Mike Lester for May 20, 2022

Could someone explain this cartoon for me?

So exactly how are the Democrats raising the price of oil?

I take it for granted that Mike has boiled frogs

Frog boiling for dummies. Dummy, a frog will jump out of a pot that gets increasingly hot. WTH is mo’ Lester trying to convey. Republicans can’t or won’t do anything?

Oh, now I get it, Democrats are boiling Republicans and the Republicans are too insensitive to feel what is happening to the party.

To a large extent, we continue to be a reactive rather than a proactive people. I try to avoid what if/counterfactual history, but I keep thinking about a certain president from 1977-81 who tried to be proactive on this issue. How far along might we be in alternative energy if he hadn’t been (mostly) ignored and mocked?

This is way too deep for us ordinary people. Or any sane person, for that matter.

I STILL don’t know where all this electricity is going to come from; we can’t keep up with demand for electricity now, yet we plan on a vast increase in the number of electric vehicles?

Biden and the Democrats came into office expecting to do a “slow boil” regarding petroleum and gas prices. But, true to their nature they screwed that up and it was exacerbated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. What’s that Obama said about Biden, something to the effect that’s there’s nothing that Biden couldn’t F*ck up, no matter how simple.

The Dems either don’t understand or don’t care that most Americans can’t afford the $60k price tag for an entry level EV or that even if a significant number of people could be moved to EVs, our power grid couldn’t support it.

Good toon, corporations have got to stop working with the Democrats, there always will be something else the left wants. They are the frog in slowly boiling water, and will not leave till it is dead. And we need fossil fuels. While we don’t have enough rare earth minerals to make the batteries we need.

Also, the so-called green movement isn’t all that clean. First, have you seen pictures of that landfills with windmill blades in Casper, Wyoming? Carbon fiber can’t be recycled.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills

Then digging up rare earth elements in China:https://theplanetvoice.com/is-rare-earth-mining-killing-the-environment/

We can do it cleaner, here is a one possible way:

https://investorplace.com/2020/11/rare-earth-mining-how-the-u-s-can-get-back-on-the-right-side-of-the-technochasm/

All most forgot cause we stopped pumping oil, we now use 2000 gallons of oil to ship more oil to the country and prices are going up.

Mikes trying to sound smart and funny at the same time. Unfortunately the right is never funny or smart.

It is an ‘incredible transition". In spite of the The Party of Trump’s (TPOT’s) heel-planting, knuckle-dragging, obstinate, absolutist obfuscation and obstruction, the ‘incredible’ end of using fossil fuels finally is under way in the US. We will get there, too.

By the way, notice that the cost of hydrocarbon fuels in the US is STILL far less on average than the European ones. As of 16 May 2022, those prices range from about the same as in the US for Ukraine, up through $7.70 in Britain, to $9.64 in Norway. For the rest of the world, gas prices are even higher in most countries. I’d say we have it reasonably good, based upon that comparison.

Regarding the implied idea that somehow the Biden administration is ‘responsible’ for the rise in fuel prices, or that they have ‘fallen down on the job’, both of those presumptions are without merit or substance. The rise price of all commodities (including fuel) is the result of world-wide disruptions in distribution networks, production facilities closings as a result of CoViD, and very poor (actually, non-extant) planning and policy decisions by the Trump administration – the direct results of which are only now beginning to be unavoidably felt in the US. This is because the results of any administration’s economic decisions take about 1 to 3 years to take full effect and be noticed by the public.

Come on, People. Go learn basic high-school micro- and macro-economics. The economy does not change overnight. Biden can guide the economy, but CAN NOT instantly change it. Changes have to overcome inertia, and that takes time. For instance, it took more than 4 years for the Obama administration to pull the US out of the 2008 housing market finance bubble implosion and get the economy (steadily) growing again.

I think I’ve got it figured out with this cartoonist. Lester draws a nonsensical cartoon that gets lots of comments wondering what it’s about. Then Lester goes to his editor and says, “See ? They love my cartoons. Look at all the comments !”

Trump, of course, decided that ANYTHING ‘Obama’ was automatically ‘bad’. He ignored the policies that the economic directors had formulated, firing anyone who dared to question HIS ‘wisdom’. Through his inept, juvenile, fumbling attempts to use US economic policies to enrich himself, by mid-2019 he had caused that steady growth to stumble, hiccup, and then go into headlong free-fall starting in about August of 2019.

We already were headed for a massive recession – before the advent of CoViD in November of 2019. Trump’s frantic retributive efforts, in November of 2020 through January of 2021, to hand the incoming administration ‘a bag of snakes’ only capped the national economic difficulties he already had created. Economists largely agree that it will take 5 years or more to ‘recover’ from the horrendous economic mess Trump made.

Search: How long for the US economy to recover

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/economic-impact-covid-19/

https://www.rbcwealthmanagement.com/en-us/insights/how-long-will-the-economic-recovery-take

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-quickly-will-us-economy-recover

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-fast-does-economy-recover-recession

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-biden-boom-economic-recovery-in-2021/

… etc.

But is the stove gas or electric?

We need a crisis here, electric vehicles need to be the standard in 10 years, not 30. When they said we had 10 years before irreversible climate change they were wrong, we have six.