First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Despite what green lobbyists and celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver might have us believe, diseases like swine flu are less likely to develop in factory farms, not more so, argues Vivienne Parry this month’s Prospect. Of the 40 or so new diseases that have appeared around the world in the last three decades, almost [...]

In this month’s Prospect podcast (also available on the right of this page), our resident philosopher Nigel Warburton examines the ambiguous role of thrift in defining the good life. As Warburton argues, the idea of thrift “hangs awkwardly between profligacy and miserliness,” making it one of the few virtues best practiced in moderation.
Distinguishing an appropriate [...]

America may be moving to the left under Obama; indeed, as Newsweek put it, Americans are “all socialists now” and due to become “even more French” in the decade to come. Despite this, it’s still widely assumed, on both sides of the Atlantic, that Europe and America are essentially different—in their economies, societies and values. [...]

[Editor's Note: Erik is in the running to get that amazing job on an island somewhere in Australia: the one that you read about a few months ago, remember? Actually, he is down to the last 50. He seems like a nice man, so why not vote for him here. As Prospect's official candidate, if [...]

Further evidence (if any was necessary) that Prospect’s influence stretches right to the very highest echelons of British political power: following John Beddington’s call in these pages for UK homes to be made more carbon friendly, the government will announce plans this week to give one in four homes a complete eco-makeover.
According to today’s Guardian, [...]

So, I’m confused. The Times, on Saturday, ran a startling story, claiming that two Google searches cost the same amount of carbon as boiling a kettle. The story was dynamite: Google, previously only evil in China, might actually be evil everywhere. The story begged a question: if googling was environmentally problematic—what about other online activities, [...]

An Englishman’s home may be his castle, but it should still be subject to a yearly MOT, says the government’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington. People may think they’re being “greener than thou” by recycling and flying less, but good old-fashioned loft insulation will make the biggest difference in the fight against climate change, he [...]

Pressing ahead with its plans for the next generation of nuclear power stations, the government has repeatedly pledged that no taxpayers’ money will be spent on subsidising nuclear construction or bailing out debt-ridden energy companies. But, says Tom Burke in the new issue of Prospect, no one should be blinded to the fact that the [...]

When Nicholas Stern’s review on the economics of climate change came out in late 2006, it changed the terms of the climate debate. The warnings from scientists and environmental campaigners about the dangers posed by global warming had been growing increasingly loud, but here, for the first time, was a detailed and hard-headed examination of [...]

This morning, in a radical experiment that’s set to make my life both better and more expensive, I took a different route to work. I live in Brighton (where my wife works) and work in leafy Bloomsbury, so a reasonable amount of my week is spent in transit: about four hours a day by the [...]