Tony Curzon Price

Tony Curzon Price is Editor-in-Chief of openDemocracy. He received a PhD in economics from University College London (UCL), and worked as a jobbing economist for more than ten years. He founded a high-tech electronics compancy, Arithmatica, in 1998 and lived in Silicon Valley from 2001 to 2004.

He has lectured on economics and energy policy to postgraduates at Imperial College, London, and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Recent articles

Energy is at the heart of two of the hardest social problems we face: environment and poverty. And the two pull in different directions.

Average energy use per person must rise, while total carbon emmissions must fall. Bringing 2 billion people out of misery and another 2 billion out of poverty will need huge increases in their energy use. But at the same time,  environmental constraints mean that carbon emmissions must fall.

To come to a responsible view on a great number of topics - from the response to economic crisis to bio-fuels; from climate change mitigation to transport policy - we need to have a solid grounding in the facts about energy. (See David's own list of questions at the bottom of this page).

This is why I have picked David Mackay's "Energy Without Hot Air" as a first text for openDemocracy's 2009 Group Reads. We'll feature about 10 pages per week and keep a running page of the commentary and questions and notes.

As before, we'll use diigo.com to do the annotations. You need to sign up for a diigo account and then join the "Energy group read" group. I usually find it easiest to install the diigo toolbar on my browser to add notes to online texts. You can also get the same sort of functionality by installing the diigolet button, which is somewhat easier to use and install.If you have any trouble with any of this, add a question to the comments on this page and we'll try to sort it out.

Once you have diigo set up, you can go to the online version of  "Energy Without Hot Air" and start reading, commenting and asking questions. When you come to a place in the text that is worth a comment or question (for example, here, on the text "This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers"), highlight the phrase and choose "Highlight" from the diigo menu. Once highlighted, mouse over the highlight and choose "Add sticky note" from the diigo menu. Type in your note or question and in the drop-down menu that defaults to "Private" make sure you select "od energy group read".

When you are reading  "Energy Without Hot Air" other people's highlights should appear, and you should be able to read their comments and questions by mousing over the text.You can also look at all notes on a page.

We're still experimenting with how these online group reads work. Last year, we ran group reads on Zittrain's Future of the Internet and on the G20 communique. They're fun, interesting and informative. Do join us!

Just like to say a big thank you to David MacKay who has been very supportive of this project, and to William Sigmund without whose amazing html and perl skills I do not think we would have had an online version to work with.

Today was pretty Gaza-dominated on the site again. Over in the forums, Gaza-related threads are getting very long and heated. Just asn an example, Iron Mike posted this one on Hamas being the blame for the war, and it now has 110 replies. I think that Avi Shlaim's devastating history of Israel's post-1947 treatment of Palestinians should be read by all those in that thread. It is very powerful to hear this story told by "someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders."

We published on the economy too. Godfrey Hodgson celebrates the return of the economically powerful state, while Simon Zadek sees the hope for real accountability in capital allocation mechanisms. Simon links the solution of the financial crisis and the environmental crisis: both are failures to hold the powerful to account for all the consequences of their actions. I hope Simon is right. I feel that the solutions may be less technocratic than he seems to suggest---redesigning incentive systems is unlikely without a firm purpose, and that needs a strong, positive vision to take hold. On that, we could do better.

 There is a very moving story of vision in Jane Gabriel's interview of legend film-maker Theo Angelopoulos. He is interesting on the riots ... but also on the optimism of his own generation: 

" I belong to an older generation, a generation that believed that change was possible, that it was possible to change the world, that it was possible to open up a new path. My generation believed that it was possible not only to dream of a new world, but also to turn dreams into realities. It didn't happen. I think we are all carrying the shadow of disappointment and failure. "

 But read to the end. It is brimming with hope.

We have a huge amount of good material coming in. That's one thing crises do -- send thinking people to write. We don't have the capacity to transform all of it into publishable material. Hat tip to the volunteers in the publishing network without whom output would slow to a trickle!

Oh ... and yesterday's intruder on the Gaza box. He's now written suggesting some writers we might like to commission. That's an improvement in method :)

Denis Dutton at Arts & Letters Daily featured Theo Hobson's very interesting Milton piece and we got the spike in readership that comes from Denis' selection. I have written about the ALDaily effect, over here in relation to the unbundling of editorial roles that is happening all over publishing. If you go to the comments on the Milton piece, the 15 from Sunday are, I assume, from amongst the followers of Denis' recommendations. They are articulate, intelligent, opinionated---just the sorts of readers we love to have. Thanks, Denis!

Our own unbundling had a slight hic-up today. First, I spent a good part of last night restoring 2 new computers replacing the stolen ones. (Digression: my laptop had a Time Machine on an external hard-drive in the house. I got a total clone of the computer that was stolen in hours. Selina's had key files backed up on Mac's iDisk which was much less smooth restoring. Of course, iDisk is somewhat safer in that it is off-site. The lesson is that we should always be backing up both on and off-site, both complete mirrors and critical files).

Then there was a big ModernLiberty planning meeting -- exciting things happening there, more news soon. And finally our twice weekly physical group get-together... So it was great that the publishing team got  Sophie Roberts'  piece on the disappearances of civil society and opposition figures in Zimbabwe. She tells the history of Zimababwe's first post-colonial "dirty war" againstZapu-supporters and analyses disappearance as a tactic of putting people in a place that is beyond law. People disappear, and, this way, so too does accountability.

Tomorrow -- the traditionalism of the French Socialist party, three scenarios for Somalia ...

I added the Polymeme feed to the front page the other day. Polymeme was created by openDemocracy author Evgeny Morozov. It is Evgeny's own semi-automated news aggregator, and I had found myself selecting so many of Evgeny's stories in my "The World" entries that I eventually saw the web logic of this -- why not  spread the energy and just give Polymeme its own slot.

Evgeny has built a database of a huge number of sites and blogs which he has categorised into broad subject areas. Every day, his machine discovers which stories are being referred to by several of these sites. He then does a manual cull for the most interesting ones. The result is a very interesting and distinctively personal selection of news stories.

Yesterday's fron page plans did not all come together in time. There was the very nice surprise of having John Palmer's piece on the Irish referendum and the sureal spectacle of having Europe's leaders promise that they will not do any number of things that they never had the intention or the right under the treaty of doing. Palmer wonders whose victory it will be if the Lisbon Treaty does not get through before the UK Tories are in power with the ability to veto it.... Time is surprisingly short, and the Irish in a rather good negotiating position.

We did not have all the Stalin/Memorial pieces ready to go last night, and anyway it seemed as if the SWISH report and its extraordinary daglo picture --- this is described on flickr as a picture of a soldier concealing himself  with a smoke bomb after his vehicle is hit by an IED --- could spend a few more hours in the top slot. A strange notion of concealment ... maybe there is a metaphor there.

The Russian pieces should be ready to go tonight. The two together tell a very disturbing story. I hope that we see the Zimababwe article too.There has been very good discussion on Archibugi's Human RIghts piece - what exactly is the role of NGO's in improving governance?The immigration pieces we featured from OurKingdom last week continue to elicit important debate.

I had the nasty experience of having our house broken into last night. My laptop was stolen, as was Selina's (my wife's) ... So today has been a scramble of glaziers, police visits and all the while making sure that we do have backups of everything (and especially Selina's manuscript). I think we're going to be OK, but it is a long process getting the personal computing cloud back up and running.