Thus Matt Ridley for The Wall Street Journal today. “Ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again,” he states in the byline. The gist of his argument is that innovation not only breaks all limits, but that it also improves the environment. This is his answer to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) and all subsequent worries of the same ilk. As he argues in The Rational Optimist (2010), the prevailing pessimism of our age is misguided. And he piles all sorts of figures in support of his optimism. But there is one small omission in his argument. To wit, whence the abundance of pessimism in today’s world? How come optimists like him are so scarce nowadays? And that is hardly a fallacy, he will have to admit. A British journalist, a businessman, and a member of the House of Lords, he had better answer this perplexing question in yet another book of his, of which there are plenty already.