Eco Rocks - Professor Brian Cox talks to WhatHouse.co.uk

Can construction save the planet? It could certainly build us more time. What House? editorial director Rupert Bates talks to Professor Brian Cox.

Forget the cosmos, the arrow of time and epic landscapes that dominated the BBC series Wonders of the Universe.

Park your theories on thermodynamics, the waxing of the moon and the orbit of the sun and listen to what Professor Brian Cox said on planet earth at a particular instant in time and several trillion years before the end of the age of starlight.

Ecobuild at the ExCeL exhibition centre in East London is a slightly more prosaic location than Patagonian glaciers in South America.

"The products on show at Ecobuild are the middle way between the tree huggers and the climate change deniers," said Cox, everybody's favourite particle physicist.

Cox, the stellar professor and TV presenter, was at Ecobuild to open the Practical Installer area on behalf of Pumb Center, a supplier of construction products and materials.

The link between the rock star scientist - he played keyboards for D:Ream in the 1990s - and central heating, plumbing and drainage equipment was not obvious, until Cox spoke.

"There seems to be two camps. One that thinks the Earth should be protected at all costs and at the other end of the spectrum are those who think that it is okay to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere if it enables progress to be made," said Cox.

"But I think the scientific and sensible perspective and also the one represented at Ecobuild is that the emergence of renewable technologies enables us to take the middle ground - not go back to living like cave men but also not to march through progress and energies at all costs and ignore the planet completely."

Cox began with a light bit of banker bashing, saying that science and engineering were doing their best to support and stimulate economic growth in the absence of much help from the banking sector.

"6.4 per cent of GDP comes from physics based industries and construction is defined as physics based. Finance is less than five per cent of GDP."

Positioning sustainable construction as the ‘middle ground' at first seemed like a PR attempt to give relevance to his celebrity appearance at Ecobuild, but for a stargazer Cox is remarkably down to earth and fathomable.

"I was thinking what can I say in the context of Ecobuild and my background as a physicist and then it occurred to me that sustainable building products can and should represent the consensus - the interface between the two opposing views on climate change."

"Making existing houses and new buildings as eco-friendly as possible is key and the necessary construction technologies are being developed. The government must back these technologies. They make sense economically as well as helping the planet."

The industry should make more of Cox's comments. He is already an idol among physicists and astrologers - not to mention those who remember the hit single adopted by New Labour ‘Things can only get better' and a growing portion of the country's female population. Particle physics just got sexy.

Can Cox become the poster boy of the construction sector and give the industry a sprinkle of stardust? It is rare to find such a high-profile personality who can rationalise the opposing views on climate change. Cox finds it " very strange" that there can be any debate about the damage greenhouse gases are doing. But also embraces a civilisation that has learnt how to build and progress. There may be life on Mars, but it is not wearing hard hats and drinking mugs of tea - yet.

Cox uses the words 'vast!' and 'unimaginable!' more often than most, but when your work on the Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland is the biggest science experiment ever, exploring what happened a billionth of a second before the universe began, you live in a world of exclamation marks.

The science is there; the will among suppliers is there, the regulation, if still chaotic, is there. But until the public, philosophically as well as financially, engages with the imperative of eco construction, there will be no mainstream buying market.

As Cox didn't' say, it's not rocket science.