Just what I thought.
Efforts to rein in global warming by eating less meat, driving electric cars, or subsidizing solar energy are completely ineffective, writes a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and constitute nothing other than “pointless virtue signaling.”
Bjørn Lomborg is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. “… Going entirely vegetarian reduces a person’s total emissions by only 2%.”
On electric cars, though they are “branded as environmentally friendly,” generating the electricity they require almost always involves burning fossil fuels. Moreover, producing energy-intensive batteries for these cars generates significant CO2 emissions (as written elsewhere in this blog), so that electric cars have a huge carbon deficit when they hit the road, and will start saving emissions only after being driven 60,000 kilometers.
According to IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol, we already spend $129 billion per year subsidizing solar and wind energy, yet these sources meet just 1.1% of global energy needs. The IEA estimates that “by 2040 — after we have spent a whopping $3.5 trillion on additional subsidies — solar and wind will still meet less than 5% of our needs.”
“If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong,” Birol observes. The fact is “cheap and reliable energy underpins human prosperity,” and this will be provided by fossil fuels until alternative sources of cheap and reliable energy can be found. Wind and solar ain’t it.