Thread by @AukeHoekstra

"There are lies, damned lies and statistics".

I hate the quote but it applies to the newest column of statistician and merchant of doubt @BjornLomborg.

Here he is again with misdirection against climate change action. This time against electric vehicles in the @australian.

The article has a clear message: electric vehicles are an expensive and meaningless way to combat climate change and only useful for virtue signalling by people with too much money.

Let me untangle the trail of misdirection and cherry picking.

Quote: "Globally, fewer than 0.3% of cars are electric."

The implication: not serious.

Different fact: if growth continues (47% per year, more on that later) all cars sold are electric by 2030.

Pretty serious no?

bloomberg.com/amp/news/artic…)

"Unsurprisingly given the price tag, electric cars are often playthings for rich people."

Lomborg has become an expert at framing in a way that is not outright lying but makes a point that he knows to be invalid.

The point he scrupulously avoids to touch is that they are expensive because of batteries. And batteries have become almost ten times cheaper in the last ten years.

In 2030, FOSSIL cars will be playthings for rich people.
Budget conscious people will overwhelmingly buy electric.

It's a bit like solar panels: through subsidies they became 100x (!!) cheaper in the last 50 years and now they are increasingly sold to budget conscious buyers.

I have no idea why Lomborg (that I used to admire hugely after his first book) is now so opposed to green innovation.

"But aren’t electric cars better for the environment? Barely. ... [it] will have to be driven 60,000km just to pay off its higher CO2 emissions."

Apart from the fact that the @IEA is sometimes convervative (

https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1064529619951513600

) this still means that an EV is much better.

Here I show why over its lifetime an EV emits less than half the CO2 of a diesel or gasoline car.

That's not 'barely' better for the environment.

And this is just the beginning. In 2050 EVs will emit
~10x less greenhouse gasses.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

" The IEA hopes the world can reach 130 million electric cars in 10 years — a breathtaking ask given we have spent decades reaching just over five million."

Here Lomborg tries to persuade you to think linearly and to concentrate on cumulative growth that looks slower.

But look at this green line again. Doesn't it strike you as odd to characterise this as "it took decades for us to reach 5 million". If you look at this graph you see this is a curve growing pretty steeply.

Statistician Lomborg knows he's trying to con you here.

In fact, using statistics we can fit an exponential trendline to this 2011-2019 data. For nerds: R2=0.990. For non-nerds: it fits perfectly.

And this tells us the average growth was 48% per year.

Wat does this mean for the "breathtaking ask" of the @IEA?

I ran the numbers in excel and even if we assume next year will have very limited growth we only need 30% growth in sales per year after that (down from 48% before that) to reach 142 million EVs in 2030.

“If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong.”

This is classic misdirection. Because of course it's true. Electric cars are only one tool in the toolbox.

But let me make an equally truthful statement:

"If you think you can save the climate WITHOUT electric cars, you're completely wrong."

Unless you find a way to convince everybody to take the bike or (electrified) public transit there is no way we'll make it without EVs.

"The Dutch Court of Auditors recently ruled The Netherlands was wasting taxpayer money on subsidies, calling them “an expensive joke”."

I've been intimately involved in this discussion (explaining the numbers and even discussing it with parliamentarians on twitter). Here we go.

"Expensive joke" is the literal translation of the Dutch "dure grap". It means expensive and has no connotation of a joke whatsoever. But ok, they called it expensive.

That was partly bc. they assumed that without subsidies, people would have bought an equally expensive non-EV.

Critics (like the PBL - that is as authoritative - and yours truly) have shown this is untrue. Basically most people used the subsidy to buy a much more expensive (Tesla) EV than they could usually afford. This makes the subsidies ~3x cheaper. The auditors have stayed mum since.

(Interesting he has access to this Dutch 'inside baseball'. It conjures up visions of deniers collaborating globally.)

Of course subsidy for mature products (like insulation) is cheaper per ton CO2 now but it won't help to stimulate innovation. Which is where we are heading now.

"Without Norway’s overgenerous subsidies, by 2030, only 9 per cent of all car sales will be purely electric."

Riddle me this: if in 2030 a sporty EV with 500 km of range will be cheaper to buy and 50% cheaper to use (without subsidies) why would 91% of people avoid them?

Lomborg wants you to believe that computers will never be the size of phones, that LED lighting will never be cheaper than incandescent light bulbs, that internet will never be a thing. Change is impossible and the plummeting costs of batteries should be ignored.

Once you allow yourself to see trends you understand the days of the combustion engine are over and the sooner we make the transition to the electric motor, the better.

In 2050 most electricity will be clean. EVs will be produced by and driving on low carbon sources.

Not only will they emit little greenhouse gas, they will also be cheaper to build because an electric motor is very simple to make and batteries will be cheap. They will be cheaper to use because an electric motor uses 1/4th of the energy and needs no maintenance.

I'm not saying electric cars are THE solution because in increasingly dense cities they are increasingly dangerous, noisy and bulky. And bikes and public transit are certainly better for the environment.

But EVs are a LOT better than the combustion cars Lomborg is defending!