False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet

by Bjørn Lomborg

The sheer scale of battery storage capacity that would be needed for solar power to work is vastly underappreciated: today the United States has enough batteries across the entire nation to store just fourteen seconds of average US electricity use.5 These fundamental economic and technological challenges are why no big nation in the world is anywhere close to seeing new renewable energy do more than nibble at the edges of energy consumption. This is clear when you look at the share of renewable electricity from all sources in the US. Wind power produced less than 7 percent of US electricity in 2018, and solar power less than 2 percent. In total, renewable energy sources produced 17 percent of the United States’ electricity, but most of this came from old renewables, with the majority coming from reliable hydroelectricity.