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We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones?
Unfortunately, the climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. Lomborg explains in Wall Street Journal (also available here) that if every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, we'd slow down global warming by 0.0002°F (0.0001°C) by the end of the century.
And the trades we make to subsidize expensive electric vehicles are highly questionable. Look at oil-rich Norway, the only country where most new cars are electric: To cut one ton of CO2 emissions through the subsidization of electric cars, Norway has to sell 100 barrels of oil, which emit 40 tons of CO2.
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It’s easy to believe that life on Earth is getting ever-worse. The media constantly highlight one catastrophe after another and make terrifying predictions. With a torrent of doom and gloom about climate change and the environment, it’s understandable why many people — especially the young — genuinely believe the world is about to end. The fact is that while significant problems remain, many indicators, even environmental, are in fact getting better. We just rarely hear it.
Yet, global warming prompts celebrities and politicians to fly around the world in private jets lecturing the rest of us, while we spend less on problems like hunger, infectious diseases, and a lack of basic schooling. When did politicians and movie stars ever meet for an important cause like de-worming children?
Read Bjorn Lomborg's new op-ed in New York Post, Financial Post (Canada) and Berlingske (Denmark).
He also discussed the fact that ever fewer people die from climate-related disasters than ever before with Jesse Watters on the FOX News Channel. |
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Top administration officials are fanning out across the U.S. in a victory lap for the new Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden calls “the most significant legislation in history to tackle the climate crisis.” America, we are told, is a global climate leader again. This narrative has serious problems, as Lomborg explains in Wall Street Journal (also available here) and in an interview with WSJ editor Paul Gigot on the Journal Editorial Report.
Despite the bill's whopping cost of $369 billion, the UN's own climate model shows that the impact will be impossible to detect by mid-century and still unnoticeable even in the best case (a reduction of 0.016°C or 0.028°F) by the year 2100.
Achieving such miniscule effects at such enormous cost makes this policy undesirable for other countries. Three-fourths of all emissions in the rest of this century will come from what are today developing countries, especially China, India and nations in Africa. These countries couldn’t afford to follow the U.S. lead and drop hundreds of billions of dollars on climate subsidies even if they wanted to. The U.S. might be proclaimed a global climate leader, but it’ll have few followers.
The Washington Post also reported on Lomborg's calculations, writing that
the law’s impact on global temperatures — just like its impact on inflation — will be virtually nonexistent. Here’s the deep, dark secret: The costs of climate policies often vastly outweigh their benefits. Even if Democrats had passed the left’s entire Green New Deal — with World War II levels of government climate spending — it still would not put a dent in global temperatures. “Most people don’t appreciate how enormous cuts are needed to make substantial temperature reductions,” Lomborg tells me. “Even if the U.S. went entirely net-zero today and for the rest of the century — an almost unfathomably costly policy — it would reduce global temperatures in 2100 by just 0.3°F.”
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Climate-alarmist politicians and the “intellectual elite” prioritize a vague plan for saving earth over the lives of struggling people all over the world. Governments are being forced to press their citizens, straining already fragile economic and agricultural systems, in order to appease a green utopian vision. 
Bjørn Lomborg and Ralph Schoellhammer sit down with Jordan B Peterson to discuss the faults in this plan, and the people who are suffering because of it.
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The Copenhagen Consensus approach has successfully introduced a rational, data-driven input to national priority-setting in many countries, including Bangladesh, Haiti, India, Ghana and Malawi in recent years.
With the UN's Sustainable Development Goals reaching their halfway mark by the end of this year, it is time to assess how much progress countries have made towards the goals, and what they should focus on over the following eight years to create the largest-possible benefits for their societies.
The largest selling newspaper of the Pacific Islands, the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier reports that data from economic science can help politicians and their officials pick more of the really effective programs and slightly fewer of the less so, to maximize social returns for every dollar spent.
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The disconnect between the climate-worried global elite and the real world suffering from the energy crisis and the aftermath of the pandemic is growing by the day. The costs of the climate and environmental policies pushed at establishment talkfests are quickly becoming unbearable, and people are starting to rebel against green diktats, as we have recently seen in the Netherlands and Sri Lanka.
Even under today’s policies that won't even get us close to the net zero target, EU vice-president and long-time climate action advocate Frans Timmermans admits many millions of Europeans may not be able to heat their homes this northern winter. This, he concludes, could lead to “very strong conflict and strife”. He’s right. When people are cold, hungry and broke, they rebel. If the elite continues pushing expensive policies that are disconnected from the urgent challenges facing most people, we need to brace for much more global chaos.
Read Bjorn Lomborg's analysis in newspapers around the world, including Financial Post (Canada), The Australian, The Philippine Daily Inquirer, City AM (UK), Business Day (South Africa), Addis Fortune (Ethiopia), Tempi (Italy), and multiple US newspapers such as Las Vegas Review-Journal, Press of Atlantic City, The Telegraph and The Times of Northwest Indiana.
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The rich are denying the poor the power to develop
Rich countries - despite their climate rhetoric - are heavily relying on coal, oil and gas to cope with the current energy crisis. Yet, the G7 recently decided to stop funding any fossil fuel projects in the developing world, immorally blocking the path for poorer countries to develop. This is clearly not what developing countries want, as their leaders and ordinary citizens have made very clear.
Read Lomborg's column in newspapers across the US such as Detroit News and Las Vegas Review-Journal, as well as Financial Post (Canada), China Daily, Business Day (South Africa), Economic Times (India), The Australian, Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden), Tempi (Italy), Libre Mercado (Spain), El Tiempo (Colombia), El Universal (Venezuela), Perfil (Argentina), Listin Diario (Dominican Republic), La Tercera (Chile), La Prensa Grafica (El Salvador), The Punch (Nigeria), Addis Fortune (Ethiopia), Berlingske (Denmark), Finmag (Czech Republic), Portfolio (Hungary), Postimees (Estonia) and Morgunbladid (Iceland).
Lomborg also discussed the rich world's fossil fuel hypocrisy on Sky News (Australia).
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