Our time is coming

Forecasting is a risky business. I remember being one of a roomful of eager recruits 30 years ago, listening to the chairman explain that our new firm would never stray from electromechanical engineering into civils because there was no future in it. So, 20 years later, I was surprised to hear that my old firm had been taken over by a civil consultant. Although I knew the chairman to be a shrewd businessman by then, I have only thought of him as a chump ever since.

Thus the risk of forecasting is a route to professional perdition. Funny, then, that I have accepted many such invitations this year – because the discipline of thinking about the future is good. My prediction? That we are rapidly approaching a golden age for our profession, a time when our skills will be valued more highly than perhaps they ever have been.

Behind the salary rises

It is tempting to forecast by extrapolating trends. For example, I was delighted to discover in preparing a 'futures' paper for our graduate conference that engineers' salaries have risen by about 40% in real terms over the last 20 years, despite fee scales falling by 20%.

However, it occurred to me that the fact that I was able to do this while connected to our London network from a train somewhere between Belfast and Dublin might have a bearing on this increase. After all, I had just completed and distributed a specification from the same train – something that, at the beginning of my working life, was a laborious process involving frequent trips to the typing pool and several tiers of checking before a man called Len turned the whole thing into a document.

Sadly, salaries have not risen because society increasingly values what engineers do, but simply because the whole IT revolution allows us to do things far more efficiently (while pinning us down 24/7, working like dogs). So, unable to visualise a sea-change in technology around the corner, this trend does not feature in my vision of our brave new world.

The kick start for the new age of engineers in the industrial democracies will come as a result of prime source energy use

Yet I speculate whether continued pay growth might be likely for another reason. Perhaps the time is coming, in this carbon-challenged world, when society will need to revalue engineers and to restore some of the status and rewards enjoyed by the Victorian grandees.

I see the role we can play in controlling atmospheric carbon as just a small part of this reformation – certainly for as long as the “free world” is hell bent on taking the issue to the edge of oblivion. Western-style democracies, despite their merits, are poor drivers of the sort of changes needed. It is difficult to imagine that a system of government that depends on four-year terms of 'you've-never-had-it-so-good' politics to endear itself to the electorate could be anything other than hamstrung in making the sort of major long-term decisions needed to deal with climate change – until there is a popular demand for it. But by then it will likely be too late.

I think the kick-start for the new age of engineers in the industrial democracies will come from the other end of the carbon cycle. By any system of forecasting, the production of hydrocarbons cannot keep up with demand for much longer – even factoring in sources now considered too difficult and expensive to tap. So energy costs must continue to rise, reflecting increasing costs of production, security and the laws of supply and demand – so that good old economic pressures, well understood by democracies, will drive down prime source energy use.

When this happens, building services engineers will likely be the only people in construction able to deal with it – certainly if the general bafflement of other sectors of construction regarding PPS22 and upcoming Part L is any measure of their dependence on us.

Remember, you heard it here first. So, chump or champ? You decide…