Battle of Ideas 2014

The Institute of Ideas' tenth Battle of Ideas festival is taking place next month at the Barbican Centre in London. If you're not familiar with the event, the Battle is a weekend of many debates and discussions on many different matters, led by speakers from around...

Stern's Turn

Way, way back in the 2000s, when everyone believed in Hockey Sticks, the UK's Labour government commissioned somebody nobody had ever heard of to write a report on the economics of climate change, so that it could make an argument for domestic and international...

Monbiot Re-Writes History

Environmentalists don't understand politics. Especially democratic politics. And Environmentalists aren't much good at history either. And it should be noted, that although environmentalists like to claim that their perspectives are grounded in science, they are...

A Climate Economics Antinomy

Paul Ehrlich once famously remarked, Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. A point noted here often is that although environmentalists claim that their perspective is grounded in science, their desire for...

How Not to "Crush and Bury" Climate Sceptics

The Guardian has quoted Royal Society President, Paul Nurse's outburst: He urged researchers to forge relationships with politicians, lobbyists, religious figures and leaders of organisations in the hope that they might feel ashamed to misuse scientific evidence. But...

Science can’t tell us how to live the Good Life

According to new research from the University of Cambridge, the world’s growing and increasingly wealthy population must change its diet if environmental harm and catastrophic climate change are to be avoided. Lead researcher Bojana Bajzelj and her colleagues used...