Matt Ridley
“Agrigento?
Isn’t that some
kind of bitcoin?”
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W
hen I land on the east coast of
America, people tell me they’ve
never met a Trump voter. When I land in
the middle, as I did last week in Kentucky,
I meet lots. I chatted with my driver, who
did not like Trump at first, but would
vote twice for his re-election if he could,
because of the jobs boom and the Brett
Kavanaugh hearings. He’s a retired
salesman who tutors kids from poor
backgrounds in reading and maths. ‘I guess
that makes me a conservative,’ he says.
I
had to lecture in semi-darkness in
Louisville, after a power cut plunged
most of the university into darkness. I
timed it so that just at the moment when
the power company had promised the
lights would come back on, I had reached
the bit where I said that artificial light is
now 60,000 times cheaper than in 1800,
in terms of the amount of time you have
to work to earn a given quantity of light
— a calculation by the economist Bill
Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize the
day before my talk. But it stayed dark, and
stiflingly hot.
T
hat day Hurricane Michael slammed
into Florida, causing devastation
and killing 26 people. It had the third
lowest recorded atmospheric pressure
(919 millibars) of any hurricane to
make landfall in America. The lowest
(892mb) was the Labor Day hurricane
of 1935, which killed 423. Yet the media
continues to imply that recent hurricanes
are linked to climate change, as if they
would go away if we stopped driving
cars: ‘The Hurricanes, and Climate-
Change Questions, Keep Coming. Yes,
They’re Linked’, said a New York Times
headline on Thursday. I find almost
nobody knows that there is no upward
trend in the frequency or strength of
such cyclones over the last four decades
— a fact reconfirmed in the latest UN
report last week. Globally, deaths from
floods, droughts and storms are down by
98 per cent in a century, not because of
less bad weather, but because of better
technology and forecasting.
D
onald Trump now says of climate
change: ‘I don’t think it’s a hoax,
I think there’s probably a difference.
But I don’t know that it’s man-made.’
The climate activist Eric Holthaus
said: ‘The world’s top scientists just gave
rigorous backing to systematically dismantle
capitalism.’ Both are wrong. The truth is that
climate change is happening, but more slowly
than expected. It’s now 30 years since James
Hansen of Nasa raised the alarm and, as
climate scientist Pat Michaels and hurricane
expert Ryan Maue have pointed out, ‘it’s
time to acknowledge that the rapid warming
he predicted isn’t happening’. Our own
government’s climate-change committee,
and the hysterical BBC, should take note.A
t a meeting in California I attended
a remarkable talk by Hugh Herr,
who is a double amputee developing
new bionic limbs at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. By attaching
people’s leg muscles to each other during
an amputation, he has reduced both
the phantom pain and the deadness of
their limbs. Robotic, motorised ankle
prostheses can pick up signals from the
muscles and enable the person to lift, roll
and tap their ‘feet’ again. He showed a
video of a patient climbing the sheer cliff
in the Cayman Islands where he fell and
lost a leg some years before, using his
robotic foot to cling to crevices in the rock.A
n afternoon whale-watching off
Santa Barbara proved almost
ridiculously productive. A mother
humpback whale and her calf decided to
spend the afternoon seeing who could
jump higher out of the water, while a
thousand common dolphins joined in.
Globally, humpback whale numbers have
increased from 10,000 in the 1960s to
80,000 today. They are not bothered by
the fact that the waters off Santa Barbara
are stained when calm with thin oil slicks.
It’s entirely natural: 10,000 gallons of
oil oozes into the water every day in a
six-mile stretch just off the beach, from
seepages on the ocean floor.A
lso on the boat was Oskar Eustis,
artistic director of New York’s Public
Theater and one of the people behind
Hamilton. He tells a fascinating story
of what came out of the moment when
the audience booed vice-president Mike
Pence at a showing of the musical in 2016.
Hundreds of thousands of pro-Trump
Americans signed a petition to boycott
the show, but instead of patronising them
as philistines, Eustis realised that most
of these people would never get to see it
anyway. ‘They aren’t boycotting us,’ he
says, ‘we’re boycotting them’ — by making
theatre an exclusive preserve of the
bi-coastal elite that does not address the
concerns or come to the towns of middle
America. He is now taking Lynn Nottage’s
Sweat, about job loss and drug addiction
in the Rust Belt, for free to community
centres in the heart of the country, and
reactions have been spectacular. An
encouraging example of the two Americas
reconnecting. Britain needs this too.