Speakers Series
2012 Speaker Series
We’ve wrapped up our 2011 Speakers Series. If you missed any, you can check out the videos.
Stay tuned for the list of speakers invited for the 2012 Speakers Series!
2010 Speaker Series Videos
Richard Heinberg
Richard Heinberg, the Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post Carbon Institute is widely regarded as one of the worlds foremost Peak Oil educators. Heinberg was in Edmonton on Feb. 11th, 2010 as part of the City of Edmonton’s ‘The Way We Green’ Distinguished Speaker Series. The Way We Green is Edmontons environmental strategic plan — a blueprint for being the nation’s leader in setting the highest standards of environmental preservation and sustainability. Heinberg spoke on the subject of Peak Oil and Economic Transition, asking how much Oil did you use today? Are We Running Out? What does this mean for the things we do, the food we eat, the places we go? Heinberg challenged the audience to think the unthinkable, exposing the tenuousness of our current way of life while offering a vision for a truly sustainable future.
Joshua Farley
Ecological economics provides us with insights into the relationship between economic activity and the capacity of the Earths resources to sustain us. In this video Joshua Farley one of the visionary thinkers in this discipline, provides an overview of some these critical relationships, and gives examples of how responsive policy measures can be applied in an urban setting like Edmonton’s.
Rob Hopkins
Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes, UK and of the Transition Network. In this video he talks about the value of Transition Town initiatives and the optimistic, refreshing contrast they provide to the doom and gloom of todays key environmental challenges.
Matthew Dance
Ambient air quality monitoring provides us with an indication of the level of emissions present in our surrounding air. In this video Matthew Dance, a researcher, project manager and policy analyst, provides an interesting overview of the nature of air quality and its implications for our health. He outlines new developments in air quality monitoring and elaborates on the leadership role that Edmonton and other cities are currently playing in implementing measures that manage emissions. We also learn how our individual lifestyle choices effect the planning and development options that determine urban form and ultimately our quality of life.
Colleen Cassady St. Clair
David Thompson
On Tuesday, November 16, David Thompson, Principal of PolicyLink Research and Consulting gave a noon hour talk about Environmental Pricing Reform as part of The Way We Green Speaker’s Series. The talk expands on David’s The Way We Green discussion paper The Power of Prices and the Failure of Markets: Addressing Edmonton’s Environmental and Fiscal Challenges.
David’s talk focused on urban sprawl and how the pricing of goods and services (including municipal services) contributes to sprawl. He gave some ideas of what kind of changes the City could consider adopting to tax the bads not the goods, in other words, charge more taxes or fees on things that are bad for the environment, like car usage.
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