Green Cars? The Joke's On You!

[PoliticalChic]

1. "Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of "zero emissions," and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream.... it's truly green, right? Not really.

2. For proponents ... the main argument is that their electric cars...don't contribute to global warming. And, sure, electric cars don't emit carbon-dioxide on the road. But the energy used for their manufacture and continual battery charges certainly does—far more than most people realize.




3. A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity.

4. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds

5. While electric-car owners may cruise around feeling virtuous, they still recharge using electricity overwhelmingly produced with fossil fuels. Thus, the life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide.

a. ...remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.






6. So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.

7. ... the batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles.




8. ...the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.

9. The current best estimate of the global warming damage of an extra ton of carbon-dioxide is about $5. This means an optimistic assessment of the avoided carbon-dioxide associated with an electric car will allow the owner to spare the world about $44 in climate damage. On the European emissions market, credit for 8.7 tons of carbon-dioxide costs $48.

a. ...U.S. federal government essentially subsidizes electric-car buyers with up to $7,500. In addition, more than $5.5 billion in federal grants and loans go directly to battery and electric-car manufacturers like California-based Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors TSLA +1.90% . This is a very poor deal for taxpayers.


10. ....as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing."
Bjorn Lomborg: Green Cars Have a Dirty Little Secret - WSJ.com


"There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase often credited to P. T. Barnum...


The only way for our on-site 'environmentalists' to read this article is with Percocet in a Pez dispenser.

 

[Old Rocks]

Lithium mining. Lordy, lordy, PC, you are truly ignorant. Perhaps you should do a little investigating in how they 'mine' lithium.

 

[Old Rocks]

And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Lithium mining. Lordy, lordy, PC, you are truly ignorant. Perhaps you should do a little investigating in how they 'mine' lithium.

Thank goodness we have a brilliant mind like yours, here, to straighten things out!!!

Geeeezzzzz...folks might believe the 'truly ignorant' otherwise!


BTW....every word between the quotation marks was written by Mr. Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge Press, 2001) and "Cool It" (Knopf, 2007).


Heck...you should get in touch with him forthwith!
He'd certainly benefit from knowing that he is 'truly ignorant.'


Lemme know how that works out, Rocks.

 

[PoliticalChic]

And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar.

'To make matters worse, the batteries in electric cars fade with time, just as they do in a cellphone. Nissan estimates that after five years, the less effective batteries in a typical Leaf bring the range down to 55 miles. As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: "Don't Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much."'
Ibid.



"As the MIT Technology Review cautioned last year: "Don't Drive Your Nissan Leaf Too Much."

You can't make stuff like this up!!!


Rocks....how do you feel being the punchline of a joke?

 

[PoliticalChic]

And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar.

Fueling???


Recharging???



Here's some news:

1. An electric car requires an array of battery cells, almost 500 pounds worth. http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Battery-and-Electric-Vehicle-Report-FINAL.pdf

a. GM’s EV1 NiMH (nickel metal hydride) weighed in at 1,150-1,400 pounds. Nickel Metal Hydride | GREENDUMP and Berezow, Op.Cit., p. 99.

b. The Chevy Volt has a lithium-ion battery that weights in at 435 pounds. GM press release: CHEVROLET VOLT’S REVOLUTIONARY VOLTEC ELECTRIC DRIVE SYSTEM DELIVERS EFFICIENCY WITH PERFORMANCE



2. The batteries are expensive, listed at $3,000-$4,000. Prius hybrid owners have been quoted at $7,000 and up. Behind the Hidden Costs of Hybrids - HybridCars.com

a. It is unclear what replacement cost will be when labor is included.



3. Since the battery’s ability to recharge declines with use, it must be replaced at about 100,000 miles. And the nickel metal hydride leaks energy- about 20 percent of capacity within the first 24 hours.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/Nickel_based_batteriesbnn



4. The batteries pose a dramatic detrimental effect on the environment due to polytetrafluoroethylene binder and nickel foam materials. Life cycle environmental assessme... preview & related info | Mendeley



5. Basically, electric vehicles are dragging a lot of extra weight made of toxic materials in order to use stored energy that combustion vehicles can simply generate on the go. Berezow, Op. Cit., p.66.



"And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar."

Really?

How's yours workin' out?


What???
You didn't get one???


I get it...waitin' for the other simpletons to get 'em.....
Better not buy a used one: replacing those batteries is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.....

But...."the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar."

Sure.

 

[RollingThunder]

Lithium mining. Lordy, lordy, PC, you are truly ignorant. Perhaps you should do a little investigating in how they 'mine' lithium.

Thank goodness we have a brilliant mind like yours, here, to straighten things out!!!

Geeeezzzzz...folks might believe the 'truly ignorant' otherwise!


BTW....every word between the quotation marks was written by Mr. Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge Press, 2001) and "Cool It" (Knopf, 2007).


Heck...you should get in touch with him forthwith!
He'd certainly benefit from knowing that he is 'truly ignorant.'

Mr. Lomborg has been informed repeatedly that he is truly ignorant but like most politically motivated deniers, he is oblivious to the deficiencies in his knowledge. He is not a climate scientist. His degrees are in so-called 'political science'.

Bjørn Lomborg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author, academic, and environmental writer. He is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.



Copenhagen Consensus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Copenhagen Consensus is a project that seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. It was conceived[1] and organized by Bjørn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the then director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute. The project is run by the Copenhagen Consensus Center,[2] which is directed by Lomborg and was part of the Copenhagen Business School, but it is now an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation registered in the USA.

Criticism

The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus attracted various criticisms.

Approach and alleged bias

The 2004 report, especially its conclusion regarding climate change was subsequently criticised from a variety of perspectives. The general approach adopted to set priorities was criticised by Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and advocate of both the Kyoto protocol [29] and increased development aid, who argued that the analytical framework was inappropriate and biased and that the project "failed to mobilize an expert group that could credibly identify and communicate a true consensus of expert knowledge on the range of issues under consideration.".[30]

Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth, repudiated the entire approach of the project, arguing that applying cost-benefit analysis in the way the Copenhagen panel did was "junk economics".[31]

John Quiggin, an Australian economics professor, commented that the project is a mix of "a substantial contribution to our understanding of important issues facing the world" and an "exercises in political propaganda" and argued that the selection of the panel members was slanted towards the conclusions previously supported by Lomborg.[32] Quiggin observed that Lomborg had argued in his controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist that resources allocated to mitigating global warming would be better spent on improving water quality and sanitation, and was therefore seen as having prejudged the issues.


THE LOMBORG-ERRORS WEB SITE


***

 

[skookerasbil]

LOL.........there are like 178 electric cars on US roads today. And the outlook is......ummm.......dim!!!

Not to mention that every single poll ever done clearly displays that Americans arent interested in electric cars. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/25/idUS244407485920110525....NO MATTER WHAT

Shit....the just did a test trying to drive a Volt from DC to New York and it made it a few miles and the damn thing died because it was cold and they had to use heat = dead battery in the time it takes me to type this!!!

 

[RollingThunder]

ummm.......dim!!!

That pretty much sums up all of your braindead posts, kookster.

 

[TheOldSchool]

My mom fills up 1 time per month though commuting every day to work. It's insane. That joke's on the gas companies.

 

[skookerasbil]

American men dont want to drive gay cars. They want to drive real cars.........

Like THIS >>>>>>>>>>>



[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7_WEU61A0U]TERMINATOR 03 Cobra Burnout - YouTube[/ame]

 

[westwall]

My mom fills up 1 time per month though commuting every day to work. It's insane. That joke's on the gas companies.

Then why don't we see them racing at Le Mans? You guys post cute little videos of them doing little 1/4 mile runs but nothing at all about endurance racing...why is that? Maybe because the weight of batteries converted into fuel will supply 14 conventional cars for the duration of the race.

You call THAT efficient?

 

[TheOldSchool]

My mom fills up 1 time per month though commuting every day to work. It's insane. That joke's on the gas companies.

Then why don't we see them racing at Le Mans? You guys post cute little videos of them doing little 1/4 mile runs but nothing at all about endurance racing...why is that? Maybe because the weight of batteries converted into fuel will supply 14 conventional cars for the duration of the race.

You call THAT efficient?

Um because a car that races at Le Mans would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? That's stupid.

 

[Ernie S.]

Lithium mining. Lordy, lordy, PC, you are truly ignorant. Perhaps you should do a little investigating in how they 'mine' lithium.

Thank goodness we have a brilliant mind like yours, here, to straighten things out!!!

Geeeezzzzz...folks might believe the 'truly ignorant' otherwise!


BTW....every word between the quotation marks was written by Mr. Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge Press, 2001) and "Cool It" (Knopf, 2007).


Heck...you should get in touch with him forthwith!
He'd certainly benefit from knowing that he is 'truly ignorant.'

Mr. Lomborg has been informed repeatedly that he is truly ignorant but like most politically motivated deniers, he is oblivious to the deficiencies in his knowledge. He is not a climate scientist. His degrees are in so-called 'political science'.

Bjørn Lomborg[/SIZE]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author, academic, and environmental writer. He is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.

On 6 January 2003 the DCSD reached a decision on the complaints. The ruling sent a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question:[8]

Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty. ...In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg's publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterization. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.​

The DCSD cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:

* Fabrication of data;
* Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
* Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
* Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
* Plagiarism;
* Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.​

Copenhagen Consensus[/SIZE]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Copenhagen Consensus is a project that seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. It was conceived[1] and organized by Bjørn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the then director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute. The project is run by the Copenhagen Consensus Center,[2] which is directed by Lomborg and was part of the Copenhagen Business School, but it is now an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation registered in the USA.

Criticism

The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus attracted various criticisms.

Approach and alleged bias

The 2004 report, especially its conclusion regarding climate change was subsequently criticised from a variety of perspectives. The general approach adopted to set priorities was criticised by Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and advocate of both the Kyoto protocol [29] and increased development aid, who argued that the analytical framework was inappropriate and biased and that the project "failed to mobilize an expert group that could credibly identify and communicate a true consensus of expert knowledge on the range of issues under consideration.".[30]

Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth, repudiated the entire approach of the project, arguing that applying cost-benefit analysis in the way the Copenhagen panel did was "junk economics".[31]

John Quiggin, an Australian economics professor, commented that the project is a mix of "a substantial contribution to our understanding of important issues facing the world" and an "exercises in political propaganda" and argued that the selection of the panel members was slanted towards the conclusions previously supported by Lomborg.[32] Quiggin observed that Lomborg had argued in his controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist that resources allocated to mitigating global warming would be better spent on improving water quality and sanitation, and was therefore seen as having prejudged the issues.

Under the heading "Wrong Question", Sachs further argued that: "The panel that drew up the Copenhagen Consensus was asked to allocate an additional US$50 billion in spending by wealthy countries, distributed over five years, to address the world’s biggest problems. This was a poor basis for decision-making and for informing the public. By choosing such a low sum — a tiny fraction of global income — the project inherently favoured specific low-cost schemes over bolder, larger projects. It is therefore no surprise that the huge and complex challenge of long-term climate change was ranked last, and that scaling up health services in poor countries was ranked lower than interventions against specific diseases, despite warnings in the background papers that such interventions require broader improvements in health services."

From a purely mathematical point, if economic growth is projected far enough into the future, it will always be better to postpone difficult and expensive problems (like climate change) until an unspecified point in the future when we are much richer than today and have more abundant resources available to solve the problem in question. Projecting a paltry 1.5% rate of economic growth one hundred years into the future implies that the global economy will more than fourfold in size and that any large and expensive project should be handled at that time or later. On the other hand, the use of a smaller 1.5% discount rate, rather than a larger discount rate, ironically actually increases the present costs of global warming that occur to future generations, so choosing a larger discount rate would actually make the problem of global warming smaller today, since it is generally understood that the majority of costs of global warming will result in the future, not the present. So it is not entirely clear that Cline was wrong to choose a smaller discount rate of 1.5%. If climate change is posited to have dire economic consequences and negative implications for economic growth long before that point in time, it might have been judged to be a more immediate problem by the Copenhagen Consensus. By not including any negative feedback loops on the world economy from not solving the issue of climate change, the Copenhagen Consensus implicitly states that it does not matter - from an economic point of view - if we solve climate change or not.

One of the Copenhagen Consensus panel experts later distanced himself from the way in which the Consensus results have been interpreted in the wider debate. Thomas Schelling now thinks that it was misleading to put climate change at the bottom of the priority list. The Consensus panel members were presented with a dramatic proposal for handling climate change. If given the opportunity, Schelling would have put a more modest proposal higher on the list. The Yale economist Robert O. Mendelsohn was the official critic of the proposal for climate change during the Consensus. He thought the proposal was way out of the mainstream and could only be rejected. Mendelsohn worries that climate change was set up to fail. [34]

Michael Grubb, an economist and lead author for several IPCC reports, commented on the Copenhagen Consensus, writing:[35]

To try and define climate policy as a trade-off against foreign aid is thus a forced choice that bears no relationship to reality. No government is proposing that the marginal costs associated with, for example, an emissions trading system, should be deducted from its foreign aid budget. This way of posing the question is both morally inappropriate and irrelevant to the determination of real climate mitigation policy.​

Panel membership

Quiggin argued that the members of the 2004 panel, selected by Lomborg, were, "generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto.".[32] Sachs also noted that the panel members had not previously been much involved in issues of development economics, and were unlikely to reach useful conclusions in the time available to them.[30] Commenting on the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus, climatologist and IPCC author Stephen Schneider criticised Lomborg for only inviting economists to participate:[36]

In order to achieve a true consensus, I think Lomborg would've had to invite ecologists, social scientists concerned with justice and how climate change impacts and policies are often inequitably distributed, philosophers who could challenge the economic paradigm of "one dollar, one vote" implicit in cost-benefit analyses promoted by economists, and climate scientists who could easily show that Lomborg's claim that climate change will have only minimal effects is not sound science.​

THE LOMBORG-ERRORS WEB SITE


***

Your large font is irritating. It takes too long to scroll past.

 

[RollingThunder]

Thank goodness we have a brilliant mind like yours, here, to straighten things out!!!

Geeeezzzzz...folks might believe the 'truly ignorant' otherwise!


BTW....every word between the quotation marks was written by Mr. Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge Press, 2001) and "Cool It" (Knopf, 2007).


Heck...you should get in touch with him forthwith!
He'd certainly benefit from knowing that he is 'truly ignorant.'

Mr. Lomborg has been informed repeatedly that he is truly ignorant but like most politically motivated deniers, he is oblivious to the deficiencies in his knowledge. He is not a climate scientist. His degrees are in so-called 'political science'.

Bjørn Lomborg[/SIZE]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author, academic, and environmental writer. He is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.

On 6 January 2003 the DCSD reached a decision on the complaints. The ruling sent a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question:[8]

Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty. ...In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg's publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterization. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.​

The DCSD cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:

* Fabrication of data;
* Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
* Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
* Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
* Plagiarism;
* Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.​

Copenhagen Consensus[/SIZE]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Copenhagen Consensus is a project that seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. It was conceived[1] and organized by Bjørn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the then director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute. The project is run by the Copenhagen Consensus Center,[2] which is directed by Lomborg and was part of the Copenhagen Business School, but it is now an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation registered in the USA.

Criticism

The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus attracted various criticisms.

Approach and alleged bias

The 2004 report, especially its conclusion regarding climate change was subsequently criticised from a variety of perspectives. The general approach adopted to set priorities was criticised by Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and advocate of both the Kyoto protocol [29] and increased development aid, who argued that the analytical framework was inappropriate and biased and that the project "failed to mobilize an expert group that could credibly identify and communicate a true consensus of expert knowledge on the range of issues under consideration.".[30]

Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth, repudiated the entire approach of the project, arguing that applying cost-benefit analysis in the way the Copenhagen panel did was "junk economics".[31]

John Quiggin, an Australian economics professor, commented that the project is a mix of "a substantial contribution to our understanding of important issues facing the world" and an "exercises in political propaganda" and argued that the selection of the panel members was slanted towards the conclusions previously supported by Lomborg.[32] Quiggin observed that Lomborg had argued in his controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist that resources allocated to mitigating global warming would be better spent on improving water quality and sanitation, and was therefore seen as having prejudged the issues.

Under the heading "Wrong Question", Sachs further argued that: "The panel that drew up the Copenhagen Consensus was asked to allocate an additional US$50 billion in spending by wealthy countries, distributed over five years, to address the world’s biggest problems. This was a poor basis for decision-making and for informing the public. By choosing such a low sum — a tiny fraction of global income — the project inherently favoured specific low-cost schemes over bolder, larger projects. It is therefore no surprise that the huge and complex challenge of long-term climate change was ranked last, and that scaling up health services in poor countries was ranked lower than interventions against specific diseases, despite warnings in the background papers that such interventions require broader improvements in health services."

From a purely mathematical point, if economic growth is projected far enough into the future, it will always be better to postpone difficult and expensive problems (like climate change) until an unspecified point in the future when we are much richer than today and have more abundant resources available to solve the problem in question. Projecting a paltry 1.5% rate of economic growth one hundred years into the future implies that the global economy will more than fourfold in size and that any large and expensive project should be handled at that time or later. On the other hand, the use of a smaller 1.5% discount rate, rather than a larger discount rate, ironically actually increases the present costs of global warming that occur to future generations, so choosing a larger discount rate would actually make the problem of global warming smaller today, since it is generally understood that the majority of costs of global warming will result in the future, not the present. So it is not entirely clear that Cline was wrong to choose a smaller discount rate of 1.5%. If climate change is posited to have dire economic consequences and negative implications for economic growth long before that point in time, it might have been judged to be a more immediate problem by the Copenhagen Consensus. By not including any negative feedback loops on the world economy from not solving the issue of climate change, the Copenhagen Consensus implicitly states that it does not matter - from an economic point of view - if we solve climate change or not.

One of the Copenhagen Consensus panel experts later distanced himself from the way in which the Consensus results have been interpreted in the wider debate. Thomas Schelling now thinks that it was misleading to put climate change at the bottom of the priority list. The Consensus panel members were presented with a dramatic proposal for handling climate change. If given the opportunity, Schelling would have put a more modest proposal higher on the list. The Yale economist Robert O. Mendelsohn was the official critic of the proposal for climate change during the Consensus. He thought the proposal was way out of the mainstream and could only be rejected. Mendelsohn worries that climate change was set up to fail. [34]

Michael Grubb, an economist and lead author for several IPCC reports, commented on the Copenhagen Consensus, writing:[35]

To try and define climate policy as a trade-off against foreign aid is thus a forced choice that bears no relationship to reality. No government is proposing that the marginal costs associated with, for example, an emissions trading system, should be deducted from its foreign aid budget. This way of posing the question is both morally inappropriate and irrelevant to the determination of real climate mitigation policy.​

Panel membership

Quiggin argued that the members of the 2004 panel, selected by Lomborg, were, "generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto.".[32] Sachs also noted that the panel members had not previously been much involved in issues of development economics, and were unlikely to reach useful conclusions in the time available to them.[30] Commenting on the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus, climatologist and IPCC author Stephen Schneider criticised Lomborg for only inviting economists to participate:[36]

In order to achieve a true consensus, I think Lomborg would've had to invite ecologists, social scientists concerned with justice and how climate change impacts and policies are often inequitably distributed, philosophers who could challenge the economic paradigm of "one dollar, one vote" implicit in cost-benefit analyses promoted by economists, and climate scientists who could easily show that Lomborg's claim that climate change will have only minimal effects is not sound science.​

THE LOMBORG-ERRORS WEB SITE


***

Your large font is irritating. It takes too long to scroll past.

Says the retard who didn't bother reading it. And who apparently is too stupid to use the slider on the right side of his screen to move down the page with lightening speed.

 

[skookerasbil]

Mr. Lomborg has been informed repeatedly that he is truly ignorant but like most politically motivated deniers, he is oblivious to the deficiencies in his knowledge. He is not a climate scientist. His degrees are in so-called 'political science'.

Bjørn Lomborg[/SIZE]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author, academic, and environmental writer. He is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.

On 6 January 2003 the DCSD reached a decision on the complaints. The ruling sent a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question:[8]

Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty. ...In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg's publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterization. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.​

The DCSD cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:

* Fabrication of data;
* Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
* Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
* Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
* Plagiarism;
* Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.​

Copenhagen Consensus[/SIZE]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Copenhagen Consensus is a project that seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. It was conceived[1] and organized by Bjørn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the then director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute. The project is run by the Copenhagen Consensus Center,[2] which is directed by Lomborg and was part of the Copenhagen Business School, but it is now an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation registered in the USA.

Criticism

The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus attracted various criticisms.

Approach and alleged bias

The 2004 report, especially its conclusion regarding climate change was subsequently criticised from a variety of perspectives. The general approach adopted to set priorities was criticised by Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and advocate of both the Kyoto protocol [29] and increased development aid, who argued that the analytical framework was inappropriate and biased and that the project "failed to mobilize an expert group that could credibly identify and communicate a true consensus of expert knowledge on the range of issues under consideration.".[30]

Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth, repudiated the entire approach of the project, arguing that applying cost-benefit analysis in the way the Copenhagen panel did was "junk economics".[31]

John Quiggin, an Australian economics professor, commented that the project is a mix of "a substantial contribution to our understanding of important issues facing the world" and an "exercises in political propaganda" and argued that the selection of the panel members was slanted towards the conclusions previously supported by Lomborg.[32] Quiggin observed that Lomborg had argued in his controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist that resources allocated to mitigating global warming would be better spent on improving water quality and sanitation, and was therefore seen as having prejudged the issues.

Under the heading "Wrong Question", Sachs further argued that: "The panel that drew up the Copenhagen Consensus was asked to allocate an additional US$50 billion in spending by wealthy countries, distributed over five years, to address the world’s biggest problems. This was a poor basis for decision-making and for informing the public. By choosing such a low sum — a tiny fraction of global income — the project inherently favoured specific low-cost schemes over bolder, larger projects. It is therefore no surprise that the huge and complex challenge of long-term climate change was ranked last, and that scaling up health services in poor countries was ranked lower than interventions against specific diseases, despite warnings in the background papers that such interventions require broader improvements in health services."

From a purely mathematical point, if economic growth is projected far enough into the future, it will always be better to postpone difficult and expensive problems (like climate change) until an unspecified point in the future when we are much richer than today and have more abundant resources available to solve the problem in question. Projecting a paltry 1.5% rate of economic growth one hundred years into the future implies that the global economy will more than fourfold in size and that any large and expensive project should be handled at that time or later. On the other hand, the use of a smaller 1.5% discount rate, rather than a larger discount rate, ironically actually increases the present costs of global warming that occur to future generations, so choosing a larger discount rate would actually make the problem of global warming smaller today, since it is generally understood that the majority of costs of global warming will result in the future, not the present. So it is not entirely clear that Cline was wrong to choose a smaller discount rate of 1.5%. If climate change is posited to have dire economic consequences and negative implications for economic growth long before that point in time, it might have been judged to be a more immediate problem by the Copenhagen Consensus. By not including any negative feedback loops on the world economy from not solving the issue of climate change, the Copenhagen Consensus implicitly states that it does not matter - from an economic point of view - if we solve climate change or not.

One of the Copenhagen Consensus panel experts later distanced himself from the way in which the Consensus results have been interpreted in the wider debate. Thomas Schelling now thinks that it was misleading to put climate change at the bottom of the priority list. The Consensus panel members were presented with a dramatic proposal for handling climate change. If given the opportunity, Schelling would have put a more modest proposal higher on the list. The Yale economist Robert O. Mendelsohn was the official critic of the proposal for climate change during the Consensus. He thought the proposal was way out of the mainstream and could only be rejected. Mendelsohn worries that climate change was set up to fail. [34]

Michael Grubb, an economist and lead author for several IPCC reports, commented on the Copenhagen Consensus, writing:[35]

To try and define climate policy as a trade-off against foreign aid is thus a forced choice that bears no relationship to reality. No government is proposing that the marginal costs associated with, for example, an emissions trading system, should be deducted from its foreign aid budget. This way of posing the question is both morally inappropriate and irrelevant to the determination of real climate mitigation policy.​

Panel membership

Quiggin argued that the members of the 2004 panel, selected by Lomborg, were, "generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto.".[32] Sachs also noted that the panel members had not previously been much involved in issues of development economics, and were unlikely to reach useful conclusions in the time available to them.[30] Commenting on the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus, climatologist and IPCC author Stephen Schneider criticised Lomborg for only inviting economists to participate:[36]

In order to achieve a true consensus, I think Lomborg would've had to invite ecologists, social scientists concerned with justice and how climate change impacts and policies are often inequitably distributed, philosophers who could challenge the economic paradigm of "one dollar, one vote" implicit in cost-benefit analyses promoted by economists, and climate scientists who could easily show that Lomborg's claim that climate change will have only minimal effects is not sound science.​

THE LOMBORG-ERRORS WEB SITE


***

Your large font is irritating. It takes too long to scroll past.

Says the retard who didn't bother reading it. And who apparently is too stupid to use the slider on the right side of his screen to move down the page with lightening speed.

These people are the most miserable fucks on the planet. They fall all over themseves, for years now, telling people about the "consensus" and they have yet to budge the goalposts a single inch.




L O S E

 

[ima]

And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar.

Fueling???
Recharging???
Here's some news:
1. An electric car requires an array of battery cells, almost 500 pounds worth. http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Battery-and-Electric-Vehicle-Report-FINAL.pdf
a. GM’s EV1 NiMH (nickel metal hydride) weighed in at 1,150-1,400 pounds. Nickel Metal Hydride | GREENDUMP and Berezow, Op.Cit., p. 99.
b. The Chevy Volt has a lithium-ion battery that weights in at 435 pounds. GM press release: CHEVROLET VOLT’S REVOLUTIONARY VOLTEC ELECTRIC DRIVE SYSTEM DELIVERS EFFICIENCY WITH PERFORMANCE
2. The batteries are expensive, listed at $3,000-$4,000. Prius hybrid owners have been quoted at $7,000 and up. Behind the Hidden Costs of Hybrids - HybridCars.com
a. It is unclear what replacement cost will be when labor is included.
3. Since the battery’s ability to recharge declines with use, it must be replaced at about 100,000 miles. And the nickel metal hydride leaks energy- about 20 percent of capacity within the first 24 hours.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/Nickel_based_batteriesbnn
4. The batteries pose a dramatic detrimental effect on the environment due to polytetrafluoroethylene binder and nickel foam materials. Life cycle environmental assessme... preview & related info | Mendeley
5. Basically, electric vehicles are dragging a lot of extra weight made of toxic materials in order to use stored energy that combustion vehicles can simply generate on the go. Berezow, Op. Cit., p.66.
"And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar."

Really?
How's yours workin' out?
What???
You didn't get one???
I get it...waitin' for the other simpletons to get 'em.....
Better not buy a used one: replacing those batteries is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.....
But...."the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar."
Sure.

Polchic, you sure are a dumbass and aren't afraid to show it. Sure electric cars aren't perfect these days, but the research... is going in the right direction. Sooner or later on this planet, we'll run out of fossil fuels and will need other ways to get around. Electric vehicles, possibly recharged by the sun in the future, are an excellent goal for ceasing to use oil. Sure, electricity is made with fossil fuels in a lot of places, but a lot of places have hydro-electricity already, and the prospect of refuelling your car with solar power is very cool.

PS do you think that maybe if you got laid properly that you wouldn't be so ornery all the time?

 

[PoliticalChic]

Lithium mining. Lordy, lordy, PC, you are truly ignorant. Perhaps you should do a little investigating in how they 'mine' lithium.

Thank goodness we have a brilliant mind like yours, here, to straighten things out!!!

Geeeezzzzz...folks might believe the 'truly ignorant' otherwise!


BTW....every word between the quotation marks was written by Mr. Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge Press, 2001) and "Cool It" (Knopf, 2007).


Heck...you should get in touch with him forthwith!
He'd certainly benefit from knowing that he is 'truly ignorant.'

Mr. Lomborg has been informed repeatedly that he is truly ignorant but like most politically motivated deniers, he is oblivious to the deficiencies in his knowledge. He is not a climate scientist. His degrees are in so-called 'political science'.

Bjørn Lomborg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author, academic, and environmental writer. He is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned an M.A. degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in political science at the University of Copenhagen in 1994.

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific dishonesty. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.



Copenhagen Consensus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Copenhagen Consensus is a project that seeks to establish priorities for advancing global welfare using methodologies based on the theory of welfare economics. It was conceived[1] and organized by Bjørn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the then director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute. The project is run by the Copenhagen Consensus Center,[2] which is directed by Lomborg and was part of the Copenhagen Business School, but it is now an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation registered in the USA.

Criticism

The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus attracted various criticisms.

Approach and alleged bias

The 2004 report, especially its conclusion regarding climate change was subsequently criticised from a variety of perspectives. The general approach adopted to set priorities was criticised by Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and advocate of both the Kyoto protocol [29] and increased development aid, who argued that the analytical framework was inappropriate and biased and that the project "failed to mobilize an expert group that could credibly identify and communicate a true consensus of expert knowledge on the range of issues under consideration.".[30]

Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth, repudiated the entire approach of the project, arguing that applying cost-benefit analysis in the way the Copenhagen panel did was "junk economics".[31]

John Quiggin, an Australian economics professor, commented that the project is a mix of "a substantial contribution to our understanding of important issues facing the world" and an "exercises in political propaganda" and argued that the selection of the panel members was slanted towards the conclusions previously supported by Lomborg.[32] Quiggin observed that Lomborg had argued in his controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist that resources allocated to mitigating global warming would be better spent on improving water quality and sanitation, and was therefore seen as having prejudged the issues.


THE LOMBORG-ERRORS WEB SITE


***

So.....where are the errors in his article in the WSJ?

You may need bigger font to make sure everyone gets your drift.


Did you miss them.....or aren't there any errors?

You mean Lomborg is correct in everything he said????

Wow....




There's a lot of money riding on the global warming scam.....

....and lots of folks buying it like it was on sale.

 

[PoliticalChic]

LOL.........there are like 178 electric cars on US roads today. And the outlook is......ummm.......dim!!!

Not to mention that every single poll ever done clearly displays that Americans arent interested in electric cars. Six in 10 Americans say no to electric cars (poll) | Reuters....NO MATTER WHAT

Shit....the just did a test trying to drive a Volt from DC to New York and it made it a few miles and the damn thing died because it was cold and they had to use heat = dead battery in the time it takes me to type this!!!

I'll second that.


USA Today -- Nearly six of 10 Americans — 57% — say they won't buy an all-electric car no matter the price of gas, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

That's a stiff headwind just as automakers are developing electrics to help meet tighter federal rules that could require their fleets to average as high as 62 miles per gallon in 2025. And President Obama has set a goal of a million electric vehicles in use in the U.S. by 2015.

The anti-electric sentiment unmasked by the poll shows that pure electrics — defined in the poll question as "an electric car that you could only drive for a limited number of miles at one time" — could have trouble getting a foothold in the U.S.

Such cars "are very much niche vehicles. They find acceptance among a core group of passionistas, but too many questions remain ..
Researcher J.D. Power and Associates projects sales of pure electrics this year will be 10,727, rising to 95,939 in 2015. Industry estimates for total 2011 light-vehicle sales are in the 13 million range, rising to about 14 million by 2015.
The poll of 1,024 adults nationwide has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. It was done May 12 to 15, when the average gas price was about $3.98. It's now about $3.83.
Americans say 'no' to electrics despite high gas prices - USATODAY.com



Sure would like to know how many electric bumper cars the folks in this thread who support same have purchased.....


....after all, the rest of us are paying them to do so.



Like to see 'em put their dinero where they put their dinner.

 

[PoliticalChic]

And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar.

Fueling???
Recharging???
Here's some news:
1. An electric car requires an array of battery cells, almost 500 pounds worth. http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Battery-and-Electric-Vehicle-Report-FINAL.pdf
a. GM’s EV1 NiMH (nickel metal hydride) weighed in at 1,150-1,400 pounds. Nickel Metal Hydride | GREENDUMP and Berezow, Op.Cit., p. 99.
b. The Chevy Volt has a lithium-ion battery that weights in at 435 pounds. GM press release: CHEVROLET VOLT’S REVOLUTIONARY VOLTEC ELECTRIC DRIVE SYSTEM DELIVERS EFFICIENCY WITH PERFORMANCE
2. The batteries are expensive, listed at $3,000-$4,000. Prius hybrid owners have been quoted at $7,000 and up. Behind the Hidden Costs of Hybrids - HybridCars.com
a. It is unclear what replacement cost will be when labor is included.
3. Since the battery’s ability to recharge declines with use, it must be replaced at about 100,000 miles. And the nickel metal hydride leaks energy- about 20 percent of capacity within the first 24 hours.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/Nickel_based_batteriesbnn
4. The batteries pose a dramatic detrimental effect on the environment due to polytetrafluoroethylene binder and nickel foam materials. Life cycle environmental assessme... preview & related info | Mendeley
5. Basically, electric vehicles are dragging a lot of extra weight made of toxic materials in order to use stored energy that combustion vehicles can simply generate on the go. Berezow, Op. Cit., p.66.
"And the EV's are not only here to stay, but they will give the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar."

Really?
How's yours workin' out?
What???
You didn't get one???
I get it...waitin' for the other simpletons to get 'em.....
Better not buy a used one: replacing those batteries is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.....
But...."the homeowner the independence of fueling his own vehicle with solar."
Sure.

Polchic, you sure are a dumbass and aren't afraid to show it. Sure electric cars aren't perfect these days, but the research... is going in the right direction. Sooner or later on this planet, we'll run out of fossil fuels and will need other ways to get around. Electric vehicles, possibly recharged by the sun in the future, are an excellent goal for ceasing to use oil. Sure, electricity is made with fossil fuels in a lot of places, but a lot of places have hydro-electricity already, and the prospect of refuelling your car with solar power is very cool.

PS do you think that maybe if you got laid properly that you wouldn't be so ornery all the time?

Seems to be a rule: if you have no point, no brains.....resort to the vulgar.



So.....

....how many electric cars do you own?





Now, take a lesson here. This is the way a scholar does it.
I'm gonna roll you up and smoke you like a Cuban cigar:

"Sooner or later on this planet, we'll run out of fossil fuels"

1. The Leftist elites in Washington have artificially restricted American energy resources, from a 25-year ban on offshore drilling to a de facto ban on nuclear energy. The energy crisis created by environmental extremists, politicians, and bureaucrats who, for ideological reasons, favor high energy prices and severely limited energy consumption. And the cost of this policy is foreign imports, loss of American jobs, and American reliance on foreign dictatorships.


2. There is every reason to believe that we have far more energy reserves than the government estimates.

a. The 2008 USGS assessment estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the U.S. portion of the Bakken Formation, elevating it to a “world-class” accumulation. The estimate had a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. The USGS routinely conducts updates to oil and gas assessments when significant new information is available, such as new understanding of a resource basin’s geology or when advances in technology occur for drilling and production…. The 2008 USGS assessment showed a 25-fold increase in the amount of technically recoverable oil as compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.
http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleas...a-will-be-updated-by-US-Geological-Survey.cfm

b. Oil giant BP says it has made a "giant" new oil discovery in its fields in the Gulf of Mexico…. BP said the discovery, amounting to more than three billion barrels, would "support the continuing growth of our deepwater Gulf of Mexico business into the second half of the next decade".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8233504.stm

c. According to the US Geological Survey, the Arctic sea floor has 13% of the world's undiscovered "conventional" oil reserves and 30% of undiscovered natural-gas reserves.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Drilling-Trade-Offs-Keystone-for-Alaska.html

d. The Marcellus Shale [Pennsylvania, Oho, New York] could be one of the USA's most promising natural gas ...that the Marcellus might contain more than 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. ...
http://geology.com/articles/marcellus-shale.shtml