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No-take zones and marine reserves are needed, because over-fishing is key My Times column on fish and oceans: The decision to create the world’s largest marine reserve around Pitcairn Islands seems to have taken campaigners by surprise. Environmentalists and celebrities had been pushing for this reserve and others in British overseas territories (around Ascension Island […]

Getting emissions down is not going to be easy My Times column on carbon capture: Carbon dioxide is not the most urgent problem facing humanity, compared with war, extremism, poverty and disease. But most presidents, popes and film stars think it is, so I must be wrong. For the purposes of this article let’s assume […]

Their energy makes the difference between misery and prosperity This essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal and later in shorter form in the Sunday Times The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources […]

Booming cereal yields are good for the planet, but Europe lags behind My Times column on farm yields and land sparing: If something drops out of the news, it usually means it is going well. Mad cow disease killed nobody last year; Mozambique and Angola are growing their economies at a furious lick; the Somerset […]

Public bodies are often immortal in a way that private ones rarely are My latest column in The Times: The latest report into Jimmy Savile’s astonishing freedom to roam the wards of Stoke Mandeville hospital will not lead to the end of the National Health Service. Nor will the forthcoming report that apparently finds a “systemic […]

If it won’t reform, then it should devalue My Times column on Greece: For an expert on game theory, Yanis Varoufakis, the Essex University-trained economics professor turned Greek finance minister, does not seem very good at negotiating. His style reminds me of the old joke about playing chess with a pigeon: it knocks over the […]

Consumers are the ones that benefit from buying what they want My Times column on free trade: An American friend recently sent me a gift as a thank you for a weekend’s hospitality. It arrived in the form of a card from the Post Office telling me to pay a hefty sum of tax before […]

Prices may have fallen, but it’s the cleanest and safest of fossil fuels My Times column on shale gas: I don’t know about you, but I have been especially glad of my gas-fired central heating and hot water in the past few frigid weeks. Gas really is rather special: it provides us in this country […]

If it is safe, then we should not prevent families using it My Times column on Britain’s impending decision to allow mitochondrial donation: Tomorrow’s vote in the House of Commons on whether to allow mitochondrial donation has at least flushed out the churches. Both the Catholic and Anglican churches have decided that it is not […]

A book about bitcoin’s implications My review of the book Cryptocurrency appeared in the Times: When the internet started, few guessed how it would develop. I remember reviewing a string of books in the early 1990s arguing that it would lead to atomised and isolated lives, cut off from social contact. Social media put paid […]