Mimicking Nature

Well, nature is really our only guide as to how to do this properly. You look at this incredible environment here, created by living things, capturing the energy from the sun, using that energy to do a whole lot of jobs, including creating pure water, breathable air, all of the food we eat, recycling our wastes, our traditional [INAUDIBLE] conventional wastes. So nature is the model to me. I mean, that’s where we’ve got to go.

I think one of the things we really need to develop now are technologies that are what I call multipotent, or do more than one thing at once. And there’s a number of these technologies around. A good example is concentrated solar thermal technologies, which can generate electricity. They can desalinate salt water to create fresh water supplies. You can use them to generate steam that can be used to clean up pollution. They can even fabricate new materials. When you get very high temperatures in these plants, you can break apart the CO2 atom itself and create the carbon. So it’s those sort of approaches that engineers and others will discover in future, I think, are going to be the really important ones.

We’ve got a world that’s awash with pollution, with the oceans and the plastics and whatever else in it. It’s facing a food security crisis, obviously the climate problem. There’s lots of other pollution problems. So we need those multipotent technologies to move us quickly from this world awash with problems to one which has the solutions.