It’s high time to end this ludicrous COP jamboree – but it just won’t die

Matt Ridley

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 […]

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COP29 

Dam shame: what really caused Valencia’s floods?

Matt Ridley

Who is to blame for the devastating floods that hit Valencia on 29 October? The mob that surrounded King Felipe at the weekend, and drove the prime minister out of town with a hail of mud and stones, was angry at the failure to forecast the flood and warn people to get out of its […]

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Welcome to feudal Britain

Matt Ridley

Only today the tax-grabbing barons are public sector fat cats.. and you’re the peasant funding their gold-plated pay rises Next week, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, apparently plans to raise the rate of national insurance paid by employers. But the government itself is a large employer, through the NHS for example. It has now occurred to […]

Is another pandemic really inevitable?

Matt Ridley

Future pandemics as bad as Covid are ‘a certainty’, says Sir Chris Whitty. He is right in one sense. So many people gained so much money, power or fame out of the pandemic that they will be all too willing to declare another one soon. The WHO is trying to vastly increase its budget and its […]

Don’t fall for the Chinese wet market theory for Covid

Matt Ridley

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 […]

Here’s how to prepare for Britain’s net zero switch – buy a generator

Matt Ridley

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 […]

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energy 

Whoever you vote for, the Blob wins

Matt Ridley

At the age of 66 I feel like a first-time voter. As a member of the House of Lords, I was not allowed to vote in the last three general elections. But I retired from the House in 2021, so democracy here I come. I shall scan the ballot paper with interest: who is standing […]

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