CIBSE President's Blog

A month in which your President does a few quick trips abroad, putting Europe and the Mayor of New York to rights and sadly prepares to hand over the Blog …. Presidential April started with not much of a Spring but a trip to touch base with REHVA . Donald Leper and Derek Braham have done CIBSE and REHVA great service over the years. Their terms are coming to an end and it was time to make fresh contact with REHVA. REHVA has a very different constitution to CIBSE, but then everything is more complicated in a large European Union. Over lunch with the outgoing REHVA President and the Chief Executive we strove to put Europe to rights.  The rest of the brasserie had emptied long before we even got to the Euro or anywhere near defining Near Zero. April ended with a speaking slot in New York at the New York Times Conference on Building Sustainable Cities . It was a surprise format - if very NYT. Each session was run without PowerPoint, as a kind of Jeremy Paxman Newsnight pane...

A month in which your President gets some sad news and the UK gas supply nearly ran out... According to the UK Press, an Energy Minister this month complained that environmental critics were bourgeoise and ‘a bit detached’. He probably never said that -  the Prime Minister didn’t actually say ‘Hug a Hoody’ [much to the relief of the lads on site], and someone else never said ‘Pleb’. But if the Minister had, wouldn’t that in any case have been the sobriquet  the Opposition would have naturally applied to his party? May be it was intended to be a compliment after all. The Minister has since been promoted without portfolio to the Cabinet Office, so I rest my case. But ‘bourgeoisie and proud of it’ was in my mind visiting this year’s Ecobuild at Excel. The Eco-build exhibition is a welcome upbeat relief from serried ranks of shining heating exchanges I had seen at Dallas in January. The stands were all rather nice and sun-lit. CIBSE had a really smart stand (not the least chintz-...