Policies Pushing Electric Vehicles Show Why Few People Want One

2013-10-07 Australian science magazine COSMOS features a 5-page portrait of Bjorn Lomborg in its October/November edition. 

Climate activists and politicians constantly tell us electric cars are cleaner, cheaper, and better. 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?

As George W. Bush and Tony Blair learned the hard way, the public does not take kindly to being misled about the nature of potential threats. A similar shift in global public opinion is occurring with respect to climate change, owing to a stream of revelations about climate scientists' sloppy, if not tendentious, practice.