Yes I love lists. Here’s one with nine in it, which by a freak act of nature is the number of the new year that we have entered. I hope I don’t run out of juice by number five:
Slow-tech - It’s the title of a book by author Andrew Price. He’s putting forward a philosophy [...]
The question about how best to embed green principles into construction - the carrot or the stick - has been an ongoing theme of this blog. It reared its head this week again at two Building magazine events - the first a conference, the second while I was interviewing winners of the Building Sustainability awards [...]
Paul King chief executive of the UK Green Building, gave a brief speech at last night’s Building Sustainability Awards. Here it is:
A question on many people’s lips, including journalists from the trade press, recently has been, ‘will sustainability be the next casualty of the credit crunch?’
Life is very tough out there at the moment, and [...]
The International Energy Association (IEA) has said it will be almost impossible to prevent dangerous climate change above 2 degrees without extracting greenhouse gases from the air.
Two further numbers from their annual report featured on Reuters:
$3.6 trillion - the cost of decarbonising all the world’s energy production between 2010 and 2030.
$4.0 trillion - the price paid to shore up [...]
We live in strange times. For the past few weeks we’ve been waking up with some dread, expecting another depressing set of economics news, company results or political/global crises. Then comes this morning. I awoke halfway through John McCain’s concession speech then fired up the TV to watch Obama give what I’m sure will go [...]
The latest in my haphazard series of random musings on the future state of the globe.
So just how excited can we get at the prospect of the man who likes to say change entering the White House? Let’s hope he gets there in the first place.
I’m somewhat reminded of the heady days of 1997 when [...]
So farewell then Allan Jones, chief executive of the London Climate Change Agency (LCCA), one of the numerous redundancies that are about to befall ours and other industries. His departure was not much of a bacon sandwich-dropper - he was a Ken appointment, and today’s Building article points to the lack of discernible results from [...]
Just been at a Saint-Gobain roundtable / high-end focus group high up in 30 St Mary Ax (the Jerkin). The French manufacturing group was founded - almost incredibly - to supply glass for the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles in 1660 which now owns Jewson, British Gypsum and Artex among others. UK Chief Exec, Roland Lazard, reckons that makes them [...]
To Pall Mall last night for a lecture from James Woudhuysen, the professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester. Or alternatively a sustainability iconoclast. By that I mean he has it in for greenies that believe we need to rethink man’s role in the world. So out goes conservation, reduction or going [...]
Here’s a very interesting question that was raised to me yesterday by Martin Russell-Croucher, with whom I was on a panel with at an EPC event a couple of weeks ago. Russell-Croucher is director of accreditation and certification at the RICS and has unsurprisingly been closely tracking the implementation of the EPBD legislation that oversees [...]
