Bjørn Lomborg Is a Troll and a Shill

Last year, Bjørn Lomborg posted another miserably misinformed article.

In it, he posts a broken link (I'm thinking maybe intentionally so) to a Journal of Industrial Ecology study, and then proceeds to misrepresent its findings:

A life-cycle analysis shows that almost half of an electric car’s entire CO2 emissions result from its production, more than double the emissions resulting from the production of a gasoline-powered car...If the car is driven less than 32,000 miles on European electricity, it will have emitted more CO2 overall than a conventional car.

Less than 32,000 miles. Oh, brother. Can you hear everyone's eyes rolling, Lomborg, you half a demented and desperate shill?

The 2011/12 Leaf's battery was initially guaranteed by Nissan for eight years or 100,000 miles (160,000 km)[39][40]

Anyway, here's the properly-formed link to the full article, and if Lomborg is too incompetent to form simple anchor tag links, maybe he should think about keeping his blockheaded commentary off the Web.

Let's delve a bit into the study, and I think we'll see rather quickly why Lomborg probably doesn't want you to actually find/read it, and instead wants you to take his twisted version of it as reality.

Here's the low-ball estimate from the study:

We find that EVs powered by the present European electricity mix offer a 10% to 24% decrease in global warming potential (GWP) relative to conventional diesel or gasoline vehicles assuming lifetimes of 150,000 km (~93,200 miles).

You can get larger decreases if your electric car lasts longer, but let's just stick with these numbers. So...there are approximately 1 billion cars on the planet (the vast majority of which are fossil fuel-powered), and, if, for convenience sake, we assume an EPA passenger car's annual output for them, and that their CO2 dwarfs the other gases they emit in both weight and impact, they each emit about 9,700 lbs of critical GHGs each year. Sure, there are minor difficulties in projecting American passenger car numbers onto the world vehicle population, and in neglecting the other tailpipe gases, as well as air, rail, and marine transportation, but for our purposes here they are far from show-stopping, and certainly less so than the stupid assumptions Lomborg made in his piece.

OK, let's do some simple math...

1,000,000,000 * 9,700 lbs/yr = 9,700,000,000,000 lbs/yr or about 4.4 gigatonnes per year (Gt/yr)

With an estimated global output of 31Gt CO2 in 2010, that puts our back of the envelope vehicle discharge calculations at about 14% of total annual human emissions. Hmmmm, a bit inflated, considering the means of transportation that were left out, but not too terrible awful bad.

That means if we could be visited by a magic wand-waving miracle, the likes of which Lomborg actually seems to be arguing we wait for (more on that below), and have all the vehicles on our planet supernaturally transformed into electric cars today, when we are still hitching and sputtering away from an addiction to fossil fuels largely due to the stifling political influence of well-funded naysayers, using the lower estimates of the very study Lomborg himself tried linking to, we reduce global CO2 emissions by 0.44Gt to 1.1Gt each year. And if we double the life expectancy of the electric vehicles, according to the journal article, we get something more like a 1.3Gt reduction annually. Going from 31 to 29.7 Gt/yr by transforming a sector that is only 13-14% of our total GHG production is not worth doing, Lomborg? Come again? And if we somehow figure out other ways to similarly reduce outputs in the other four major GHG-producing sectors (agriculture, industry, energy, and forestry) in the EPA graph I linked to above, then we as a society are down to about 25 Gt/yr. I'll take that as a present-tech, "what's available to us now," starting-point reduction scenario any day.

Sure, the study rightly brings up environmental issues surrounding the EV supply chain, but it also mentions the increased CO2 reductions we will enjoy once we get serious about improving our electrical infrastructure and means of production, because, again, these are today's numbers, which will improve dramatically in the future, as long as we don't follow Lomborg's dumb-balls advice and abandon the effort. Notice that the study, unlike Lomborg, doesn't bellyache about the investment required until it seems the idea is to just sit around until the Electric Vehicle Fairy shows up and waves his or her magic wand.

Someday, the electric car will, indeed, be a great product...But lavish subsidies today simply enable an expensive, inconvenient, and often environmentally deficient technology.

There ya have it, folks. According to Lomborg, EVs are such a great idea we should make no effort now to facilitate their popular usage.

Wot?

And "lavish subsidies" my ass. They are nowhere near those enjoyed by fossil fuel companies due to the fact that we taxpayers open our wallets to clean up their messes.

As usual, if you want a completely lopsided, cherry-picked version of the facts, read Bjørn Lomborg's Slate blog.

And shame on Slate for providing a platform for such a biased nitwit to spread misinformation that so clearly benefits one rapacious industry.