Realistic remedies for the world - Clean, affordable energy - The rational approach

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson just announced a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 in an attempt to jump-start the market for electric cars in the UK. Bjorn Lomborg cautions in Britain's largest-circulating broadsheet newspaper The Telegraph that electric cars won't be a miracle cure for climate change, as they provide only marginal emission reductions at a very high cost.

The lesson from the federal government's failed backing of Solyndra is not that the United States should abandon energy innovation. It is that the government should not try to pick industry winners in the race to replace fossil fuels with an alternative. Solyndra is the now-bankrupt solar-panel manufacturer that received a $535 million federal loan guarantee in 2009 to build a factory based on the proposition that solar power should be captured through solar cylinders rather than the more established technology of silicon wafers.

Over the past decade, the global elite’s obsession with climate change has taken away from the many other major problems facing the planet — shown most dramatically by the invasion of Ukraine. Western European leaders should have spent the past decade diversifying energy sources and expanding shale gas, instead of shutting down nuclear plants and becoming scarily reliant on Russia. But the looming war is far from the only thing they have managed to ignore.