Lotz of thoughts

Last Sunday I was on a panel at the Young Professional and Student Day, part of the IAEE 2026 conference in Chile, a full day built around graduate students and early-career researchers, with a handful of us there to talk about building a research career in energy economics.  One of the first questions the facilitator put to us was simple and impossible at the same time: how do you know if your research question is actually good (original, novel, publishable..)? I have asked myself that more times than I'd like to admit — as a young researcher staring at a blank page, and later, as an editor staring at someone else's blank-page attempt. That day, I found myself trying to say out loud all the things I usually only know by instinct. I took notes through the whole session, half for whoever was in the room, half for myself. Some things you only really learn when you are forced to explain them to someone earlier in the journey than you. The first thing that came out of my mouth was:...

Every conference I attend lately, every article I read, every strategy document that lands in my inbox — they all have the same words. Skills. Reskilling. Upskilling. Digital transformation. Technology adoption. AI readiness. Lifelong learning. The language is urgent, as if we are all running a race against a future that keeps moving the finish line. And I don't disagree. These things matter. They matter a lot.  But I keep finding myself asking a quieter question, one that doesn't seem to make it onto the slides or the policy frameworks or the LinkedIn posts: what about work ethics ? Not productivity metrics. I mean the actual, old-fashioned, harder-to-measure thing; how we show up for our work and for the people around us. When I think about work ethics, the first thing that comes to mind is pride. Not arrogance. Pride. That quiet  internal voice that says,  "I want to do this well. "  Not because someone is watching. Because it matters to me. I have met people ...