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 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, Université du Québec, 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 criticized claims that CFCs contribute to ozone depletion and that human activity was contributing to global warming.

Bailey has stated in the article "Global Warming ... Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough":

Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now ... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable.

However, he is critical of Al Gore and his film about global warming, writing, "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."

Ronald BaileyRonald Bailey