This year’s IFP academic & executive sessions were lively (the faculty had actually warned me ahead of time about this year’s student group!!) — and there’s obviously tremendous interest about emissions trading throughout the energy sector.  But I very much prefer to have that kind of enthusiasm & interest evident in the classroom!

This year I was able to catch up once again with former classmate Bob Gould & his wife Garrette Clark (please see last year’s posting), at a nice dinner in a small Pakistani restaurant in Montparnasse.  Bob has taken a new position at ERM France, and I was then able to visit ERM’s offices in the 10th arrondisement — a site not too far from the new home of one of my former students, Dr. Lew Fulton, & his wife Lili.   Lew & Lili are now back in Paris after a two-year stint in Nairobi at UNEP — and it’s really good to have them back!  Lew is a senior transportation specialist at the International Energy Agency, and he was one of the earliest victims of my (rather nascent!) teaching skills — i.e., in the second class I taught at Penn in 1984.  Luckily, however, he doesn’t hold that against me, and so we’ve gotten together many times over the years in Paris (with Lili too, another former Penn student who somehow skillfully managed to avoid taking my class).

Another view along Rue de Castiglione

On this Paris visit I was reading Alain de Botton’s latest work, The Architecture of Happiness.  De Botton is a peripatetic writer who has written books about philosophy, status, love, Proust, & travel, and he turns his hand to architecture in this one.  He notes that certain cities are universally recognized as beautiful (including Paris, Edinburgh, Rome and San Francisco), and his book shows a picture of the arches, facades, and balconies of the Rue de Castiglione in the 1st arrondisement — a few hundred meters from the store where I bought his book.  Its coherence and linearity “confronts us with an externalisation of the most rational, deliberate workings of our minds.”  I had talked about the role of order arising from urban environmental design in my Pollution Markets book, but de Botton is certainly much bolder than I was:

Our background awareness of inevitable calamity is what can make us especially sensitive to the beauty of a street, in which we recognize the very qualities on which our survival hangs.  The drive towards order reveals itself as synonymous with the drive towards life.

An interesting read…. (& I really enjoyed his previous The Art of Travel too!).