Bjorn Lomborg in the New York Post: “We endlessly hear the flawed assertion that because climate change is real, we should “follow the science” and end fossil fuel use.
We hear this claim from politicians who favor swift carbon cuts, and from natural scientists themselves, as when the editor-in-chief of Nature insists “The science is clear — fossil fuels must go.”
The assertion is convenient for politicians, because it allows them to avoid responsibility for the many costs and downsides of climate policy, painting these as inevitable results of diligently following the scientific evidence.
But it is false because it conflates climate science with climate policy.
The story told by activist politicians and climate campaigners suggests that there is nothing but benefits to ending fossil fuels, versus a hellscape if nothing is done.”
Also from Lomborg recently:
“Wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil” is how President Biden conveniently justifies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on green subsidies. Indeed, arguing that wind and solar are the cheapest is a meme employed by green lobbyists, activists and politicians around the world.
Unfortunately, as the huge subsidies show, the claim is wildly deceptive.
Wind and solar energy only produce power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The rest of the time, their electricity is infinitely expensive and a backup system is needed.
This is why global electricity remains almost two-thirds reliant on fossil fuels — and why we, on current trends, are an entire century away from eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation.
It is often reported that large, emerging industrial powers like China, India, Indonesia and Bangladesh are getting more power from solar and wind. But these countries get much more additional power from coal.
Last year, China got more additional power from coal than it did from solar and wind. India got three times as much, while Bangladesh got 13 times more coal electricity than it did from green energy sources, and Indonesia an astonishing 90 times more.”
