Bad Luck Hollywood

08 Jul 2007 – John Elkington

One of the people on the first panel I moderated today, on green technology, was Zhang Yue, Chairman & CEO of Broad Air Conditioning. I began by asking the audience whether they had read the March issue of The Atlantic, one of my favourite magazines? No one had. Pity, I said, since it contained a fascinating profile of Zhang Yue, noting – among any other things – that he has built himself a home modelled on the Palace of Versailles. I was pretty sure he was the only person in the auditorium to have done so, adding that while it was clear he was extremely interested in profit, he also seems energetically committed to environmental and sustainability issues.

The session was off the record, but I think I can mention something that David Hobbs, a VP and Managing Director, Global Policy, at the energy consultancy CERA said to me after the session. He had passed on the opportunity to say a few final words, because of the pressure on time, but what he had wanted to say was that if Zhang Yue has his way and managed to radically shrink the scale of the ventilation and air-conditioning plants modern buildings need, Hollywood will lose one of its main plot lines, where heroes and heroines scurry through ventilation and A/C pipes in their attempts to escape, while bad people hose the ceilings with machine-gun fire.

Still, on the basis of what I have heard about the penetration of such technologies in China to date, I’m again pretty sure most Hollywood moguls won’t be shivering in their shoes any time soon.