The Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy

Michael Giberson

The Spectator magazine in the U.K. announces the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy:

Matt Ridley has long deplored the wind farm delusion, and was appalled when a family trust was paid by a wind farm company in compensation for mineral rights on land on which it wanted to build a turbine. The trust would be paid £8,500 a year for it, and Matt couldn’t abide the idea of profiting — even in part — from this. So he is donating £8,500 in an annual prize to be given to the best essay exposing environmental fallacies. Entries open today.

The rules are simple. We invite pieces from 1,000 to 2,000 words in length, to gore one of the sacred cows of the environmentalist movement. Matt says more in his cover essay for the new Spectator (which you can also read on Facebook) : ‘There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest or that organic farming is good for the planet or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species.’ A shortlist of six will be put to a panel of judges and the winning entry will be published in the magazine in July.

Entries … close on 30 June 2012.

More details at the first link above. £8,500? That is more than US$13,000. Hmmm, which sacred cow do I want to gore?

Matt Ridley is the author of several books on science and society, including The Rational Optimist, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, and Genome.