A professor at the MIT who designed computer interfaces once told me that people take in five to seven bits of information into short term memory which they can act on. So having thirty or so speakers at the Low Carbon World conference on subjects as diverse as spirituality, waste, transport, energy, capital flows and town planning, puts that into sharp focus.

Each delegate would have taken away what they will, but what struck me was a throw-away remark by a delegate on the NASA statement, that the world has to aim for a target of 350ppm CO2 to avoid climatic instability. We are already at 382ppm, which raises questions about zero carbon being enough with rapidly rising population? Is it wise to enshrine the concept of zero carbon into legislation and regulations, particularly as there are several definitions, which tend to confuse rather than lead to positive action.
Restorative development where activities take out carbon, is really the only way forward if the NASA predictions are right.

There were examples of European neighbours having adapted sustainable technologies successfully – and we have to look East, not West. The Austrians have been developing PassivHaus for the last ten years; the Scandinavians have a long track record of successful district heating; The Germans have used the tax and subsidies to good effect in the fields of solar energy and retrofit; the Dutch have good integrated transport systems. Even Australia, New Zealand and Japan are making breakthroughs in zero waste.

The whole area of heat transfer has been grasped by a number of politicians, brought up several times and no doubt will be a focus of more technological input.
And international standards are progressing lending encouragement that in the near future measurements in this field will be standardised, audited and therefore outputs managed and reduced.