Zerochampion

Following a rather frenetic and frenzied day at Ecobuild last Wednesday I was hoping to piece together a considered and thoughtful piece together over the weekend. Failure. So instead I will simply brain dump some notes from the day in a list format:

• Will Eco part from Build? Regardless of your view on the emergence and relative success of the sustainability movement in the UK, it’s quite remarkable to see the success of Ecobuild. So much so it appears to have pushed the established products show Interbuild, to the sidelines. Such a step clearly raises the spectre of sell-out or split. This post in the Green Building Press reflects such a viewpoint. And speaking to some committed greenies at the Inbuilt drinks do at the end of the day confirmed that ongoing tension. According to some the ‘real’ green exhibitors had been pushed to the cheap seats, leaving bigger and more established players to hog the centre stage Continue reading →

Spring is here. Time to get over our post-Copenhagen hangovers and kick back into action. Ecobuild starts today and, more significantly we have the introduction of the Pay as You Save policy by the Government. I’ve only seen early new reports on this, such as in the Telegraph, so we’ll have to see the detail. Casey Cole over at Carbon Limited has written two excellent posts on existing stock policy, part 1 and part 2, and the UK Green Building Council, which has been campaigning for PAYs for two years, has sent me a handy guide (obviously with their slant on it) to what it means: Continue reading →

I have written a few posts in the past year or so on the state of journalism in the wake of the recession and burgeoning free digital content. There was plenty of navel gazing and head scratching that has gone on and continues in the trade (I currently have 106 bookmarks on my delicious account in the past nine months or so on this) as to whether we can come up with a different business model for online journalism. Which is code for charging for content.

So what’s my company concluded? Two main things:

• That we will be charging for content online. Continue reading →

After a relatively quiet month or so we’re now firmly in events season. There’s two of them to kick the year off , BSEC, the schools exhibition and conference run by my company, this week followed swiftly by the behemoth that is Ecobuild thre working days later. A chance then for something of a gauge of how the industry is collectively feeling about itself as a Spring – please God let it come (the season that is) – election looms. Is it the last hurrah for education investment, or will the argument for retaining school funding, put forward by Building last week, be met favourably by the new administration? Is there green ennui post Copenhagen that will be reflected at Ecobuild?

There will also chance for us to experiment a little at our UBM stand tomorrow at BSEC. I’m chairing a live debate in the afternoon from the stand on green refurbishments of schools. One of the speakers will be contributing from the stand itself, Richard Woods at Capita Architecture, whilst the rest of the line-up will be logging in remotely – more information on the debate on this page. We’ll be flashing up the debate on the screens on our stand but we’ll also have an audience outside of the ExCel centre in East London. It’s what in the US people in virtual and live events are calling a ‘hybrid’ event, mixing digital with live. It’s hardly that new but interesting to see how such formats evolve.

Having got thoroughly depressed reading another thread on climate change off the back of an article in the Sunday Times, it was a delight, and an irony as it’s housed on the same site, to listen to comedian John Oliver riff on it on the Bugle podcast from last week:

Just reading up on these (climate change) stories opens up a Pandora’s Box of whack jobs. The comments on the pages below the articles… passes you through a wardrobe into a Narnia of nutcases. I really do think that these message boards might well be the perfect time capsule of crazy. If any life form a thousand years down the line comes to this scorched lifeless planet and wonders what happened I do hope there’s a hard-drive in tact somehwere so they can read what we were saying to each other before we died off . It would offer a vital window into the fatal flaws that helped wipe humanity from the face of the planet.

I’m rediscovering the lecture. Having sat through them with more regularity but less interest during the mid 90s in tertiary education it’s now an experience I crave more of. The renewed enthusiasm was sparked in part by seeing author Richard Holmes speak this time last year at the Royal Society. I wonder in an age of continual distraction listening to someone talk for a good chunk of time is a refreshing diversion.

So this led me to the LSE, and it’s new Sheikh Zayed lecture theatre, at the weekend for Reading London, part of the school’s Literary Festival 2010. Continue reading →

My immediate response to Mark Brinkley’s post from a few weeks back entitled Is Blogging Dying? was that while he had a point – blogging doesn’t seem to be as exciting or popular as a few years back – this shouldn’t put the best ones like him off from continuing in the medium . Looking at the overall numbers – a report by the Association of Online Publishers issued earlier this month – backs up the thought that the explosion of blogs in the past decade has slowed. Year on year growth from 2008 to 2009 for blogs and personal websites in terms of visits was healthy – 12% up – but below that of growth in news and media (up nearly 20%) and social networking (17%). The point I made below his post was that I thought many online visitors were consolidating their digital experiences somewhat. I for one have now started to cut back on the feed of sites I follow in the past few weeks, simply down to time and new interests. And as Mark pointed out I’ve not seen many great new blogs or bloggers introduce themselves to our browsers in the past year or so.

Mark’s post has clearly lodged itself into my subconscious as in the past week as I’ve been seriously considering the future of this blog. Continue reading →

In a recent post I rather jokingly referred to my chilly house with no central heating. It’s all very well for me making gags about wearing slankets but for some the situation is entirely more sobering and uncomfortable. Holly Billen, an eight-month pregnant 26-year-old who lives in Wiltshire and features in today’s Guardian, is having to make a daily decision between spending money on heating or food. Which serves to underline our collective moral duty to upgrade our housing stock, both environmentally and socially.

Having read the initial gloomy summaries of how disastrous the Copenhagen conference was in the hours and days afterwards I, probably like many, put it to the back of my mind and concentrated on enjoying a high carbon Christmas. So in sober January it was useful to get a less tabloid version of events over the Channel at the Green Monday event earlier this week. The organisers pulled together four speakers to review events from their perspective. There was: the Government man – Chris Dodwell from DEC ; the environmentalist – Steve Howard from The Climate Group; the businessman – Ray Barker from Kingfisher; and the banker – Abyd Karmali, who works with Merrill Lynch. The consensus: an attempt to look on the bright side rather than continue to get depressed about what Copenhagen didn’t do. Which was a mixed success. Continue reading →

I am currently writing this sat next to an electric heater wearing a slanket. For those unaware of the unexpected Christmas phenomenon that was the slanket it’s a blanket with sleeves. Yes, you look like you’re in a straight-jacket, and it may well have been a seasonal gimmick, but for dwellers of leaky Victorian houses with no central heating it is essential attire.

So this is an overdue update on the refurb, not simply a pathetic whinge. Buying such a property and hunkering down for winter was part of the plan.  That said winter turned out to be the coldest since when the Beatles starting knocking out three minute ditties was not one that we anticipated. I’m currently living a rather schizophrenic existence. By morning and night there’s plenty of layers, rediscovering the rather old-fashioned pleasures of the electric blanket and the slipper; by day stripping off the layers in my overheated office. Continue reading →