The 2013 Matt Ridley Prize is now open. Click here for more details.
When Matt Ridley offered £8,500 for the best prize essay for environmental heresy, we at The Spectator expected lots of entries. But what took us by surprise was the quality of the submissions. The winner is Pippa Cuckson, whose piece on hydropower is the cover story of this week’s magazine.
The judges had a pretty tough task. There were quite a few brilliant demolitions of environmentalism in general: as Stephen Hawking said at the Paralympic Games opening ceremony, the enemy of knowledge isn’t ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. It could sum up the problem with rational discussion of global warming and related topics. Cuckson’s piece scored because, as well as being a profoundly rational piece, it best rose best to Matt Ridley’s invitation ‘to gore one of the sacred cows of the environmentalist movement’.
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