WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Economic and environmental benefits of mining go together Blagdon estate has hosted parts of two surface coal mines, at Brenkley and Shotton, for several years. We are proud to have done so mainly because of the jobs provided and the income to the local economy. But environmentally, too, these projects have been very positive. Managed […]

Each year, John Brockman’s website, The Edge, asks a question and gets many answers to it. This year, the question is: What is your favourite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? Some of the answers are fascinating. Here’s mine: It’s hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of 28 February 1953 […]

Brian Eno, the musician and writer,  is more positive as a result of reading The Rational Optimist: “That kind of marks the change I’ve felt in the past year or two. I wouldn’t end an album like that now,” he says. Drums Between the Bells has a loose, funky feel; it ends with the words, “Everything […]

How the left discovered pessimism Here is an op-ed I wrote for today’s Australian newspaper: POLLYANNA is a fool; Cassandra was wise. As a self-proclaimed “rational optimist” who argues that the world has been getting better for most people and that the future is likely to be better still, I am up against a deep prejudice […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on how the future turns out: Last month a crash dummy flew to 5,000 feet above ground level in a personal jet pack. The inventor, New Zealander Glenn Martin, has spent decades on the project and is ready to start selling the device for […]

Britain’s neo-medieval green policy robs the poor to pay the rich I have this article in the current issue of the Spectator (not yet online): `Greener food and greener fuel’ is the promise of Ensus, a firm that opened Europe’s largest (£250 million) bio-ethanol plant at Wilton on Teesside last year – and has now […]

  Lord (Chris) Patten, new chairman of the BBC Trust, has been sounding off, militantly, at the militancy of atheists. He scored a bit of an own goal, though, with this remark: “It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith,” he said. “Their books would be a lot […]

The BBC has plumbed new depths with its recent reporting on shale gas. Its reporter Richard Black wrote a story about the old Cornell University claim that shale gas production emits more greenhouse-warming gases than coal. I happen to know quite a bit about this study and I know that it is based on very extreme […]

Alan Carlin has a peer reviewed paper in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which concludes that climate policy is, in my terminology, a tourniquet for a nosebleed: The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity […]

As I keep saying, shale gas is indeed revolutionising world energy supply. The US Energy Information Administration officially uses the word `vast’ for shale gas resources outside the US: Although the shale gas resource estimates will likely change over time as additional information becomes available, the report shows that the international shale gas resource base is […]