The first photo shows Tessa Tennant speaking on Monday this week to guests at a BMW event, spotlighting their electric cars. A particular highlight on the i3, which Tessa and her husband Bill drive. Astrid and I went along a year after I want to the first of these events – and were pleased to encounter a mix of the usual suspects and several people I hadn’t seen for ages, including Tracy Worcester, now Director of Farms Not Factories.
The cleantech theme is becoming hot again – and continued to play out in the days following. Notably on Friday, when I spoke at the Clean & Cool Showcase event atop Millbank Tower. Odd walk down memory lane as I made my way from Westminster Tube to the tower: walked past ICI’s old HQ. There was a time when I was in and out of that building like a pendulum in a grandfather clock. Including for a memorable interview with John Harvey-Jones when he was Chairman. Also recalled the time when three different parts of ICI were threatening to sue us after the publication of The Green Consumer Guide, despite the fact that we were working for them at the time.
The week began with such things as Board meeting with the Biomimicry Institute, which I did via Skype. The week was delightfully fully of conversations, with people like André Schneider about his forthcoming World Green Economy Summit in Dubai, where I will keynote; Jim Banister about our evolving work on what we call the ‘Screen Consumer;’ and Rafia Qureshi, Jules Peck, and Peggy Liu and Caroline Seow.
I also had a session with Susana Frazao Pinheiro about my annual lecture at UCL, which happened on Thursday – and was great fun. The cleantech theme surfaced a number of times, particularly around the Tesla and Elon Musk stories.
Then, yesterday, we sped westwards to Little Rissington to see the Elkingtons of Hill House, an exercise that remind me of just how much of a fossil-fuelled installed base we currently have on our roads – and of the level of effort that it will take to move from concept cars and ‘Early Adopter’ usage through to the ‘Early’ and ‘Late Majorities’ moving to sustainable mobility options.
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