Matt Ridley
Viewpoint: ‘The battle to feed humanity is over”: Eco-pessimist Paul Ehrlich leaves a legacy of misinformation about the mortal threat of overpopulation
The butterfly biologist turned rock-star eco-pessimist, Paul Ehrlich has died at the age of 93. That in itself is remarkable ...
Should we use CRISPR gene editing to remake humanity?
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand, the free-thinking philosopher of technology, wrote in ...
Viewpoint: Despite environmental activist claims, bird and insect populations are not crashing in Britain
The scientific evidence increasingly refutes the alarmist narrative that our farmland bird and insect populations are disappearing due to intensive ...
Viewpoint: The Greens are wrong — Here’s why humanity is good for nature
Over the past few years, we have been subject to endless media reports on the devastating impact humanity is having ...
Viewpoint: If the EU insists on food labeling, organics, not gene edited foods, should be at top of list on safety grounds
The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) has followed the science in recommending a streamlined approach to regulating gene edited food ...
Viewpoint: ‘It’s time for transparency’ — How promoting alleged benefits of organic food misleads shoppers and undermines our farm system
Rather predictable howls of protest from organic lobbyists greeted the recent decision to allow the temporary use of neonic seed ...
Viewpoint: Reject GM crops because they’re ‘not natural’? Here’s a primer on 9,000 years of human tampering with our food supply
One of the most frequently cited concerns about ‘genetically modified’ food is that it is ‘unnatural’ or as the then ...
Viewpoint: Do you avoid GM crops because they were ‘made by science’ but buy organic food because it’s more ‘natural’? What does naturalness even mean?
Our obsession with products and farming systems perceived to be more natural risks preventing our food from being plentiful, affordable, ...
Viewpoint: The ’natural food’ sham — ‘Effective communication on the ethics of science may be hindered by appeals to naturalness’
What could be more natural than organically grown Golden Promise barley, used to make craft-brewed pale ale? ...
Viewpoint: War and global food crisis takes sharp toll on organic market. Maybe it’s time for a more sustainable alternative?
"Is organic’s luck about to run out?” So ran a recent headline in The Grocer magazine, and it got me thinking. Could food ...
Viewpoint: ‘Britain must address the madness of its organic-obsessed, science-denying agricultural system’
When the Ethiopian famine finally ended in 1985, with a million people dead, nobody expected it to be the last ...
Organic farming is both yield intense and more sustainable? BBC bungles revision of pro-organic ‘propaganda’ aimed at school children
Despite an investigation by BBC’s rural affairs broadcaster Tom Heap, the network continues to peddle fact-challenged study guides promoting organic ...
Viewpoint: England’s ‘half-hearted’ support for gene editing is stifling innovation
The [UK] Government’s half-hearted support for the process is denying us a huge chance to progress. The Government wants to ...
Catastrophic claims of an ‘insect armageddon’ misrepresent the science
“The insect apocalypse is here,” said the New York Times in 2018. “Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’,” said ...
Viewpoint: ‘Sure, organic agriculture is sustainable: it sustains poverty and malnutrition’ — Why organic farming is a ‘green’ dead end
It is mystifying to me that organic food is still widely seen as healthier, more sustainable and, most absurdly, safer ...
Viewpoint: Organic lobbyists show ‘sheer hypocrisy’ opposing UK emergency authorization of neonicotinoid sugar beet seed treatments — while supporting environmental waiver for ‘acutely toxic’ copper sulfate
The Government was right to make provision for a temporary and limited derogation for the use of the neonicotinoid seed ...
Science paradox: How the response to the pandemic has been infected by bias, overconfidence and politics
[W]hen people started falling ill last winter with a respiratory illness, some scientists guessed that a novel coronavirus was responsible ...
Viewpoint: How prosperity and technology are defeating ‘environmental pessimism’
In 1980, the year that PERC was founded, I spent three months in the Himalayas working on a wildlife conservation ...
Viewpoint: UK proposal to break from EU CRISPR rules could unleash plant breeding ‘gold rush’
The agriculture bill before the House of Lords [June 10] offers a chance for plant breeders to make safer, more ...
Europe streamlined approval process to weeks to fight COVID-19 pandemic. Why does it take more than a decade to get a GMO safety review?
At the start of the pandemic, China built a hospital in double-quick time and we all thought, “that’s why they ...
Why Brexit could jump start UK GMO, CRISPR research—once stifled by ‘dead hand’ of EU regulation
Britain is really good at biology. In physics and chemistry, or painting and music, we have often failed to match ...
Viewpoint: How Europe’s risk aversion has turned the continent into an agricultural backwater
With tariffs announced against Brazil and Argentina, and a threat against France, Donald Trump is dragging the world deeper into ...
Video: House of Lords member and science writer Matt Ridely urges UK to ‘break free’ of Europe’s restrictive CRISPR crop rules
The UK must break away from Europe's restrictive agricultural gene-editing rules, science writer Matt Ridley told the UK's House of ...
Viewpoint: At least 200,000 people die every year GMO Golden Rice is kept off the market
This is not a story of incompetence and ignorance, but of an antediluvian hostility to science and technology ...
Brexit could lead Britain to ‘ditching EU’s mindless precaution and innovation-crushing rules on GMO crops’
Britain was once the world leader in biotechnology for agriculture, but that all changed 20 years ago when the environmental ...
Viewpoint: Modern farming, economic growth don’t cause biodiversity decline—they prevent it
Driven perhaps by envy at the attention that climate change is getting, and ambition to set up a great new ...
From pesticide scare stories to insect ‘extinction,’ reporters are addicted to ‘pseudoscience,’ says science writer Matt Ridley
Three times in [February 2019], pseudo-science flew around the world before the scientific truth had got its boots on (as ...
Viewpoint: GMO crops are future of African farming—if anti-biotech activists get out of the way
[I]nfluenced by European environmentalists, most African countries forbid the growing of genetically modified crops. This is a pity, because unless ...
