sutton038

Recently Google Maps has been blowing my (admittedly somewhat unstable) mind. It all started when I thought it would be great to travel around China, looking at Special Economic Zones . In the absense of cash to get a ticket to China though, I used Google Street View to drive through the outskirts of Hong Kong and to look longingly across the bay at Shenzhen, an economic engine on overdrive. Virtual driving with Google streetview requires no petrol, but the system does rely on giant Google data centres sucking up huge quantities of electricity, so it ain’t exactly carbon-free travel yet. That’s a goal for the future, and in the spirit of a great transformation from carbon-intensive economies to a carbon-free one, I thought it would be interesting to use Google’s software to map the harware of global energy. Thus, I'm happy to introduce Suitpossum’s Map of Global Energy Geopolitics. View Suitpossum's Global Energy Geopolitics in a larger map It's the beginning of an ongoin...

On Thursday I made my first appearance in the Ecologist , by all accounts one of the world’s leading environmental publications, founded in the 1970s. Yeah, airpunch! The subject of the article was food speculation . It sounds obscure, but concerns around speculation on agricultural futures have been seeping into the mainstream agenda over the last few months in the context of rising global food prices. There is rising suspicion that the activities of financial players in commodity futures markets could have a distorting effect on futures prices, and thus that food price increases might be linked to computer algorithms running in some hedge fund in Mayfair. WHEATBIX FUTURES Having had experience in the world of derivatives, I’m always prepared to accommodate the idea that irrational behaviour in financial markets could distort prices. That said, I’ve remained cautious about populist arguments about why speculation must necessarily be a negative force. Thus, in late 2010, I attended a ...