Matt Ridley
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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 ...
Activist case that glyphosate herbicide causes cancer mired in scandal
A perfectly useful herbicide could be banned in Europe thanks to a tangled network of lobbyists, lawyers and activists. … ...
Will Britain fumble regulations on human and agricultural gene editing as it has on GMOs?
Britain has an opportunity to seize on the latest breakthroughs in gene editing and pioneer new approaches in agriculture, research ...
Neonicotinoid fiasco: How American NGOs turn Europe against science, push EU towards insecticide ban
The current EU ban on neonics has been disastrously counterproductive, resulting in an increased use of more damaging pesticides, mainly ...
UK could become gene-editing leader in farming post-Brexit
Scientists at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, said [February 2017] that they had edited the genomes of pigs, rendering them ...
Europe appears poised to overturn neonicotinoid pesticides ban
[Editor's note: Matt Ridley is a columnist for the Times (UK), a member of the House of Lords and the ...
Why gene editing does not lead to eugenics
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. This summer brings the ...
Matt Ridley: Greens scare mongering on GMOs, fracking, pesticides blunts access to safer technologies
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. The public has increasingly ...
Ecomodernist Manifesto: Technology based agriculture more sustainable than ‘green’ myths
The Ecomodernist Manifesto, a short but brilliant essay published online recently by 18 prominent greens, gets sustainability right at last. Until ...
Precautionary principle backfires in Europe, insecticide ban harms bees and farming
An EU pesticide ban that was supposed to protect bees has done no such thing. All it does is damage ...
Oppostion to GM crops counter-productive to environment, economy and consumer
The news that Britain could soon grow genetically modified crops commercially is a victory for commonsense over irrational opportunism, and ...
How many of the people born in the world in 1756 could have become Mozart? IQ twin studies may provide an answer
A recent study on the heritability of intelligence has sparked interest in determining where we get our intelligence. A new ...
GM crops don’t kill kids, opposing them does
Golden rice’ prevents the vitamin A deficiency that kills millions every year. Yet Greenpeace is blocking it It was over ...
