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I sent this letter to the Financial Times: Sir, Gideon Rachman (“In defence of gloomy columnists“, May 24) is right to point out that terrible blips will still happen in an improving world. Another way of making the same point is that good news tends to be gradual, incremental and barely visible, while bad news almost […]

Warmiong potential of methane emissions from gas do not nearly match carbon dioxide emissions from coal It turns out I was right to be sceptical about the Howarth study claiming that shale gas production produces more greenhouse gases than coal. Ther’s now a definitive study here thoroughly debunking Howarth and showing that shale gas results in […]

Sean Corrigan’s superb essay on finite resources Now this is what I call magnificent writing in the sprit of Swift: Sean Corrigan riffs on peak oil, finite resources and the planet’s carrying capacity: It is much better to forget all that Sierra Club/WWF elitist, anti-mankind, horse manure about ‘the call on the planet’ exerted by us […]

Random thoughts on gas, songs, weather, walls and dead flies I wrote this week’s Spectator diary (no link yet): A day in London for the launch of my new report `The Shale Gas Shock’, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I argue that shale gas calls the bluff of the renewable energy movement in […]

I stumbled on a BBC television program this evening (watch it here), which was unintentionally revealing. It was a compilation of extracts over several decades from its flagship science series `Horizon’, all on the theme of the `end of the world’. The episodes covered asteroids, supervolcanoes, contagious earthquakes, bird flu, the Y2K computer bug, the greenhouse […]

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 […]

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 […]