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The EU’s absurd risk aversion stifles new ideas
Matt Ridley
Excessive regulation means the health and environmental benefits of new technology are suppressed My article from The Times: With tariffs announced against Brazil and Argentina, and a threat against France, Donald Trump is dragging the world deeper into a damaging trade war. Largely unnoticed, the European Union is also in trouble at the World Trade […]
GM Crops Like Golden Rice Will Save the Lives of Hundreds of Thousands of Children
Matt Ridley
My recent article in Quillette: Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice. If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge […]
Matt Ridley
How cheap energy was killed by Green lies and Russian propaganda My article from The Critic The first coffee house in Marseilles opened in 1671, prompting the city’s vintners to recruit a couple of professors at the University of Aix to blacken their new competitor’s reputation. They duly got one of their students to write […]
Why vaping causes harm in the US but not in the UK
Matt Ridley
It pays to legalise but regulate, rather than prohibit My recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the very different experiences of two countries with respect to electronic cigarettes. Why the U.K. Isn’t Having Problems With Vaping The lessons of Prohibition’s failure in the U.S. haven’t been lost on the British. A woman […]
Matt Ridley
Renewables and austerity can’t decarbonise My Sunday Telegraph article on the need for realism about carbon dioxide targets: If the British government declared the abolition of sin by 2050, commentators would be rightly cynical. The announcement last week that Britain will enact a net-zero carbon target for 2050 was instead welcomed, especially by “faith leaders”. […]
Matt Ridley
Why do people oppose harm reduction technologies? My essay for Freer: Suppose that millions of Britons were driving a dangerous type of car that was killing 80,000 people a year. Suppose somebody invented a new car that was much, much safer, significantly cheaper, and emitted far fewer fumes, while performing just as well. Would you […]
A counsel of despair about the loss of biodiversity is the wrong approach
Matt Ridley
Why are lions decreasing, wolves increasing and tigers holding steady? My article for Reaction on biodiversity: Driven perhaps by envy at the attention that climate change is getting, and ambition to set up a great new intergovernmental body that can fly scientists to mega-conferences, biologists have gone into overdrive on the subject of biodiversity […]
The near misses of scientific history
Matt Ridley
A new book uncovers those who almost found the secret of life My Times review of Gareth Williams’s new book Unravelling The Double Helix. Who discovered DNA? James Watson and Francis Crick, right? Wrong. Eighty years before they even approached the topic, in 1868, a young Swiss researcher, Friedrich Miescher, working at the University […]
Surface mining in Northumberland
Matt Ridley
Economic and environmental benefits of mining go together Blagdon estate has hosted parts of two surface coal mines, at Brenkley and Shotton, for several years. We are proud to have done so mainly because of the jobs provided and the income to the local economy. But environmentally, too, these projects have been very positive. Managed […]
Matt Ridley
How bad science gets used for power and profit by some activists My Spectator article on a surge in medical and environmental pseudoscience: ‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of […]
