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Extraordinary day spent at annual Environmental Advisory Meeting of Nissan, with many of the top brass in attendance, but with we visitors – and many of the younger Nissan people – barely able to keep our minds off the results of the US election.  Cell phones and laptops were being passed around at various junctures, with people debating the signifciance of the mapped results.  When the news finally went solid, there was applause across the room, twice. 

A strong sense that a dark, misguided, benighted, mean-spirited period in America’s history may finally be drawing end, with at least the hope of something better. Like many people, I suspect, I found my mind turning back to the even darker days of slavery.  Am currently reading Janis Cooke Newman’s extraordinary novelised life of Mrs Lincoln.  And then Mark (Lee) at SustainAbility sent out a link to the latest Tom Friedman op-ed from the New York Times.  Caught the spirit to the nth degree.  What a race it has been – and the first US election where I actually dreamed of the outcome on election night.  No-one can envy Obama the Augean task he now faces, but he certainly won my (non-existent) vote.

Driven to Nissan’s R&D Center outside Tokyo in a fuel-cell vehicle, for a session I did head-to-head with one of Japan’s leading environmentalists, Junko Edahiro.  Great fun – and someone I’m keen to build a deeper connection with.

Dashboard of Fuel Cell Vehicle I was driven out of the city in   Solar roofing at Nissan R&D Center   After the session – Junko in the middle   Any colour as long as it’s …   Electric car 1   Electric car 2   Now I have my Carbon Off Passport, what mobility option to choose?

[NOTE: I thought this was a Dreamliner already, but subsequently found that the Dreamliner hasn’t been launched yet …]

Up at 04.00 (albeit with an hour’s grace because of the clocks going back at midnight) in Seattle for the trip out to Sea-Tac.  The repile in me protested, but the taxi-driver had the BBC World Service on when I climbed in – and so I got to hear the spoof conversation between a fraudulent President Sarkozy and a very real Sarah Palin.  Helped ease me into the day.

On arriving in Los Angeles,  I found the relevant terminal and not long afterwards boarded a 777 for Tokyo’s Narita airport,.  My Argentinian seat-mate and I were alternately amused and spooked by peridoic announcements from the cockpit that the brakes weren’t working – and then that the avionics weren’t either.  At which point the pilot demostrated just how digital modern airliners are by rebooting the plane, “just as you would your laptop,” he gaily advised.  They shut everything off for a while – and then turned things on again.  Happily the systems worked, at least for long enough to get us across the Pacific, though significantly delayed. 

(An interesting example of synchonicity and serendipity was that my new friend’s girlfriend works on climate change in Argentina.)

Had forgotten that crossing the date line meant that I would lose a day.  As I chewed on the fact, I couldn’t help but notice that a  fair few folk at Narita were wearing the face-masks that Asians so like – and which I find slightly spooky.  On the airport limousine (glorified name for a bus) in to the hotel in the Ginza district of Tokyo, several of my fellow passengers were sneezing or snorting fairly vigorously. 

As for me, as I finish off a mass of work for Volans and SustainAbility in my hotel room, and begin to wind up myself up for a series of sessions with Nissan and other companies, my fingers are pretty much all crossed that we get the right result in the US elections today — and that Sarah Palin can go back to her family and to making mincemeat out of large Alaskan wildlife, rather than practicing the same skills on the US economy and reputation in the world.

Feeling utterly exhausted after flying in to San Francisco a few days back for a session with Physic Ventures – and then heading on up to Seattle for a session yesterday with Microsoft.  I kicked off a special session of the Microsoft US CIO Summit, focusing on green IT.  Today I only briefly ventured out of my hotel In Bellevue to visit the nearby Apple Store, which Chris Guenther (who was with me at Microsoft) had pinpointed for me.  Had scallops when he and I had dinner last night – and have had an attack of food poisoning today. 

Have spent much of the time writing articles for magazines in Brazil and Japan – and being interviewed this morning by the Christian Science Monitor.  Have also been working on slide presentation for Nisan in Japan next week. 

Apart from a brightish period towards sunset this evening, the weather has been pure Seattle, with a good deal of rain, blurring the plate glass windows of my hotel room. My other small problem at the moment is a blurring of vision in my left eye, which I hope is simply just the cataract the doctors told me I am busily developing – but they argue that such things should be left to “ripen” before they are operated on. Makes one acutely aware of just how impoirtant our eyesight is. 

Part of our family here in the Seattle area was afflicted by colour blindness, indeed I am told that one member of the family was the infernally corrupt Schuyler Colfax, who made it to Vice Presient under U.S. grant, a career path which he apparently owed in part to having been disqualified from driving trains by his own colour blindness.  A nice story – and one I must check in a bit more detail one of these days.

The hour going back today was one of few good things about the week, aside from a highly successful joint SustainAbility-Volans evening event at The Hub on Wednesday and a decompression session with Charmian, Sam and Smita on Friday evening.  Otherwise, the week’s character is summed up by what just happened with my treasure trove of photographs taken during the week, both by myself and by Sam.  I was uploading them to my laptop, when a message appeared to say that disk space was precariously low.  So I came out, thinking the 120-odd images to date would have been saved, only to find – after deleting them – that they had disappeared.  Must be tired – partly after putting up with a trip in and out of London this afternoon for a meeting at 2 Bloomsbury Place.

Still, on reflection, there were other good moments.  They included a session with Singapore’s Economic Development Board on Monday, a brown-bag lunch with Monica Araya of Climate Change Capital and members of the Volans SustainAbility teams, a filming session for Accenture on Wednesday, an Environment Foundation Trustees meeting at 2BP on Thursday, and the broaching of a couple of Geoff Lye’s kindly gifted bottles of champagne as things wound down on Friday – after one of the wildest weeks for a while, both externally in the financial markets and internally.   

A couple of folk who came in during the week from the United Bank of Carbon asked me what Volans was about and one phrase I dredged up from previous days was that we aim to be grit in other people’s oysters.  And sometimes the grit lands in our oyster, as it did this week – spurring an extraordinary bout of creative thinking, which has produced a new book idea, a theme for a research programme and a bunch of other things.  Ho hum. 

A column I co-authored with Pierre-François Thaler and Sylvain Guyoton of EcoVadis appeared in yesterday’s issue of Le Monde.  It explored similarities between the U.S. suprime and Chinese melamine-in-milk scandals.