ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking today with Ed Whittingam, one of the hosts of the locally made Energy vs. Climate podcast. Tell us a little bit about this podcast. What’s it about and who’s part of it?

ED WHITTINGAM: This podcast is yet another pandemic project. I think when the pandemic started about a year ago about a billion people in the world decided it was a good idea to make a podcast. There’s a local connection because I live in Canmore as well as a longtime friend, David Keith, who had just left Harvard University where he’s a prof and came back here to Canmore. We roped in another colleague named Sara Hastings-Simon, researcher with the Colorado School of Mines and at the University of Calgary. We put together this whole podcast, and it’s been a lot of fun.

RM: For those who don’t know you, what’s your background to speak on this?

EW: Our podcast is focused on climate and energy issues. I headed up the Pembina Institute for many years and that’s a national clean energy think tank. I left that a few years ago. I work in clean energy and clean tech.

RM: I’m keying in on your title, Energy vs. Climate. I think that’s sometimes the way the discussion is framed, especially in our province – we can have a robust energy, oil and gas economy, or we can focus on preventing climate change, and trying to focus on one might hurt the other. Can we have both a robust energy economy and a real focus on climate change action?

EW: With this podcast we’re purposely trying to be provocative and, frankly, we’re trying to cut through the happy talk. You’ll hear from politicians or industry leaders or people in the UN that, yes, we can easily have our cake and eat it too. We can decarbonize our economy and we can have all the energy services that we’ve grown accustomed to, we depend on, and we want. The reality is it’s really hard, and we need to make smarter choices about how we’re going to do that. We need to have no BS conversations about the hard trade-offs between energy policy, the economy, and climate protection. That’s what we’re trying to do with this.

RM: Can you give an example of a subject you’ve explored in a recent episode?

EW: We were part of the Calgary Climate Symposium. We had 200 people on the webinar, which we then recorded and turned into a podcast. We get another thousand people listening to it on the podcast. It’s not a huge number, but we’re pretty geeky. We’re not going to be the next Joe Rogan podcast. We appeal to a limited number of Canadians, but those who listen to us really like us and what we’re talking about. It had to do with how we build back better in Alberta. Given that we’ve been hit hard by the pandemic, oil prices are only starting to rebound now, and unfortunately we’ve lost a lot of high skilled workers who have left the province. What do we do to build back our oil and gas or energy economy in a way that also helps meet those climate goals?

RM: What do you hope people take away from this podcast?

EW: I hope they take away information on how we can make those smarter choices around decarbonizing our energy system through those frank, no BS conversations that we have with each and every episode.

RM: There’s obviously some high level kinds of things that governments can do and that companies can do. Are there takeaways for the individual, just someone living here in the Bow Valley?

EW: Absolutely. We’re surprised when we actually look at the stats there is a significant Bow Valley listenership. I say that we’re an acquired taste. We’re pretty geeky, but people are listening in because what we talk about relates to the choices we’re making as individual Canadians and Albertans in our own lifestyles, to what we expect of our local governments like the Town of Canmore or the Town of Banff, and what we expect from other governments like the Government of Alberta and the Government of Canada.

RM: How can people find your podcast and how often do you release?

EW: We drop once every two weeks, and you can go to our website. We’re available through your favorite podcasters, Stitcher, Spotify, Apple, whatever it is, you can find us. Listen when you’re walking along the river. That actually would be apropos because that’s where we first came up with the idea of the podcast, David and I, walking along the beautiful Bow River here in Canmore.

RM: Ironically, that’s where you and I ran into each other and discussed, hey, we should do an interview about this!

EW: What an intersection of cultures and ideas for sure, the Bow River and our great waterways here in the Bow Valley.

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