#TNOfood: A third industrial revolution for Birmingham?
Cities run on energy, vast quantities of it. And the world is running out of environmentally-friendly ways of generating what they need.
We need nothing short of a third industrial revolution.
Imagine it’s 2050, and Birmingham has a substantial amount of its heat and power supplied by a lots of small power plants dotted around the city producing energy by a carbon-negative process fuelled by the waste produced by us all.
What impact would it have on individual lives, on our society as a whole?
This is exactly what the New Optimists Forum will be discussing on 12th July at Aston Business School (twitter #TNOfood). Two of the participants are the engineers who are developing the technologies that could underpin this exciting possibility — and quite possibly a third industrial revolution.
They are Professor Andreas Hornung and Lynsey Melville (bottom row, 1st and 2nd left)
The other participants are people who have the know-how about the kinds of societal changes we need put in place if such a revolution were to happen here in Birmingham, and what the impacts might be.
They are Ian Forsyth, the Business Development Manager from Cofely and (from top left clockwise):
- Dr Stefan Bouzarovski, a political geographer from the University of Birmingham
- Catherine Burke, a lawyer with experience in the energy field
- Simon Coles, a horticulturalist from Westland Nurseries in the Vale of Evesham (Will such a system change the game for vertical farming or something of that order?)
- Dr Corrado di Maria, an economist from the University of Birmingham
- Professor Michael Waterson, an economist from Warwick University
- Sandy Taylor, Head of Climate Change at Birmingham City Council
[...] here for the people who took part in this fascinating conversation. (On the night, Simon Coles and [...]