Paris

This year’s IFP groups were truly an international mix – more than thirty students from eighteen different countries in the PEM academic program, and more than twenty executives from a dozen countries in the mini-MBA program (including a relatively large contingent from Indonesia). There was considerable interest about the rapidly growing market for voluntary carbon offsets, and what international post-Kyoto efforts might look like.

The Gould family on the Rue Mouffetard

A highlight of my visit this year was meeting up again with an old schoolmate – Bob Gould, who was the only other chemical engineer in the energy program at Penn when we started together in 1981. Bob now directs environmental projects at BCEOM, a French engineering company, and I hadn’t seen him since the late 1980’s. I had met his wife Garrette — who works at UNEP in Paris — on one of my working visits in the late 1990’s. On this visit I was treated to lunch with the whole family, in a bistro just off the Rue Mouffetard (near the famous market on the Left Bank), very close to where they live. It was certainly a wonderful meal, and we had a chance to walk around the neighborhood afterwards & catch up on things – and I received what was essentially a ‘native’s tour’ since they’ve now lived in Paris for more than fifteen years. Later in the week I had a chance to take a stroll once again in the Jardin du Luxembourg, immediately after a refreshing summer rain – and once again after a filling lunch. (Perhaps you’ll get a hint here about why I avoid the scale after these Paris visits.)