Bjorn Lomborg: Gone With The Wind

Efforts to stem global warming have nurtured a strong urge worldwide to deploy renewable energy. As a result, the use of wind turbines has increased ten-fold over the past decade, with wind power often touted as the most cost-effective green opportunity. According to Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s commissioner for climate action, “People should believe that [wind power] is very, very cheap.”

In fact, this is a highly problematic claim. While wind energy is cheaper than other, more ineffective renewables, such as solar, tidal, and ethanol, it is nowhere near competitive. If it were, we wouldn’t have to keep spending significant sums to subsidize it.

William M. Briggs, Statistician » Steven Chu Walks To Work

not to Chu, who like many intelligent people, confuse their ability to know a lot about very little—Chu’s prize was for “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”—into thinking they know a lot about everything. Even this would be okay, except that they conjoin this mistake with the additional belief that people who are not credentialed in knowing a lot about little, know nothing about anything.