Escaping the Echo Chamber - 2024 Edition
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With the holidays upon us, we are looking forward to taking time to reflect and slow down. The year has held so much, and this welcome pause for thought comes at a good time. Last year’s “Holiday Escape from the Echo Chamber” was our second-most popular post so far. As we wrote back then, it is all but impossible to find “un-biased” information, thus the key becomes quality and transparency of the analysis to effectively challenge ourselves.
We hope you enjoy our 2024 edition!
For Listening:
Energy vs Climate - we are energy enthusiasts, thus we’ll start our recommendations with a podcast run by others who clearly enjoy the topic. Sarah Hastings-Simon (University of Calgary), David Keith (University of Chicago) and Ed Wittingham provide a thorough, robust and “home grown” approach to the topic.
In Good Company - A podcast run by the CEO of the largest single investor in the world, Norges Bank Investment Management - also known as the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. These skillfully conducted interviews ask big, important, efficient questions of leaders of some of the largest companies in the world.
For Reading:
David Brooks, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Deeply and Being Deeply Seen” - the ability to connect underpins everything we do, at home, at work, in the community, and couldn’t matter more than it does today. Like most sensible things, this reads as obvious, and that is the gift of David Brooks.
For the more technically - interested, the AESO’s real-time dashboard for the Alberta Electricity Market, providing snapshot insights into a very dynamic market, and their more holistic Annual Market Statistics Reports - who doesn’t like statistics?
For Watching:
One of the most exciting 10 minute things we’ve watched this year is this CNBC feature, explaining the cost-effectiveness and scalability of thermal storage solutions. The video highlights Rondo, our thermal storage battery provider, starting around 3:30. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/06/why-thermal-batteries-could-replace-lithium-ion-batteries-.html
For Attending
And if you are looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for a fellow energy enthusiast, we’d highly recommend a ticket to the “Energy Disruptors: Unite” conference in Calgary next October 21st & 22nd. The conference aims to bring together speakers and attendees representing all types of energy, with a stated goal of breaking down barriers and echo chambers - a goal we couldn’t agree more with. The 2024 event also featured speakers such as Yuval Noah Harari (author of “Sapiens”), Sanna Marin (former Prime Minister of Finland) and Jacinda Ardern (former Prime Minister of New Zealand), making it remarkably “out of the box” and well worth attending.