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The Government’s half-hearted support for the process is denying us a huge chance to progress My article, for The Telegraph: The Government wants to unleash innovation. If it were to be presented with a magic wand that could by 2040 feed millions more people, avoid tens of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and […]

This current crisis is a mere harbinger of the candle-lit future that awaits us if we do not change course My article for The Daily Mail: Had it not been so exceptionally calm in the run up to this autumn equinox, one could call the energy crisis a perfect storm. Wind farms stand idle for […]

My article for Spectator: With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled […]

Future technology that could power a city with a device the size of a shipping container may prove a better bet than harnessing the wind My article for Telegraph: In a key milestone on the road to harnessing fusion power, Lawrence Livermore laboratory announced this week that it had extracted energy from an object the […]

“Rewilding” is fashionable but there is more to it than letting Nature run free My article for The Critic: Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife […]

Lobsters and the like are given no more protection from cruelty under this legislation but bureaucrats will thrive on it My article for the Times: Like a lobster in boiling water, a parliamentary bill on animal sentience is being tortured in the House of Lords. The problem is political rather than ethical. Nobody objects to […]

Why did scientists suddenly change their minds about the possibility of a leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology? Jeremy Farrar offers no good answers My article for Spectator: Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me. I thought, probably like most people, that […]

The doomsday claims are not backed up by scientific research My article for the Telegraph: On Twitter this week an unfortunate hiker showed a short video of the midges swarming in their tens of thousands over his backpack and his arms in the Scottish Highlands. It was itchy just to watch. It would be silly […]

My article for Spectator: It is mystifying to me that organic food is still widely seen as healthier, more sustainable and, most absurdly, safer than non-organic food. Following the publication of part two of Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy last week, the organic movement was quick to suggest that organic food and farming offer a […]

The ‘great stagnation’ is a myth; wonders are being accomplished. But silly rules still block progress. My article for the Telegraph: Back in the early 1950s scientists were baffled by one aspect of life itself. Our cells were full of proteins whose properties depended on their precise shapes, and the key feature of life was […]