The other night I happened to catch Zac Goldsmith interviewed by Maxine McKew, one of Australia’s most respected journalists. Zac is the owner/editor of the UK-based Ecologist magazine. Which is quite remarkable because he is most assuredly to the right of British politics, to the point that the Tory party have signed him as a possible candidate for the next election. He thus had some intriguing things to say. A few I excerpted here. “The market is without doubt the most powerful force we have for social change. There's nothing in history that's remotely comparable. But it does have a blind spot and that's the environment.”. Though he did go on to observe, “We're already seeing [...] the emergence of a half a trillion-dollar sector in environmental goods and services.” And I was particularly enamoured with this gem: “If every light bulb in Britain was replaced with an energy saving light bulb you would save the equivalent of two nuclear power plants and nobody would realise.” Which competed with this one: “I saw yesterday if everybody in the United States had recycled the aluminium cans they threw away last year they would have saved enough aluminium to rebuild the world's air fleet. It is one tiny example but shows we need to find a way of designing waste out of the system. If you do that it's wonderful news for the planet and not bad news for the consumer.” The full transcript can be found at the site of the ABC’s ::Lateline.