Ronald Bailey is the science editor for Reason magazine. He was born and raised in Washington County, Virginia, and attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1976. He attended the University of Virginia School of Law for three semesters.

Bailey worked briefly as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before turning to his career in writing and television production. According to his biography on the Reason magazine website: "He has produced several series and documentaries for PBS television and ABC News. Mr. Bailey was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Commentary, The New York Times Book Review, The Public Interest, Smithsonian magazine, National Review, Forbes, The Washington Times, Newsday, and Readers Digest. He has lectured at Harvard University, Rutgers University, McGill University, University of Alaska, Universite de Quebec, the Cato Institute, the Instituto de Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), and the American Enterprise Institute."

Bailey lives in Washington, D.C., and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Bailey has described himself as a "libertarian transhumanist." To this end, he has written a book entitled "Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution".

In his 1993 book, Ecoscam and other works Bailey criticised claims that CFCs contributed to ozone depletion and that human activity was contributing to global warming. However, he has subsequently revised his views, stating in 2005 ^*

Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up.

However, he is very critical of Al Gore and his new film about global warming ^*, saying "On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we'll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He's a global warming exaggerator."

DDT and malaria

Bailey wrote:

Meanwhile, Carson’s disciples have managed to persuade many poor countries to stop using DDT against mosquitoes. The result has been an enormous increase in the number of people dying of malaria each year. Today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them. Anti-DDT activists who tried to have the new U.N. treaty on persistent organic pollutants totally ban DDT have stepped back recently from their ideological campaign, conceding that poor countries should be able to use DDT to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes. ^*

Bibliography

• ECOSCAM: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (St. Martins Press, 1993) ISBN 0312109717.
• The True State of the Planet (The Free Press, 1995) (ed.) ISBN 0028740106.
• Earth Report 2000: Revisiting The True State of The Planet (McGraw Hill, 1999) (ed.) ISBN 0071342605.
• Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death (Prima Lifestyles, 2002). (ed.) ISBN 0761536604.

See also

• DDT ban

American columnists | American magazine editors | Living people