Trump's cuts to renewable energy put us on the ropes in the fight against climate change

Interview for The Voice of Russia by Yekaterina Kudashkina, 6 Dec, 2012.

Global warming is real, it is man-made and it is an important problem. But the way it is often being portrayed as the cause of the vast majority of extreme weather incidents is simply unfounded.If we look at a lot of the catastrophes that we’ve seen over the last years and that have been very well published, they are by far mostly driven by social factors.

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.

2011 Sept Psychologies

Bjorn Lomborg, academic and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, for shaking up the climate change debate without ever denying the reality of man-made global warming. Nominated by Julian Baggini, philosopher and author of The Ego Trick.