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Hannah Bullock, 5 Nov 2008
The low winter sun that blinded me from behind the City buildings did look s...
Now you’re talking – Dr Earth
One-time Tory party candidate and property millionaire Andrew Charalambous, aka Dr Earth, talks to Green Futures at Bar Surya, his ‘world-first’ eco club – where you generate electricity while you dance.
“I wanted to extend the green movement”
If you want to do something constructive for the planet, it’s got to involve billions of people. Green has got to become mainstream. And I thought ‘what is the one place that you have the convergence of different cultures, creeds, backgrounds, and a stronghold for the young generation?’ That’s the club circuit. So Surya’s a platform, a springboard to get into the hearts and minds.
“I lead a very puritanical green lifestyle, but I do drive a Maserati”
It’s not a guilty pleasure, because I have another philosophy – if you want to make a difference, you can’t end the reward system. We’ve got to work from the basis that says ‘look, a billion people who each make a small difference, leads to a greater sum total than thousands of people making big sacrifices. If you take that philosophy around the whole of China – it’s massive. It’ll have a bigger impact than one green community that can say it’s totally green.
“I think we’ve superseded the green organisations now”
Green design can be opulent, green lifestyle can be fun, green doesn’t mean we have to live in a cave. We’re going to be here eighty, ninety years – you have to accept that people aren’t going to live in Britain and say they’re never going to go to the United States or China. Madness! That’s modern living. And if these people who speak on behalf of the green movement are trying to convince me that their end game is to fight climate change by stopping flying… well it’s not going to happen. What they should be saying is ‘can we make the aviation, or the automobile industry more environmentally friendly?’ The technology is out there, we can do that, but if we try and squeeze these companies it will stop them producing this kind of technology, and then we’ve lost the battle.
Dr Earth was talking to Jon Wallace
29 September 2008
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‘Green can be opulent…green can be fun…’
Photo: Mark Degroot
Registered charity number 1040519
Comments
Mainstreaming or misrepresenting?
I don't understand why you (or anyone else for that matter) would give this guy a forum to air his poorly-informed views and promote his cynical and counter-productive greenwash money spinner. I've been to Surya and it is a travesty.
Significant to this interview, academics and industry have concluded that there are virtually no savings that can be made in the medium term from either fuel efficiency or technolgical developments. We don't have very long (less than two years) to limit green house gas emissions before the positive feedback mechanisms take climate change out of our hands so this view is not only illogical but also highly dangerous.
I've no objection to mainstreaming and moderation but this man is actively promoting flying to his tropical resort and using bogus claims to do so. I suppose why should Dr Evil (as I prefer to call him) care though? Unlike the teenagers and 20-somethings he is extorting money from in his vile club and holiday destination and in common with the majority of people making decisions about our climate impacts now, he probably won't be around to deal with the consequences.
Here's my review of Surya:
I've been to, nay worked in, some festering rat holes in my time but this place really is the worst club in the world. The proprietor, Dr Earth, clearly demonstrates his contemptible cynicism and ignorance of environmental/ethical issues with charming touches such as giant plasma screens adorning the walls, a chandelier attempting to demonstrate innovative recycling made from brand new biros and Cristal Champagne on the menu for £350 a pop.
Surya claims to generate electricity to power the club by harnessing the kinetic energy from movement of the dance floor but, having inspected it, I'd love to know how they are managing to extract energy from a solid concrete floor. I suspect this is an audacious lie.
There is a bizarre display of potted plants in a cubby hole under a sign that reads "Hydroponics, the new horticulture, in which plants can be grown without soil or daylight under hydroponic light." These plants, which are by the way in soil and not a hydroponic system (whereby plants are grown in water), reside under a massive, inefficient light. Of course, how stupid of me - I was thinking that daylight was an environmentally friendly way of growing plants when all along what I really needed was a whacking great multi-kilowatt lamp to be truly green.
Even if you are not bothered by this hypocritical, poorly-executed gimmickery and require another reason not to visit this dump, I can furnish you with an excellent one. The toilets cubicles are see-through. Yes, you did read correctly, the toilet cubicles are made from frosted glass! Using those facilities counts among the top five humiliating experiences of my adult life.
Finally, what kind of psychopath is comfortable with being reminded that "every three seconds a child dies from poverty" by energy-sucking plasma screen on the wall, whilst joyfully bowing to the twin gods of self-indulgence and consumerism in the name of fun ... not me mate.
Licking the bottom of the barrel...
Obviously Dr. Earth has a message that you like, since you have not bothered with any kind of analysis of his claims.
Can you make Dr. Earth substantiate his ideas? Forum for the Future should have a more sophisticated critique.
This is Daily Mail reporting, not something I would expect from an educational charity.
Not everybody's taste
We're aware that Dr Earth isn't everybody's taste, and that he has brushed some people up the wrong way. That's why we're not endorsing him, as such, but believe his opinions make a good read - even with some of his seeming hypocrisies.
The real reason we've given him column inches is because we're excited by his ideas of taking environmental messages out to people that aren't normally reached - i.e. clubbers. We've written about eco-clubbing before, and what better way to make clear the link between energy and its laborious production than having people make their own (through the dancefloor)?
And I think misrepresentation has it ...
Because his views are not simply unpalatable but also counter-productive and therefore - due to the urgency of the situation we find ourselves in with respect to climate change - highly dangerous. Telling people, nay encouraging them, to take long haul flights as long as they dance in the right clubs would be funny if the consequences weren't so sinister. The metaphor of a sticking plaster for decapitation springs to mind.
Of course Dr Death (150,000+ people already dying from the effects climate change*) can hold any view he likes but to give air to his unsubstantiated claims and pseudo-science, especially in order to help this man sell things (did he pay for this advertising?), borders on the immoral. I had previously thought Forum for the Future were more strongly evidence-based but clearly I was wrong - I expected better and have been severely disappointed.
* Monbiot (2006) Heat, Allen Lane
Green Futures takes the world as we find it
Green Futures takes the world as we find it, not as we'd wish it to be. Whether we like it or not, there are millions out there who remain resolutely unmoved by ceaseless warnings of doom-and-gloom, and who are actively turned off by environmentalists telling them what they can and can't do; how they should and should not enjoy themselves. We can bang on about impending disaster as loudly as we like - but we should recognise that for some, that's never going to make the slightest bit of difference to their lifestyle or habits. It should do, but it doesn't. So maybe now and then we need to change the record.
With that in mind, we're always interested in covering people and initiatives who are looking for fresh ways to encourage changes in atttitude and behaviour - and Dr Earth, whatever his shortcomings, certainly falls into that category.
Clearly many readers see his unashamedly hedonistic lifestyle and celebration of consumerism as undermining any of the green messages he claims to want to promote. They argue he's doing far more harm than good. Did we overstep the mark on this one, by promoting an exceesively-flippant approach to the most serious issue of our time? Yes, it's possible. But we'd rather risk getting it wrong on occasion than let excessive caution stop us from covering anything novel and provocative.
Personally, I very much doubt that anyone already convinced that they need to live more lightly, that they need to cut out flying, for example, would be persuaded by Dr Earth to jump on a plane. But I do think it's possible that it could work the other way round: that a young clubber who thinks greens are a load of old patronising hippies might just have her or his eyes and ears opened, for the first time, to some sustainability messages which would otherwise completely pass them by.
And just for the record, no, Dr Earth didn't pay us for advertising.
Martin Wright, Editor in Chief, Green Futures