Elliot with Malachi Chadwick, Britain's cheeriest climate activist, in the 10:10 offices
One of our many reasons for visiting London was to meet up with Malachi Chadwick, the Director of "Communications and Climate Optimism" for an NGO called 10:10. If you're not familiar with this cheeky band of earth-saving activists, you're in for a treat. Founded as a spin-off from the riveting docu-drama "The Age of Stupid", their tagline is "Climate Change Sucks - Do Something About It." They're all about solutions, and about engaging people through hope and empowerment, rather than fear. They rock.
We had a great time with Malachi, although we were both sad to have so little time and so much to talk about. Still, it's good to know that there are smart people like him working on the same issues, half a world away. And we'll always have the internet...
The London Transport Museum - a mecca for transit enthusiasts.
We also visited the amazing London Transport Museum. Housed in the city's former flower market, the museum is a goldmine for transit junkies, packed with information and media materials, and dozens of the actual vehicles used to transport Londoners over the past 150 years.
The original omnibus - complete with horse poop!
We were particularly delighted at this display, which engages kids in figuring out how much horse poop was left on the streets of London before the days of internal combustion and electrification. (Answer: 1000 pounds of dung per day!)
What they didn't include was an assessment of how that relates to the amount of CO2 poop generated by car traffic today. I actually ran the calculations (for San Francisco, not for London), and the answers are pretty shocking. Look for those in a future blog post...
The museum did, however, include a plaque with this quotation:
From the London Transport Museum