In December, Our Transportation Future published a poll claiming most people support the Transportation and Climate Initiative known as the TCI. However, this special interest group failed to tell anyone surveyed that the TCI would raise gas prices.

This misleading poll is being used by Maine organizations to push Maine into joining other states in raising gas prices and then diverting that money into public transportation and efforts to make people drive less or to cajole people into driving electric vehicles. Maine-based organizations that helped sponsor the poll include the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Environment Maine, Maine Conservation Voters, and the Acadia Center.

These groups, and the Maine Beacon—a publication of the Maine People’s Alliance, are using the poll in editorials, blogs and social media posts to persuade policymakers that Maine people support an elaborate scheme to pay higher gas prices, as much as 24 cents a gallon, to fund their agenda.

These special interests claim the TCI would simply implement a fee that would be absorbed by fuel distributors. However, the benefits they claim are only achieved when the costs are passed onto the consumer in the form of higher gas prices.

Seemingly with politics in mind, Governor Janet Mills has delayed joining the first phase of TCI’s implementation—despite being very close to those behind the push here in our state.

Maine hasn’t joined TCI so far because of “the third rail politics around that particular discussion,” as one member of her own Climate Council phrased it. The Governor has committed to “monitor” the TCI, yet her Climate Action Plan directly calls for putting strikingly similar strategies into action in Maine.

In fact, several of the Maine-based organizations sponsoring the poll are voting members of Governor Mill’s own Climate Council—members Governor Mills appointed and who contributed to the plan. They know the state needs big, big money to put their plan into action.

TCI is not about the environment; it’s about the money to fund pet projects.

The people hired to design and administer the survey told reporters that they “didn’t consider” asking a question about raising consumer gasoline prices. They even went so far as to justify not including the gas price information in the poll by claiming that they don’t know exactly how much prices would increase so it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask how voters would feel about it.

Yet, according to a study conducted by Tufts University, in order to achieve what the groups are shilling, the price at the pump would have to rise by as much as 24 cents a gallon. And to calculate their benefit scenarios, the TCI analysts used specific gas prices. The survey could have used that same data.

Here are the telling excerpts from the Our Transportation Future Press Conference, December 9, 2020 (we’ve put the link to the video at the top of the comments below so you can see for yourself):

Public radio station WBUR’s reporter, Barbara Moran, asked the first question (23 minutes into the conference):

“I noticed that the polling questions didn’t indicate that there might be a cost increase at the pump for consumers, so I’m wondering if we need to take this sort of positive response with a grain of salt given that people may not be familiar with the fact that there may be an increase in gas prices with TCI, so can your talk about why you didn’t include that as part of the questioning?”

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication [who oversaw the survey], answered, “First of all, we didn’t have the details in hand to give people accurate estimates, but . . . when you do give people a sense of what things will cost, support does drop. . .”

In follow up questions, the panel was asked whether people understood TCI, and the response indicated that people were not screened for understanding exactly what TCI was and only may have learned about it from the questions.

At 31 minutes into the conference, Lisa Prevost from Energy News Network asked, “Returning to the issue of costs, why didn’t you at least ask voters if they would support TCI if it resulted in higher gas prices?”

Leiserowitz responded, “I’ll have to turn that over to our colleagues at Climate Nexus, we didn’t consider that.”

Phoebe Sweet, with Climate Nexus [which administered the survey], then answered, “I’m not sure I have much to add there, we didn’t consider it.”