Lomborg on Stossel: Whom can you trust?

Op-ed by Bjørn Lomborg in Project Syndicate.

The Doha meeting continued 20 years of failed climate negotiations, since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. There, countries pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000; the OECD countries fell short by almost 9%. The Kyoto Protocol from 1998 has almost entirely failed. And the effort intended to save the world in Copenhagen in 2009 collapsed spectacularly. 

COPENHAGEN – The world has generally become a much better place during the last half-century. Skeptics will scoff at the idea of overall improvement, but the numbers don’t lie. The task we face now is to make the world even better.

Climate activists and politicians constantly tell us electric cars are cleaner, cheaper, and better. California and many countries, including the U.K., Germany, and Japan, will even prohibit the sale of new gas and diesel cars within a decade or two. But if electric cars are really so good, why do we need to ban the alternatives? And why do we need to subsidize electric cars to the tune of $30 billion per year?