WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Together with Stephen McBride, founder of the Rational Optimist Society, I have set up an account at Substack called the Rational Optimist. I encourage all readers of this blog to subscribe – initially for free – to that account:  https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com. Stephen and I will be posting there regularly from now on.

This week’s ship collision off the Humber could have been much worse. Just one person is unaccounted for and one other needed hospital treatment. The fire is mostly extinguished, the two ships are disentangled from each other and the damage to the tanker is less than feared. It is early days, but there are reasons to be […]

I just spent ten days in India, where the cloudless blue above contrasted sharply with the grey sky-lid that greeted me on my return. Living in Britain is like living inside Tupperware, Bill Bryson once said. But it’s not just the weather that is different in the two countries. For all its poverty, India is […]

At the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, where ghosts of British Nabobs look out over the racecourse, my neuroscientist wife spoke to an audience of businessmen in support of Robin Sengupta, a pioneering Newcastle neurosurgeon. He has founded a world-leading Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata where richer patients subsidise poorer ones. After a morning meeting doctors […]

This appeared in The Daily Mail; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14322465/power-station-green-energy-corruption-burn-matt-ridley.html   From 25,000 feet on a clear day, you can see the biggest wood-fired kettle in the world belching steam, as I did the other day on a flight to Newcastle. Called Drax power station, it lies between Selby and Goole in North Yorkshire and burns the equivalent […]

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 Spiked; https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/21/trump-takes-on-the-climatecrats/ No one should mourn America’s withdrawal from the ridiculous Paris Agreement. Donald Trump has pulled America out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord for the second time. Bizarrely, like some dodgy insurance scam, the rules of the climatocracy say it takes a year to withdraw, so not till next winter America will […]

Appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-has-biden-pardoned-anthony-fauci/   Joe Biden left it until the last minute to issue a pre-emptive pardon of Anthony Fauci for any offence committed since 2014 in his work on “the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House Covid-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President”. Yet surely […]

Appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-i-fell-foul-of-youtubes-fact-checkers/ The day after Mark Zuckerberg said fact checkers “have destroyed more trust than they have created” I experienced why he has a point. I had done an interview with an evolutionary psychology podcaster, Paula Wright, about the origin of Covid. In it I said something that caused the entire interview […]

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 to shed light on how something that could have been prevented, contained and eradicated instead went on to kill more than 20 million […]