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In praise of the Green Revolution Here’s a piece I wrote for a Times supplement published yesterday in print, not available online. In the twentieth century, the world population quadrupled. By the 1960s, it was growing at 2% a year. Yet, unlike the nineteenth century when the prairies, pampas and steppes had been brought under […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal, with added links: It’s presumably neither ethical nor practical, but supposing that somebody could sequence Osama bin Laden’s genome, which genes would you want to examine to try to understand his violent desires? I put this question to the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the author […]

Random thoughts on gas, songs, weather, walls and dead flies I wrote this week’s Spectator diary (no link yet): A day in London for the launch of my new report `The Shale Gas Shock’, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I argue that shale gas calls the bluff of the renewable energy movement in […]

I stumbled on a BBC television program this evening (watch it here), which was unintentionally revealing. It was a compilation of extracts over several decades from its flagship science series `Horizon’, all on the theme of the `end of the world’. The episodes covered asteroids, supervolcanoes, contagious earthquakes, bird flu, the Y2K computer bug, the greenhouse […]

New technologies raise living standards, not when they are invented but when their cost falls within most people’s range My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is about the innovation that leads to the cheapening of technologies, as opposed to the invention that leads to new technologies. Cheapeners deserve as much credit […]

I published an article in The Times this week about fossil fuel reserves: Booming demand and stagnant supply drove oil prices to $125 a barrel last week. Is this a sign that fossil fuels are running out? It is more likely a sign that the cheap-oil age is giving way to the cheap-gas age. As the […]

Yes, it really will change the world energy scene, mainly because it is low-cost Read my report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on The Shale Gas Shock here. The foreword is by Freeman Dyson. This is the summary Shale gas is proving to be an abundant new source of energy in the United States. Because […]

The Rational Optimist has won the Hayek Prize from the Manhattan Institute. I will be giving the Hayek Lecture when I accept the prize later in the year. The Hayek Prize honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty. The Hayek Prize, with its $50,000 […]

I don’t have terribly strong views on the alternative-vote referendum that Britain holds this week. But I found this radio exchange on the BBC between John Humphreys and the prime minister, David Cameron, remarkable. If even Humphreys does not know how the system would allow the second votes of extremists to be counted more than those […]

Food that can be stored can be traded and trade leads to democracy My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on grain, fruit and the economic underpinnings of democracy. When I was young, I had a mug on a shelf in my bedroom, and on it was a poem about a […]