been getting the biggest subsidies of all, to the tune of $500 billion each year, and they don’t want competition.

I wonder why this newspaper accepts these “opinion pieces” from the Heritage Foundation. They’re not labelled as paid advertisements, so I assume there’s no financial reason to help them spread their carefully crafted efforts to protect their wealthy patrons. But when you see “Heritage Foundation” at the end of one of these articles, you can be sure that someone’s trying to steer you away from something that might endanger their profits.

 

Claire Prontnicki

Waterville

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