Farewell James Lovelock, the green icon who turned his back on modern environmentalism
Matt Ridley
We have lost a unique and truly independent mind. The father of the Gaia thesis grew to mistrust modish greenery The death of James Lovelock on his 103rd birthday brings to an end one of the most original lives this planet has seen. He filled his century on Earth with ingenuity and never wasted a […]
Eco-extremism has brought Sri Lanka to its knees
Matt Ridley
An obsession with organic farming ‘in sync with nature’ triggered an unsustainable but predictable economic crisis My article for The Telegraph: Sri Lanka’s collapse, from one of the fastest growing Asian economies to a political, economic and humanitarian horror show, seems to have taken everybody by surprise. Five years ago, the World Bank was extolling […]
The hair shirt eco-elite don’t want pain-free fusion power
Matt Ridley
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 […]
The WHO is complicit in China’s Winter Olympics smokescreen
Matt Ridley
Will Dr Tedros use the Beijing Games to deliver some home truths to China? Probably not My article for the Telegraph: The news that Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation, is to attend the Winter Olympics in Beijing is baffling on a number of levels. Has he not got a day […]
I was duped by the Covid lab leak deniers
Matt Ridley
That senior scientists saw evidence for theories that they trashed in public has shattered trust in science My article for the Telegraph: Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases […]
Britain’s hubristic green commissars can’t see the wood for the trees
Matt Ridley
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 […]
The Government is still fighting the wrong war on Covid-19
Matt Ridley
Their hasty over-reaction to the arrival of a new variant reflects just how little we truly understand this virus My article for the Telegraph: Here we go again, fighting the last war. Because governments are perceived to have moved too slowly to ban flights when the delta variant arose in India, we jumped into action […]
It’s a danger to the world that the precise origin of Covid-19 remains a mystery
Matt Ridley
Until we can rule out a laboratory origin for Covid, we must act as if it may have happened My article for the Telegraph: It is almost exactly two years since the pandemic began. According to an official document seen by the South China Morning Post, the first retrospectively diagnosed case of Covid in Wuhan […]
We’re wasting our big Brexit gene-editing opportunity
Matt Ridley
The Government’s half-hearted support for the process is denying us a huge chance to progress My article, for The Telegraph: The Government wants to unleash innovation. If it were to be presented with a magic wand that could by 2040 feed millions more people, avoid tens of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and […]
The radical potential of nuclear fusion exposes the folly of our net zero deadline
Matt Ridley
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 […]
