WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

It’s madness not to frack My article for The Sun: The price of gas is through the roof thanks to Vladimir Putin, who has Europe’s energy market by the throat. Britain is on track to spend a staggering £2BILLION on imported liquefied natural gas from Russia this year as war rages in Ukraine. Household bills […]

My article for Spiked: Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions […]

The green zealots are far more interested in lecturing others than improving lives and the planet through technology My article for The Telegraph: Fusion energy is coming. Last week’s announcement of a significant energy yield from the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire is just a milestone on the path but all the signs are that […]

My article for Spectator: My wife and I were lucky to escape for a long-delayed birdwatching holiday in Kenya over Christmas. To have been warm, sunlit and free while so many in Britain were not won’t endear me to most readers, I realise. Nairobi was rife with Covid and Christmas cancellations devastated the tourism industry. […]

Storm Arwen showed the value of gas stoves and diesel, and the folly of our national forestry policy My article for the Telegraph: The one thing that cheered us Northumbrians up as we waited for power to come back on after Storm Arwen (some wit points out that naming these daughters of Boreas only seems […]

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 […]

Doomsday thinking about the environment has been popular for decades. My article for PERC: In 1980, the year that PERC was founded, I spent three months in the Himalayas working on a wildlife conservation project. The purpose was to do wildlife surveys on behalf of the Indian government in the stunningly beautiful valleys of the […]

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news My article from The Spectator: Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent […]