British Science Festival Lecture – Engineering the Ecological Age

Here is a brief report of one of two talks I went to at the British Science Festival recently.  The speaker was Peter Head, who is a director of Arup and an expert in planning urban development.  He’s one of the UK’s top civil engineers and has an international reputation in eco-design.  Time magazine has even named him one of the world’s top eco-warriors. 

He started by summarising the mess the world is in with climate change and peak oil and told us that the world needs a new economic model.  I don’t suppose he’s in a transition group, but at this point he was sounding like he was.  Most of the talk however was on the sorts of technologies needed to make buildings and communities sustainable, including:

• Anaerobic digesters that produce bio-gas and compost from food waste and sewage
• Mining waste for valuable materials (apparently New York’s landfill is potentially the world’s biggest cooper mine)
• Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants in North Africa can meet all Europe’s electricity demand
• Urban planning to reduce the need to travel and get cars off the road
• Urban farming incl. trees to help cool streets, food growing on roofs
• Grow algae in hot water on sides of buildings and send to anaerobic digester.

The overall message was upbeat – solutions are available and this is an exciting time to be an engineer.  However he admitted that all this needs political will and when his talk moved away from his engineering expertise I found him less impressive.  Here are some examples. 

1. He repeated the official government line that we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions 50% by 2050 and UK emissions 80% by 2050 to be sustainable.  The science says we need to reduce much more than this to have any hope of limiting global average temperature rise to 2 deg C.
2. He said the all the UK’s housing should be upgraded street by street (hurray), but blithely said that “pension funds will pay”.  Surely pension funds are obliged to make the best return for the pensioners?
3. He said water shortages can be met by desalination of seawater.  But these plants are heavy energy users and not cheap.  How can poor countries possibly afford them? 

I’m glad I went but I didn’t identify anything that is immediately relevant to Transition Ashtead.  However the other Science Festival talk I attended was called ‘Energy from the Surrey Hills: Wind and Wood?’ which promised immediate local interest.  I’ll report on that within a day or two. 

Derek Smith