The Royal Society of Arts hosted a lecture yesterday evening in London, discussing the recent book ‘Fixing Climate’ with the authors and a panel of eminent climate scientists. An excellent debate ensued, centred around the premise that ’scrubbing’ carbon from the exhaust of coal-fired power stations is going to be one of the very most significant industrial solutions to man-made CO2 emissions. The panel preferred the term ‘anthropogenic’ to man-made, which I found reassuringly science-y.

The authors were kind enough to sign the copies which my colleague and I bought. I began reading mine over my porridge this morning and, like the oats, it’s fairly heavy going but I feel it’s probably worth it. I’ll post a review when I finish it but I want to share an interesting comment made by Lord Oxburgh on the panel yesterday, answering a question from the BBC’s David Shukman about higher energy costs and the people who don’t like them (that’s everyone).

Lord Oxburgh said–I’m paraphrasing–that we are entering a new era that we’ll have to get used to, after a century of cheap fossil fuel, in which energy will become significantly more expensive for everyone. That’s no doubt true in the main, with the caveat that we’re also entering a multi-fuel era of sun, wind and water as well as carbon after a century fixated on oil and coal.

But it occurred to me that we do have a precedent in living memory, of the War and immediate post-War years from about 1940 to 1954, in which fuel and energy were scarce, costly and highly prized. As with our Wartime utility furniture research, Pli is interested in the buried lessons of the 1940s and how their austerity measures can inform our predicament.