Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

After my recent visit to Australia I wrote the diary column in the Australian edition of the Spectator:

I flew from London into Sydney, then Melbourne, to make three dinner speeches in a row. Through nerves I never finished the main course of three dinners. Pity, because in my experience Australian food is as fine as anywhere in the world: fresher than American, more orientally influenced than France and more imaginative than Britain. That was certainly not true the first time I visited Australia 37 years ago, when I slept in youth hostels and Ansett Pioneer buses, and ate rib-eye steaks for breakfast. I still remember with horror the moment I realized I had left my wallet on a park bench in Alice Springs, dazed after 31 hours on a bus. I went back and it was still there, wet from a lawn sprinkler.

Like Britain, Australia’s been confronting the costs of climate policies. The Abbott government has begun to deal with them robustly, whereas in Britain we are still in denial. Our opposition leader Ed Miliband has promised to “freeze” energy bills for two years if he gets into power – a threat that probably caused companies to push them up now -- even though it was he as Energy and Climate Change secretary who did most to load green levies on to consumers. Conservatively it looks like his Climate Act of 2008, with its targets for carbon emission cuts, will cost us £300 billion by 2030 in subsidies to renewable energy, in the cost of connecting wind farms to the grid, in VAT, in costs of insulation and new domestic appliances, and in the effect of all this on prices of goods in the shops. If people are upset about the cost of energy now, they will be furious by the election in 2015. I don’t like to say “I told you so”, but I did, in my maiden speech in the House of Lords in May: “One reason why we in this country are falling behind the growth of the rest of the world is that in recent years we have had a policy of deliberately driving up the price of energy.” David Cameron should take note that Tony Abbott is the first world leader elected by a landslide after expressing open skepticism about the exaggerated claims of imminent and dangerous climate change. Nor can greens argue that the issue was peripheral. The carbon tax was what won Mr Abbott his party’s leadership, and it was front and central in the election campaign. More and more politicians will be finding out that defending green levies on energy bills is more of an electoral liability than doubting dangerous climate change.

My review of Gregory Zuckerman's book The Frackers appeared in The Times on 23 November.

In the long tradition of serendipitous mistakes that led to great discoveries, we can now add a key moment in 1997. Nick Steinsberger, an engineer with Mitchell Energy, was supervising the hydraulic fracturing of a gas well near Fort Worth, Texas, when he noticed that the gel and chemicals in the “fracking fluid” were not mixing properly. So the stuff being pumped underground to crack the rock was too watery, not as gel-like as it should be.

Steinsberger noticed something else, though. Despite the mistake in mixing the fracking fluid, the well was producing a respectable amount of gas. Over a beer at a baseball game a few weeks later he mentioned it to a friend from a rival company who said they had had good results with watery fracks elsewhere. Steinsberger attempted to persuade his bosses to try removing nearly all the chemicals from the fluid and using mostly water. They thought he was mad since everybody knew that, while water might open cracks in sandstone, in clay-containing shale it would seal them shut as the clay swelled.

I have the following letter in the Guardian (online).

While preaching to others to be accurate, John Abraham is himself inaccurate in his critique of me ( Global warming and business reporting – can business news organizations achieve less than zero?, 18 November, theguardian.com). In correcting one mistake he made – by changing 3.6C to 3.6F – you only exacerbate the problem. Far from it being "unbelievable" that up to 3.6F of warming will be beneficial, this is actually the conclusion of those studies that have addressed the issue, as confirmed in recent surveys by Professor Richard Tol. Mr Abraham may not agree with those studies, but in that case he is departing from the consensus and should give reasons rather than merely stating that he finds them unbelievable. Rather than shoot the messenger, he should invite readers to read Professor Tol's most recent paper. It is published in an excellent book edited by Bjørn Lomborg entitled How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?

As for Andrew Dessler's critique of my remarks about feedback by water vapour and clouds, his actual words confirm that I am right that these issues are still in doubt, as confirmed by the latest report from the IPCC. Most of your readers are probably unaware of the fact that doubling carbon dioxide in itself only produces a modest warming effect of about 1.2C and that to get dangerous warming requires feedbacks from water vapour, clouds and other phenomena for which the evidence is far more doubtful. This is an area of honest disagreement between commentators, so it is misleading of Mr Abraham to shoot the messenger again.

I know very little about what is being discussed inside the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party, which started at the weekend. The meeting is being held in secret — although one of the subjects to be discussed is said to be greater government transparency. About all we know is that “unprecedented” economic and social reforms are being discussed, including such things as rural property rights. But, to judge by a new wave of Mao worship, persecution of dissidents and reinforced censorship, political reform is less likely than economic.

In other words, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to continue pulling off the trick that has served it ever since Deng Xiaoping defeated the Gang of Four: more economic freedom combined with less political freedom. The people can choose any good or service they want — except their government. In many ways it has worked extremely well. In 1978 Maoism had left the country horribly poor: more than half the people of China tried to live on less than a dollar a day. Over the next nine years per capita income doubled, then doubled again over the nine years after that.

Many a left-leaning Western politician has been heard to muse about how much better we would grow if only we directed the market economy with the single-mindedness of the Chinese Communist Party. In the same way many a right-leaning Western politician has long admired the Singapore of Lee Kwan Yew on the same grounds. See, they mutter, a paternalistic government is best at generating economic prosperity.

This morning’s brief strike by the Fire Brigades Union, like the one last Friday evening, will, I suspect, mostly serve to remind those who work in the private sector just how well remunerated many in the public sector still are. The union objects to the raising of the retirement age from 55 to 60, on a generous final-salary pension scheme, with good job security. These are conditions few of those who work for private firms or for themselves can even dream of.

In my case, as somebody always on the look-out for under-reported good news stories, it also served to alert me to just how dramatic the fall in “demand” for firefighters has been. Intrigued by the strike, I looked up the numbers and found to my amazement that in 2011, compared with just a decade before, firefighters attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall; 39 per cent fewer building fires; 44 per cent fewer minor outdoor fires; 24 per cent fewer road-traffic collisions; 8 per cent fewer floods — and 40 per cent fewer incidents overall. The decline has if anything accelerated since 2011.

That is to say, during a period when the population and the number of buildings grew, we needed to call the fire brigade much, much less. Most important of all, the number of people dying in fires in the home has fallen by 60 per cent compared with the 1980s. The credit for these benign changes goes at least partly to technology — fire-retardant materials, self-extinguishing cigarettes, smoke alarms, sprinklers, alarms on cookers — much of which was driven by sensible regulation. Fewer open fires and fewer people smoking, especially indoors, must have helped too. There is little doubt that rules about such things have saved lives, as even most libertarians must concede.