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Decoupling human activity from land and wildlife helps nature My review in The Times of Dieter Helm’s book Natural Capital: The easiest way to get a round of applause at a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. Nature-studiers think money-studiers are heartless vandals who demand the rape of Mother Nature […]

Honey bees are increasing, and there’s no evidence of a general decline in My Times column on bee declines and neonicotinoid pesticides: So those beastly farmers want the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides lifted to help them to poison more bees, eh? Britain’s honeybees are supposedly declining and so are our 25 species of bumblebee and […]

Challenging entrenched bureaucracies is what politicians should do My Times column on reform as a political theme: If there is political paralysis on Friday, as seems likely, and given how many of their powers national politicians have anyway passed to bodies like the Bank of England and the European Commission, perhaps we can look forward […]

Without coalition, the Conservatives will be greatly outnumbered in the Upper House   My Times column on a perverse outcome of the election: In one respect last week’s election result has made David Cameron’s life more difficult. While gaining seats in the Commons from the Liberal Democrats, he has effectively lost them in the Lords. […]

Mass migrations, mixed matings and rapid evolution are common themes My Saturday essay in the Wall Street Journal: Imagine what it must have been like to look through the first telescopes or the first microscopes, or to see the bottom of the sea as clearly as if the water were gin. This is how students […]

There really is a trade-off: denying aid for fossil fuels hurts the poor My column in The Times is on the undeniable truth that western countries are preventing Africans getting access to the cheapest power, which is fossil-fuelled. In what is probably the silliest comment on climate since a Ukip councillor blamed floods on gay […]

Election campaigns ignore what matters most – technological change My Times column argues that only high-tech innovation will give us the cash to fund our future, so why won’t Cameron or Miliband talk about it?   Fifty years ago yesterday, a young computer expert called Gordon Moore pointed out that the number of transistors on […]

Nick Lane’s new book understands how life started as an energy system My review of Nick Lane’s book The Vital Question in The Times: Nick Lane is not just a writer of words about science, he is also a doer of experiments and a thinker of thoughts. And these days he is hot on the […]

It’s kinder to push people into work than to park them on benefits My Times column on Britain’s remarkable and unexpected plunge in unemployment and what lies behind it: Five years ago, almost nobody expected that inflation would vanish, as tomorrow’s figures are expected to show, or that unemployment would plummet, as Friday’s numbers will […]

How the general election could produce a constitutional crisis My Times column on what might happen if the British election prouces a messy result: had a bad dream. It was April 2016. The country was tumbling into a constitutional crisis, dragging the Queen into a gathering storm in the week of her 90th birthday. The […]