Petrol head to battery head!
I met a fascinating bloke yesterday – architect, green guru and one of the venture capitalists behind the Tesla electric sports car.
William McDonough is the author of the ‘Hanover Principles’ and ‘Cradle to Cradle’, he has presented his ideas to George Bush at the White House (which he likened to an anthropologcal field trip) and more recently Barack Obama. He is also leading a project with Brad Pitt to help rebuild the hurricane devastated New Orleans.
Even more surprising is that he and I went to the same school in Hong Kong – he is however a few years my senior.
I just loved the fact that someone so passionate and inspiring about returning to a sustainable environment should have fast cars so foremost in mind. I would have dearly loved to engage him in a petrol-head-battery-head debate, but time was at a premium.
His books are well worth reading – he is far from a doom and gloom environmentalist – more what I would call an optimistic environmentalist – to him we have an abundance of free energy – with a huge nuclear reactor just a mere 93000000 million miles away, and we should concentrate on what we’ve got lots of and not how little we’ve got of something else. Sounds sensible to me.