WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

My article for Spectator: Two years in, there is no doubt the Covid pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But there is also little doubt that the bat carrying the progenitor of the virus lived somewhere else. Central to the mystery of Covid’s origin is how a virus normally found in horseshoe bats […]

My blog for the Radix think tank: I was pleased to speak at the recent Radix Big Tent Meet the Leaders session about innovation, a topic that is close to my heart and one of great importance. Innovation is the source of all prosperity. It is the reason countries get rich in the first place […]

My article for Spectator: China’s President Xi Jinping has apparently not yet decided whether to travel to Glasgow next month for the big climate conference known as COP26. That is no doubt partly because he’s heard about the weather in Glasgow in November, and partly because he knows the whole thing will be a waste […]

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 […]

This current crisis is a mere harbinger of the candle-lit future that awaits us if we do not change course My article for The Daily Mail: Had it not been so exceptionally calm in the run up to this autumn equinox, one could call the energy crisis a perfect storm. Wind farms stand idle for […]

My article for Spectator: With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled […]

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 […]

“Rewilding” is fashionable but there is more to it than letting Nature run free My article for The Critic: Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife […]

Lobsters and the like are given no more protection from cruelty under this legislation but bureaucrats will thrive on it My article for the Times: Like a lobster in boiling water, a parliamentary bill on animal sentience is being tortured in the House of Lords. The problem is political rather than ethical. Nobody objects to […]

Why did scientists suddenly change their minds about the possibility of a leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology? Jeremy Farrar offers no good answers My article for Spectator: Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me. I thought, probably like most people, that […]