Eating your greenery — and having it too

Matt Ridley

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Driving home the other day it occurred to me that almost none of the greenery I could see-trees, garden shrubs, grass shoulders on the highway-was going to be used by humans for food, fuel, clothing or shelter. That would not have been true 500 years […]

Unbleached if not unblemished

Matt Ridley

New  evidence has been published that the Great Barrier Reef is not in trouble from climate change. The effects of bleaching are short-lived and reversible. When I said this in my book, I was patronised from a great height by a bunch of marine biologists in New Scientist. Will they, and New Scientist, now apologise? […]

Politics clothed in science

Matt Ridley

Walter Russell Mead is always worth reading. Now he has written a two-part essay on Al Gore and the climate debate (part one; part two) that is, I think, very perceptive. It is angry, hard-hitting, and I don’t agree with everything in it, but it somehow gets to to the core of the issue in a […]

Another long listing

Matt Ridley

The Royal Society Book prize The Rational Optimist is one of 13 books long-listed for the Royal Society Book prize for science books. If I make it to the shortlist, this will be my fifth time on this shortlist. (I have yet to win, though!)  

Evolving cures cancer

Matt Ridley

Tumours evolve — so must cancer cures My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on cancer and evolution by natural selection: Last week the American Cancer Society reported that death rates from cancer are falling steadily, at an annual rate of about 1.9% in men and 1.5% in women. A study […]

The vested interests in doom

Matt Ridley

How the left discovered pessimism Here is an op-ed I wrote for today’s Australian newspaper: POLLYANNA is a fool; Cassandra was wise. As a self-proclaimed “rational optimist” who argues that the world has been getting better for most people and that the future is likely to be better still, I am up against a deep prejudice […]

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The case of the missing jetpacks

Matt Ridley

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on how the future turns out: Last month a crash dummy flew to 5,000 feet above ground level in a personal jet pack. The inventor, New Zealander Glenn Martin, has spent decades on the project and is ready to start selling the device for […]

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The silence of the media and activists is deafening

Matt Ridley

More people died of organic, local e coli than at Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon combined, yet the outrage is absent From  Andrew Bolt: Rich Fisher: One German organic farm has killed twice as many people as the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf Oil spill combined. crickets. Hello? Environmental groups?  Journalists? Hello?

The precautionary principle does not take into account the deaths caused by NOT adopting a new technology

Matt Ridley

Were E coli deaths preventable with food irradiation? My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street Journal is about the precautionary principle as exemplified by the German e coli outbreak, which has now killed 29. Less precaution about new technology might have meant fewer deaths: A technology that might have prevented contaminated produce […]

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