Michael Edwards

Another opportunity to address a conference on climate change, this time at an event themed on green technologies. 

Ready with some key messages to give, it all began to fall apart when it turned out the anonymous sounding 76 Portland Place in London, was in fact the home of the Institute of Physics.  And I am a physics graduate. 

Still I could have stuck to message, but then a green activist at the beginning of the conference said we didn't know how to deliver change and then quoted Albert Einstein saying we have to think outside the box. 

Now Albert Einstein is a hard act to follow.  In 1905 alone, he published 4 papers that changed our understanding of light, atoms, time (relativity) and matter & energy. 

I remember how excited colleagues in the first year at university were about special relativity.  Every weekly tutorial kept discussing it.  'Would you see your reflection in a mirror travelling away from you at the speed of light?'  All enthusiasm for special relativity disappeared as fast as the mirror when we actually had to learn it in the second term. 

To think outside the box at the best of times is hard to do.   And counter-intuitive.  So why advocate it to an audience primed and ready to learn about how we can do more to reduce our carbon footprint? 

And so my speech went off track as I tried to recall how counter-intuitive quantum physics (the physics of very small things) was; and as I tried to explain how the classical model of the electron orbiting a nucleus (requiring energy to stay in orbit) was a good simile for a poor performing organisation. 

It's just possible I left the audience confused.  (But I'm not going as far as Ming Campbell in describing myself as a failure.) 

The key message stands.  Greens who are not part of the mainstream of politics and political activity, have a poor understanding of how change can be delivered, and have a poor understanding on how progress on the chosen priorities of the last decade, such as educational attainment, has been delivered. 

We know mitigating climate change is a tough call.  But not learning from our successes in delivering reform in the last decade is disappointing.