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I published an article in The Times this week about fossil fuel reserves: Booming demand and stagnant supply drove oil prices to $125 a barrel last week. Is this a sign that fossil fuels are running out? It is more likely a sign that the cheap-oil age is giving way to the cheap-gas age. As the […]

Yes, it really will change the world energy scene, mainly because it is low-cost Read my report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on The Shale Gas Shock here. The foreword is by Freeman Dyson. This is the summary Shale gas is proving to be an abundant new source of energy in the United States. Because […]

The Rational Optimist has won the Hayek Prize from the Manhattan Institute. I will be giving the Hayek Lecture when I accept the prize later in the year. The Hayek Prize honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty. The Hayek Prize, with its $50,000 […]

I don’t have terribly strong views on the alternative-vote referendum that Britain holds this week. But I found this radio exchange on the BBC between John Humphreys and the prime minister, David Cameron, remarkable. If even Humphreys does not know how the system would allow the second votes of extremists to be counted more than those […]

Food that can be stored can be traded and trade leads to democracy My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on grain, fruit and the economic underpinnings of democracy. When I was young, I had a mug on a shelf in my bedroom, and on it was a poem about a […]

The circular nature of some subsidies Update: the Taxpayers’ Alliance has a major report on this issue, by Matthew Sinclair, which concluded that Over £37 million was spent on taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning in 2007-08. That is nearly as much as the £38.9 million all three major political parties combined spent through their central […]

  Master Resource reposts Julian Simon’s wonderful and inspiring message of 1 May 1995. For good and bad, it has aged  not at all: “EARTH DAY: SPIRITUALLY UPLIFTING, INTELLECTUALLY DEBASED” – by Julian L. Simon April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day.  Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting.  But all […]

  Lord (Chris) Patten, new chairman of the BBC Trust, has been sounding off, militantly, at the militancy of atheists. He scored a bit of an own goal, though, with this remark: “It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith,” he said. “Their books would be a lot […]

Why do we like springtime so much? Update: The `hungry time’ was even later in the year than I said. See below. A meditation on the English spring I wrote for yesterday’s Times: I live on the 55th degree north parallel. If I had gone round the world along that line last week, through Denmark, Lithuania, […]

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the regulation of genetic testing I just took a detailed genetic test by sending some spit to a firm in California and looking up the results on the Net. It seems I’m probably descended from a peculiarly fecund fourth-century Irish king called Niall […]