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It was always about quitting smoking My Spectator article on meeting the man who invented vaping, Hon Lik.   Few people have heard of Hon Lik, which is a pity because he’s probably saved more lives already than anybody else I have met. Twelve years ago, he invented vaping — the idea of getting nicotine […]

On climate policy, coal, charity and ducks My recent Spectator diary: Martin Williams, former head of the government’s air quality science unit, has declared that the reason we have a problem with air pollution now is that ‘policy has been focused on climate change, and reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of much else, for most […]

Smoking will go the way of the top hat and the crinoline My article in the Spectator (3 May) on vaping versus smoking: If somebody invented a pill that could cure a disease that kills five million people a year worldwide, 100,000 of them in this country, the medical powers that be would surely encourage […]

Global warming looks like it will be cheaper to cope with than to prevent My Spectator article on the IPCC’s new emphasis on adaptation: Nigel Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career as a critic of global warming […]

Home thoughts from abroad After my recent visit to Australia I wrote the diary column in the Australian edition of the Spectator: I flew from London into Sydney, then Melbourne, to make three dinner speeches in a row. Through nerves I never finished the main course of three dinners. Pity, because in my experience Australian […]

Few people know that warming is doing more good than harm My Spectator cover story on the net benefits of climate change. I will post rebuttals to the articles that criticised this piece below.   Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of […]

The cold spring weather and what it means I wrote The Spectator diary column this week: We’ve discovered that we own an island. But dreams of independence and tax-havenry evaporate when we try to picnic there on Easter Sunday: we watch it submerge slowly beneath the incoming tide. It’s a barnacle-encrusted rock, about the size […]

The bureaucracy’s carbon obsession is distracting I have an article in this week’s Spectator about ash trees and exotic pests: I’m pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark’s trees and spreads by air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of […]

Rachel Carson and Al Gore relied on a tobacco denier I have an article in the Spectator drawing attention to the curious fact that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring owed much to a passionate tobacco denier. It’s behind a paywall, but there it is with the sources as links. Hat tip Ron Bailey.   Rachel Carson’s […]

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial […]