Needle in an environmental haystack

London. A seething, writhing cacophony of activity by day and a place where simmering pulses of energy remain by night. If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that in London, a light is always turned on somewhere.

Of course, this stands true for the monopoly of megacities pinned over the globe, each one raw and exciting in its own way. However, one residing within these cities often forgets where the vast magnitude of energy needed to run them will come from when our current reserves of oil and gas drip their last drop.

In fact, many are energy sceptics – succumbing to the wave of hysteria induced by many media outlets. Sure, two hundred trillion cubic feet of gas has been found off the coast of Lancashire. Sure, the North Sea remains an eternal, bottomless vat, but the fact that numbers can be assigned to these sources means that we should not rely on short-term stimuli, and invest our time in searching for real, ground-breaking solutions.

Hence I am honoured to be starting my time at Imperial College as an engineer. There is no hysteria (minus the abundance of freshers partying), no vacuity, but instead an academic and cultural kaleidoscope. There is a subtle, all-encompassing allegory to be derived from it all; by being in an environment where nothing is the same as it was before we abandon convention and conformism, we discover truth from a base starting point.

In the midst of this intellectual clarity, my loan never arrived, some of us have been to multi-storey nightclubs, ran all the way home from Piccadilly using our internal compasses, and some have even drank Jägermeister from the bottle. Or a bowl ;)