This evening, we attended a reception/lecture care of the University of Alberta School of Business at the Westin Hotel. The evening, which hosted guest lecturer Dr. Mark Jaccard of the School of Resource and Environment Management at Simon Fraser University, was interesting.
Dr. Jaccard made a hour-long presentation titled “Sustainable Fossil Fuels: How Alberta’s fossil fuels can be this century’s cheapest source of clean energy.” As he flew through the hour-long lecture fairly fast, it was very clear that the entire evening was a sales pitch for his new book.
As we discussed with fellow attendees at the reception following the lecture (hosted by EPCOR), our definition of ‘sustainability’ and that of Dr. Jaccard were clearly two different entities (ours being a source of energy that will last potentially forever-hence, sustainable, and his being one which would last for about 100 years-maybe). Also, his seemingly pro-nuclear undertones were fairly alarming.
All things aside, we did have a nice conversation at the reception with Tory MP Ken Epp and Alberta Liberal MLA Bill Bonko, who were also around to check out the show.
Also, the free Chardonnay was nice.