Sustain Ability ????

Yesterday I attended a conference in Loughborough called Sustain EM, and I left early and in a very strange mood. The reason I went was because I have tried for two years to secure support for the Rotaire Dryline project, and at last the government has started to address sustainability as an issue. My problem is that a practical consumer item that saves energy is not "sexy" enough to hit their g spot. They like to fund big projects that address leading edge technology and particularly if they tap into the academic and University knowledge network.
As you will have guessed I got no further with my quest. However, I listened to four presenters - Bruce Duguid from the Carbon Trust, Adam Morton of Rolls-Royce, Thomas Bennett of Intelligent Energy and Andrew Haslett of the Energy Technology Institute. When they had finished their presentations there was a Q & A session, and I asked the first question: "Have any of you done a Carbon Audit on your own lifestyle?" None of them had. Another member of the audience asked about Transition Towns, and their faces were blank. They had not heard about transition towns.
I asked the question because it became clear just how new all their initiatives are. Even Rolls Royce has little experience of alternative energy yet now they are actively developing machinery for marine energy generation. ETI was only formally set up in March this year, with seven main partners; Shell, BP and Rolls-Royce among them. These are three of the major energy pirates if you like, posting nearly a billion pounds in profits between them. Their investment is a mere 5 million pounds each, to tap into 1.1 billion pounds of government (our) money! Andrew Haslett talked of tackling energy poverty, not the need to reduce energy consumption.
Bruce Duguid alone referred to the climate change crisis, casually saying that at present trends the CO2 content of the atmosphere in 2050 is likely to be 650 ppm, resulting in a 3-4 degree rise in temperature. A 3-4 degree rise in temperature will be catastrophic. It was clear that he does not understood the problem. Thomas Bennett is involved in developing fuel cells, and was honest enough to say that hydrogen technology was not the magic bullet, and that there was no answer to the problem of clean energy. Despite helping Boeing to power the first fuel cell powered aeroplane and helping Suzuki to develop the first motorcycle he said the power density is not high enough to compete with fossil fuel.
What really troubles me is that the money that is channelled into manufacturing through the governmental Regional Development organisations mainly ends up serving the organisations themselves. This is a common theme in the European Union. Where a simple idea like mine would really benefit from a small (£100k) investment to secure international Intellectual Property they prefer to spend £6 million on new offices for Advantage West Midlands and to pay for the lavish facilities of the conference and perhaps 50 of the delegates who were tied into the system in one way or another.
Beyond this is the fact that these people are new to the whole field. I realised I was almost alone in the building. They have not thought about it for 20 years or more like myself and many of the Green persuasion. They do not understand it, and have not considered the prospect that "Business as Usual" is not an option. Yet these people are the ones empowered to solve the problem. When the population of the earth wakes up it will find itself in a nightmare.