About six years ago, British landed gentry Matt Ridley was a recurring voice in climate denial-land, penning long opinion pieces about the never-not-debunked pause in warming, criticizing the now-repeatedly-reproven hockey stick graph and otherwise leeching credibility from legitimate science institutions. But DeSmog’s revelation that his pro-coal and anti-climate lobbying might stem from the millions in annual fees from coal mines on his family estate seemed to put a damper on his eagerness to publish climate denial.
And that made sense, as no one should ever take Matt Ridley’s advice about anything, as he has proven either too greedy or too stupid to make big decisions on behalf of others. Few people are given the opportunity to fail as spectacularly as Ridley, whose short tenure as the non-executive Chairman of Britain's once-storied Northern Rock bank came to an ignoble end after his investment strategy led to the first run on a British bank since 1878. Matt’s father was a former chairman of the bank, but apparently the skills to run it weren’t hereditary!
Of course, Ridley was certainly not the only financial genius to place big bets on an obviously risky product known as sub-prime mortgages. But the fact that he staked the pensions and life savings of the bank’s customers on a literally “sub-prime” bet, and then quickly lost that bet, should be enough to disqualify him from anything but apologizing. The only thing that kept all those pensions from evaporating was the UK government stepping in to clean up Ridley’s mess, nationalizing the bank and protecting people’s life savings. (Which means it might actually be a good thing if the fossil fuel industry would heed Ridley’s infinite wisdom, as his track record suggests they too would get nationalized and shut down!)
Someone with such a self-described “catastrophic black mark” on their own record would probably do best to quietly enjoy their privilege. But Ridley has instead decided to take his “sub-prime” thinking to the Covid pandemic, where he’s been helping gin up the grossly anti-Chinese sentiment. He popped back up on our radar last year when he was feeding conspiracies about the World Health Organization being to blame for planning for climate change instead of a pandemic.
He’s got a new book on it out, called Viral, that’s essentially ‘just asking questions’ about the possibility that Covid came from a Chinese laboratory. (And of course not actually answering them, because there’s no actual evidence of that being the case.)
Mark Honigsbaum at the Guardian wrote that Ridley and co-author Alina Chan “fail to provide a shred of evidence that Covid-19 was engineered and leaked from a lab” and calls what they do present “highly misleading.”
A review from Harvard’s William Hanage in the Washington Post was even more critical, as even though Chinese authorities have been “about as transparent as a lead window” the authors “make up for this by stretching some of the facts that we do have beyond what they should bear.”
Stats are misrepresented, for example comparisons of a prior SARS outbreak and Covid-19 having a genome that’s 96 percent the same, which “to the casual observer, this seems highly suggestive.” But “they’re about as closely related as you are to a chimpanzee,” and Hanage notes that “the book does not mention this inconvenient fact, among many others.”
Ridley has a history of science and genetics writing, so he undoubtedly knew that, which is just more evidence for Hanage’s line that “nobody should mistake this book for an evenhanded scientific document.”
Viral’s narrative, Hanage writes, relies on “investigations by indefatigable online researchers, invariably referred to as ‘sleuths’” who are “taking quotations out of context” and “tracking inconsistencies in database entries,” something the anti-hockey-stick auditor Ridley was conned by is still routinely demonstrating his ignorance of.
Sound familiar? Just like he did with climate, Ridley is placing his trust in randos online taking comments out of context and “discovering” flaws in data that are really just flaws in their competency, and using that to spin up a misleading narrative about an issue of global importance.
Sounds like Ridley ran this supposed investigation the same way he ran Northern Rock: straight into the ground.
But this time, there was no government to step in and save him from himself. Not like a book can get nationalized, after all!