Author: 52ideas

Tesla doesn’t make money building cars. They make a little money on energy generation. However, as Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times pointed out during our COVID summer, Tesla makes a lot of money in selling GreenHouse Gas (GHG) Emission Credits to other automobile manufacturers. In fact, Tesla

As a parent, I have three modes of anger. The first and most basic level of my parental anger can be described as me just being “mad”. This most basic level of anger surfaces when my child has done something new that is wrong. Maybe she has taken something that

When it comes to my politics, I am a pragmatist before anything else. While, I disagree with Michael Chong a lot, it is easy for me to say that his conservative approach to Parliamentary Reform (i.e. Reform Act 2015) was simply brilliant. While, the party I tend to back –

I come from a family that loves playing sports. So, being of Caribbean Heritage, I always heard one phrase: “don’t let the side down”. Now, to be honest, it is not a Caribbean phrase but one that the British left “us”. So if you played or watched  rugby in South

So, I am stuck in the house, like so many of us and I am starting to see unprecedented events; and only one thing goes through my mind: what does Alberta’s future look like? Anyone who knows me, knows that this is not unusual. For the last few years, I

What would happen to an Oil Exporter when the world’s seventh largest economy decides that over the next fifteen years it will phase out gas powered cars? Any economist would say it is a simple demand and supply issue. If no new users of Oil came into the market, all

When I started writing my blog, more than five years ago experts said that electric cars would only be competitive with gas cars in 2035 or 2040. At the time, there were valid reasons for that understanding. Science had to move quite a ways to get to parity and so

In October of 1995, I was a student at York University. There was a buzz in the air because History was being made every day. By this time in my life, the Cold War had ended, the Iron Curtain had fallen and we believed in the diversity of a “Thousand

“McLaren is commited to having a 100% hybrid lineup by 2025 and has begun researching an all-electric auto despite concerns that clients might reject anything lacking the rumble of an internal combustion engine. “ McLaren Rolls out a GT to Rival Porsche 911 and Aston Martin, by Christopher Jasper, Bloomberg.com,

For me, Jason Kenney’s victory is something new and novel to Alberta. Think about it this way, from 1935 to 2008, Alberta had always had a variety of conservative parties. When Social Credit was in power, they had to fend off the Progressive Conservatives. For the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta had

Many good-willed environmentalists have made the argument that Alberta would be better if it left all of its bitumen in the ground. One of them replied to my last post. His name is Bill Malcolm. When it came to my notion that politicians should try to provide the most benefit

A few replies came in due to my last post and I was surprised by their disturbing tone and how some of them were laced with a sort of anger and/or a resort to partisanship, ideology or intransigence.   There is an old saying: “one gathers more flies with honey

So, Jason Kenney is now Premier. A friend of mine, who was not fond of Premier Notley, asked me my opinion. Anyone who knows me knows one thing: Russell Scantlebury will not give a simple answer. Accordingly, I thought I would jot it down here.   To start off with,

We often forget how quickly technology can move. While, Benz developed his first car in 1885; it was the development of Henry Ford’s Model T and his new innovative manufacturing techniques, in 1913, that helped to reshape the United States. By 1927, a total of just over 15 million Model