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Here is a spectacular speech by my good friend June Arunga, on optimism about Africa. “The broad generalisations that label Africa a continent of failure and business losses are plain wrong. They are part of that same pessimism that insists the only products worth investing in are misery and minerals.”

Mankind enhances natural productivity as well as eats it I have just found at Spiked Online Brendan O’Neill’s superb recent essay on whether the earth is finite, and I heartily recommend it. Here’s a sample: Over the past 200 years, Malthusians have tended to look at people as simply the users-up of scarce resources. They have […]

Some greens have seen the light on nuclear power and GM food. It’s a start. Update: I’d like to add one thing to the story below. Stewart Brand, who I know and admire, played a prominent part in the Channel 4 film. He’s not a `convert’ to these views. He has always been strongly pro-GM […]

An acrostic challenge Here is Sunday’s New York Times variety puzzle whose solution was a nice surprise for me (hat tip Steve Budiansky).

Another environmental cost of wind turbines Tim Worstall has an enlightening essay on his specialist subject, rare earths. Rare-earth minerals are the 15 elements in that funny box at the bottom of the periodic table — known as lanthanides — plus two others. About 95 percent of global production takes place in China, largely at one […]

An advert that advocates blowing up people who disagree with you Yuk. This video was made by an organisation funded partly by the UK taxpayer.

Here’s the text of an opinion piece I wrote, which was published in the Western Daily Press (link to home page, not article itself) this morning to publicise a talk I am giving in Wells Cathedral on Tuesday 14th. Come along if you live nearby for the peculiar sight of me speaking in a church. Will […]

That damned elusive slick I noticed a curious thing recently. The BBC’s coverage of the Gulf oil spill for the last two nights was missing one thing: oil. A reporter went down in a minisubmarine and looked at a pristine coral reef. Newsnight interviewed lawyers, fishermen and politicians. But there was no sign of a […]

A journalism prize to celebrate Frederic Bastiat Frederic Bastiat’s writings are full of brilliant rebukes against the restriction of trade, and the curtailment of human happiness such restrictions always bring. But it is in a discussion around the state funding of the arts that Bastiat most clearly articulates the pessimism behind the bureaucratic state and the […]

Natural variations in ocean pH both in time and space dwarf human-induced trends. Pertinent to my recent response to New Scientist on ocean acidification, Willis Eschenbach has a fascinating piece at Wattsupwiththat on a study of ocean pH along a transect from Hawaii to Alaska. Turns out that the further north you go, the less alkaline the ocean: […]