Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Peace Prize that he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, to having been a prominent US politician.
On the other side of the Atlantic, energy and the environment have
risen to the top of the UK political agenda. But, since Britain's major
political parties are not too far apart on climate policies, the contest has
to some extent boiled down to the “personal greenness” of party leaders.
David Cameron has made the environment a major aspect of his re-
branding of the Conservative party, not only in terms of policy but also
in personal image.
Shortly after becoming Conservative leader, he was filmed and pho-
tographed riding a dogsled on a glacier in the Norwegian island of
Spitsbergen to draw attention to the problem of climate change where it
was beginning to have an effect. He had a wind turbine installed on his
London house (which he had to take down briefly because it infringed
local planning rules). But he was only really tripped up by the discovery
that his well-publicized bicycle commutes to the House of Commons were
facilitated by a chauffeur bringing his briefcase and extra clothes along
behind in a car. Gestures of this kind are not the strong suit of the former
prime minister Gordon Brown - who, however, did let it be known that
he had “quietly” put solar panels on his house in Scotland.
Business
A wide range of companies have been re-branding themselves as green, and
many of the world's wealthiest business people have been investing in clean
energy. So much so that when the
Sunday Times
published its first ever
“Green Rich List”, in 2009, it did not look very different from the ordinary
“Rich List” it has published for the past twenty years. The list was headed
by Warren Buffet, one of the world's richest men. The sheer scale of his
investments placed him at the top: they include some US utilities develop-
ing wind power and a Hong Kong company making electric-car batteries.
The green business celeb who has undoubtedly attracted the most atten-
tion - and criticism - is Sir Richard Branson. He has been industrious in
his efforts to prevent the GHG emissions of his fleet tarnishing the image
of his airlines (and the rest of the Virgin Group). In 2006 he pledged that
all of the Virgin transport division's profits would be ploughed back into
alternatives to standard kerosene jet-fuel. The degree to which this has
actually happened is hard to gauge because Virgin is a private group.
But Branson has experimented with running Virgin planes on biofuels
and is interested in investing in algae biofuels. At the same time, however,
