The new hot thing: The Cold Economy

Is there anything in common between a recent test of a subsea based server run by Microsoft off the coast of California and the World Expo 2015 theme “Feeding the planet, energy for life” held in Milan?

What is the connection between a LNG tanker travelling from Australia to Japan and the record sales of air conditioners in China in 2014?

Most readers would probably consider these questions merely provocative and probably meaningless. Nonetheless the events have actually much more in common than meets the eye.

The experimental efforts of Microsoft to reduce its energy impact, the explosion in sales of air conditioning units in China, the movement of a refrigerated tanker across the world and the fight against hunger represented by the World Expo theme are unified by a single theme: the Cold Economy.