False Alarm, the book the New York Times doesn’t want you to read

From Alex Epstein, host of Power Hour

On this week’s Power Hour I interview Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, author of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.

As I discussed in my review of the book several weeks ago, I think this is an extremely valuable book, on two counts above all.

1. It documents in case after case how the media and political leaders wildly distort the conclusions of mainstream climate research.
2. It documents in case after case how human adaptation can neutralize climate danger.

The book was recently attacked in a New York Times “review” by the famous near-socialist economist Joseph Stiglitz. Bjorn systematically refuted the pseudo-review on this impressive LinkedIn article.

On the show we discuss:
- How trusted media sources manipulated a climate research paper to predict 187 million climate refugees when the number was actually around 300,000 (half the number of people who move out of California every year) * Why we always need to look for positive and negative impacts, not just one or the other
- How many seconds worth of electricity all of America’s batteries can store today
- The true state of solar and wind in the world today
- How people in developing countries around the world demand “real electricity,” not the meager, unreliable electricity provided by much-heralded solar installations
- The prospects for nuclear energy
- Some of the crude errors of the New York Times review of False Alarm
- How global capitalism will encourage energy progress even when specific technophobic countries reject it