Tim Worstall

I'm a businessman working in the field of weird and rare metals and many of my customers are in the renewable energy business: it's the weird and rare metals that make so many of the different renewables technologies work. This gives me a slightly different view of the whole marketplace. I tend to see quite a lot of information, technical information, about technologies that aren't quite ready for prime time as yet for example.

I'm also a freelance writer specialising in politics, economics and matters environmental. A consistent theme is that yes, we do indeed have environmental problems, up to and including climate change, but that doesn't mean that we should necessarily swallow all the policy recommendations of anyone who calls themselves an environmentalist.

For economics is, at least in part, the study of the incentives people face and how they change their behaviour in the face of those incentives. Thus, if we want to change peoples' behaviour (which I think we do) then we'd better go and study the economics of how to change incentives so as to change that behaviour.

The book Chasing Rainbows is mostly (apart from a few jokes, some side stories, some insults and a proof that domestic recycling doesn't actually save resources) about exploring that issue. I accept that climate change is happening (although you don't in order understand the argument) and that we must do something about it (ditto). But if we look at the economists who have studied exactly this question, what should we do now, we find that just about everything the green movement tells us we must do is wrong.

A reasonable taste of my writing and my views can be found on my blog, www.timworstall.com