Why plastic bags matter

There’s another kerfuffle about getting rid of plastic bags, since one of the government’s waste advisers has suggested that government plans to ban plastic bags, or charge for them, are a diversion from more pressing environmental issues. While it is true that plastic bags represent only a small amount of waste, or of oil use, the reason reducing their use has become important is because they are symbolic of a different issue - respect for other species.

Competition between global cities

The geographer Saskia Sassen is one of the sharpest analysts of the detail of globalisation - and I was able to see her speak on Thursday evening in London at an event organised by the RIBA ‘Building Futures’ programme. (I’ve posted before on her analysis of how different parts of government gain or lose from globalisation).

Her talk was based on a big academic study in which she and her researchers ranked 63 leading cities - cities, in her terminology, with a ‘global city function’ - by a whole set of criteria. Different cities came top on different assessments; Vancouver, for example, was top on the criteria of “ease of doing business”. Her conclusion from this is that the global economy extracts value from the (often small) differences between cities - but the small differences are critical to the value which any particular city creates.

Britain’s random drugs policy

The decision by the British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to reclassify cannabis as a Category B drug, despite the opposing views of her expert advisers, has reminded me of the chaotic state of Britain’s drugs policy. It is an area where policy has remained completely immune to evidence - as one ‘killer chart’ demonstrates.

The impact of global organised crime

One of the observations of last year’s State of the Future report (which I blogged about here) was that organised crime was one of the the three biggest threats to global security and prosperity. Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia (’a journey through the global criminal underworld’) comes to a similar conclusion - arguing that organised crime is a bigger threat than terrorism.

Mobile money - from Africa to the UK?

Kenya’s mobile phone-enabled payment system M-Pesa has grown explosively over the last nine months, according to Russell Southwood’s Balancing Act newsletter, which has been tracking the African mobile and internet markets for something like four years now. According to the newsletter the operator, Safaricom, gained 150,000 users in the three months to June last year, topped the million mark by December, and had reached 1.6m by January - despite, or perhaps because of, the country’s election-related violence. [Update: Now 2m - see Comment below]. Southwood describes it as a ‘breakthrough moment’ for mobile payments - one that’s being watched in the UK.

Important machines in history

I visited the recently refurbished Royal Observatory at Greenwich last weekend, where there is, inevitably, a whole section devoted to Harrison and his clock-based solution to the ‘longitude problem’. (The story of his fight with the Astronomer Royal, Neville Maskelyne, and the astronomy establishment, which preferred the so-called ‘lunar solution’, is famouly told by Dava Sobel in her book ‘Longitude’.) But the reason for posting is that the Observatory describes Harrison’s fourth clock, the H-4 pocket watch, as “one of the most important machines ever made”.

Scoring the impending global crisis: population

The ‘grand problematique’ is a phrase sometimes used in futures works to describe that coming collision of population increase, food supply issues, energy shortage, and climate change impact - which, it’s said, could be making our lives hell by 2030. (Colin Mason called it the ‘2030 Spike‘). There has been a wave of related reports and news stories on this recently, so I thought it would be worth running a quick score. I’m planning a series of posts covering off the stories I’ve noticed - starting with population.

Banks and chutzpah

I’ve been trying to stay away from the banking crisis, which is a big fast-moving story which has been well-covered elsewhere. But some of the events of the past few days have reminded me of the story about the definition of chutzpah: the boy who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

Making the Transition locally

I’ve meant to write before about the Transition Initiative, which is in my view one of the most radical things happening in the UK at the moment - radical because it is local and community-oriented, radical because it is a thought-through response to both impending energy shortage and climate change. (If only the government was as coherent). Now the movement’s ‘founder’, Rob Hopkins, has written a book which is a combination of handbook, textbook, and manifesto.

Arthur C Clarke and our ‘future in space’

The death of Arthur C Clarke at the age of 90 reminded me of a post I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks now, about our certainty in the 1950s and 60s that in the future we would have interstellar travel and colonies in space. That future may still exist, although to my mind it seems less likely now. Why didn’t it arrive? Partly - but only partly - because we blew the money on the Cold War instead.