Bjørn Lomborg

A lot of electric cars are bought as second cars in the US.

So we used to think that they were driven almost as much as a regular car.

It turns out that they're more likely driven less than half as much as regular cars.

So, you know, 89% of all Americans who have an electric car also have a real car that they use for the long trips.

And then they use the electric car for short trips.

89

89%, yeah.

So, so the, the point here is that, that it has, it's one of these things that become more sort of a virtue signal and thing.

And again, look, once electric cars are sufficiently cheap that people will want to buy them, that's great.

And, and they will, you know, do some good for the environment.

But in reality, what we should be focusing on is instead of getting people electric cars in rich countries, where because we're subsidizing typically in many countries, you actually get a sort of sliding scale.

You get more subsidy the more expensive it is.

We sort of subsidize this to very rich people to buy very large Teslas to drive around in.

Whereas what we should be focusing on is perhaps getting electric motorcycles in third world developing cities.

where they would do a lot more good.

They can actually go as far as you need.

There's no worry about running out of them.

And they would obviously, they're much, much more polluting, just air pollution wise.

And they're much cheaper and they use very little battery.

So it's about getting our senses right, but the electric car is not a conversation about is it technically a really good or is it a somewhat good insight.