Post

More from @mattwridley

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

Feb 5

My @spectator article on polar bears>

The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the clickbait of climate change cataclysm.

In Svalbard bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in autumn. Even more unexpectedly, the bears are fattest in or after years when the sea ice retreats farthest.

The increasing numbers are caused by the fact that bears were hunted for their skins until 1973, after which they were a protected species. But this cannot explain the increase in their girth.

Read 10 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

Jan 6

Venezuela reminds us that hydrocarbons still matter.

It is striking that, a quarter of the way into a new century, geopolitics continues to be determined by hydrocarbons, as if the green energy transition never started.

And that’s because it never really did.

In the real world, solar and wind generation provided only 6% of the world’s energy in 2024,

while coal, oil and gas generation provided 76.4% - and broke new records that year.

compared with 77.2% in 2000.

[using substation method to account for combustion losses]

Between 2023 and 2024 the world added more energy from gas than from solar:

1,127 TWh vs 1,124 TWh

and more energy from coal than from wind:

532 TWh vs 459 TWh

Read 10 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

Sep 18, 2025

Scientists have always had their prejudices, ideological biases and blind spots, but almost by definition regarded those as bad things to be minimised.

The insistence on subjecting all of science to ideological tests means maximising prejudice instead.

My, how we all laughed when Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’.

Little did we realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for physics.

In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title would have raged at the conservative right pushing creationism and sexism in the teeth of truth, now it is exposing the woke left pushing identity ideology and intersectionality at the expense of reason. @LKrauss1 @RichardDawkins @sapinker @GadSaad

Read 9 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

Aug 7, 2025

"We buried a miracle in paperwork. Since the 1970s building a new reactor has effectively been illegal in America. It required $30 billion and 15+ years in regulatory hell," writes Stephen Mcbride in @RationalOptSoc.
🧵

"I bring good news. On my recent travels through Austin and Detroit I met the world’s best nuclear entrepreneurs. This was the first time they’ve ever said the following to me (and they all agreed):"

“Regulation is finally becoming a solved problem.

One founder said his microreactor (a small nuclear reactor, or “SMR”) could be up and running next year."

Read 4 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

Mar 23, 2025

"Let me place you inside a taxi travelling to Geneva airport on 12 February 2020. Inside the cab are two people. One is Dr Peter Daszak, the $400,000-a-year head of the EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation that boasted about funnelling millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to harvest wild bat viruses and do risky experiments on them.

He and his organisation would later be debarred from federal funding by the Biden administration for failing to divulge vital information about EcoHealth’s support for suspiciously risky gain-of-function experiments on close relatives of the virus that caused Covid.

The other is Dr (now Sir) Jeremy Farrar, the then head of the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest charitable funder of scientific research, and now head of science at the World Health Organisation (WHO)...."

"In the taxi, Farrar wants the issue ‘put to bed’, even though he knows the last hope of finding evidence for a natural origin of the virus – the pangolin theory – has already fallen apart. That’s because the pangolin virus lacks the very addition that alarmed the scientists about Covid, a thing called a furin cleavage site."

"Five days after his taxi ride, Farrar would indeed help ‘put to bed’ the lab-leak theory by reading the draft paper (written at his suggestion, remember) and asking that the authors change the wording from ‘unlikely’ to ‘improbable’. He then promises to ‘push’ the paper towards a major journal, Nature Medicine, all while refusing to be listed as either an author or in the acknowledgements. That itself is a breach of scientific ethics."

Read 4 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

Jan 24, 2025

Britain's net-zero-obsessed energy policy came unstuck this week in six different ways:

1. Donald (Drill Baby Drill) Trump tore up electric-vehicle mandates and turned decisively against wind power. America, China and India are all going to increase their emissions by much more than we can possibly save.

2. Chris Wright testified how the shale revolution has turned America into now the world’s biggest producer of both oil and gas, ahead of even Saudi Arabia and Russia. That could have been our boom too.

Read 8 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Matt Ridley

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @mattwridley

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!