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Appeared in the Telegraph; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/23/green-energy-net-zero-renewables-uk-miliband/   Britain’s net zero plan is to nearly double the demand for electricity (for heating, transport and artificial intelligence) and switch off most of the supply (gas and much of nuclear). If you think that does not add up, you are right. Perhaps Ed (Miliwatt-hour) Miliband is deliberately showing Keir […]

Appeared in The Telegraph; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/12/06/explosive-truth-about-origin-covid-19-emerge/ Trump’s new lieutenants, Jay Bhattacharya and John Ratcliffe, are convinced that a lab leak was probably the source It is now five years since we woke to the news of a new outbreak of infectious pneumonia in China. Retelling the story of those early days of the Covid pandemic helps […]

Appeared in The Telegraph; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/16/time-to-end-ludicrous-cop-jamboree-eco-summit-baku/ Eco-summits in petro-tyrannies sound like something out of a comic novel. Sadly, they are all too real. There is something poetic in the way that the delegates attending the 11-day COP29 climate conference in Baku were forced to listen to their moustachioed autocrat host, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, call […]

How is it possible that the public sector is no more productive today than it was in 1996, before the internet took off? Britain has a chronic productivity problem. As the American economy marches upwards in output per person, Britain limps behind. As Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman have calculated, if GDP per hour […]

Contrary to reports, the evidence still points to a lab leak being the most likely cause of the pandemic No, there is no new evidence that Covid originated with a raccoon dog in a market in Wuhan. The public relations blitz that surrounded the publication this week of a paper in Cell from a team whose previous […]

Green shift is already leaving our energy system hugely vulnerable ‘If Ed Miliband has a plan to deal with the volatility and intermittency of renewable energy, he is yet to reveal it’ Heathcliff O’Malley Energy is already ludicrously expensive. Making it more unreliable will only compound our misery. In November 2021, Storm Arwen gave me a […]

The jabs undoubtedly saved lives, but overblown claims sadly damaged the reputation of vaccination Vaccination is one of mankind’s most miraculous innovations. The eradication of smallpox, and the retreat of measles and other cruel afflictions, mean that vaccines rival sanitation for first prize in the saving of lives. New jabs against malaria and melanoma promise great benefits. […]

Even green campaigners fear they are damaging the planet, consuming land that could be left to nature The actress Tracy Ward objects to her ex-husband the Duke of Beaufort building a 2,000-acre solar farm in Gloucestershire: “Solar panels should be on roofs, along motorways, or industrial sites,” she says. “Be careful what the climate change […]

The current investigation isn’t doing its job. We need a faster, cheaper rival to actually get to the truth. In his excellent 2014 book Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed begins with the story of an airline pilot, Martin Bromiley, whose wife died because of mistakes made by anaesthetists during a routine operation. He set out […]

The jabs undoubtedly saved lives, but overblown claims sadly damaged the reputation of vaccination. Vaccination is one mankind’s most miraculous innovations. The eradication of smallpox, the retreat of measles and other cruel afflictions mean that vaccines rival sanitation for first prize in the saving of human lives. New vaccines against malaria and melanoma promise great […]