Category Archives: Anecdotes

Means of life

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits made an astute observation that led to his exploration of habits and eventually the best-seller. He observed that people often had the same goals but they do not end up with the same results. This meant that goal-setting, while being an important first step, wasn’t what achievement is about.

Our culture sometimes seem to think that setting up goals is enough, that it would naturally push everyone or everything to place. That cannot be farther from reality; and having that sense of purpose for life isn’t exactly sufficient. We need to discover the means by which we fulfill our purposes and reach the goals.

What do you think are your means of life? Is it about money, resources? Financial wealth? Or relationships, connections, networks? What fuels you towards your life goals?

Supply side perspectives

There was a time when demand and pricing was what matters because the rise of logistics and transport technologies made it easy to ship things around or even store things for long. So production becomes so isolated from consumption that as long as you can price things right on demand side, you can be producing anything anywhere.

Profit then is just about finding lower cost locations, resources, manpower, materials and so on. Services gradually have those attributes as they are increasingly performed remotely. But when we start considering supply chains of products, issues of resilience as well as carbon emissions, things goes a bit tricky.

The future low carbon world might be one where supply chains are shorter, where consuming local looms large and where decentralisation returns. Powering decentralisation is simply the recognition that there’s both financial economy and carbon economy; that when we need to economise on carbon, we can afford it.

Recycling woes

When you deposit a recyclable item into the rubbish bin or down the chute here in Singapore, did you know that it means the item will actually never be recycled? It will definitely end up in the incineration plant where everything is burnt. Metals are sometimes recovered but that is just about all. This is because everything collected in the green waste bin by the licensed public waste collectors have to be sent to the incineration plants.

On average, incineration removes more than 90% of the waste matter, leaving a residue which is buried in our offshore landfill at Pulau Semakau. Soon, when the Integrated Waste Management Facility in Singapore is built, there might be more post disposal sorting that takes place after our public waste collectors retrieve the waste. But before that, despite the possible economic incentive of picking out suitable waste materials or matters to be recycled before incinerating the rest, the market is unable to respond to them.

Incineration keeps going and expanding in Singapore as waste volumes increase because that had been a proven solution that is difficult to challenge even when contending technologies and approaches works. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Yet as our landfill approaches the point of its maximum capacity, we cannot keep kicking the can down the road.

Limited life

Our lives are limited in many ways but more so by our perspectives than anything else. Time is one perspective by which we limit our lives. In some ways, it is sombering and perks us up but the urgency to accomplish things doesn’t always help. In that sense, the perspective of time as a resource otherwise wasted rather than an input to possibilities, limits us.

Then there is the dimension of money. Because money can buy more and more things, we become increasingly overwhelmed by our limited ability to generate income and wealth. The reason why get-rich-quick scheme works and why greed is pervasive is that we fear that material needs catches up with us. In the market system, money is our vote of some kind, the power we have to grab our share of possessions and material in this world. If we don’t get hold of enough money, we also lose our share of the society’s production. So then life gets caught up with that, with trying to get our share of production by trying to produce or to divert. And in the process we limit our lives to the material, even as we pursue experiences that money can buy.

Money, time and numbers/metrics were gifts to our lives, meant to be additions and blessings but instead they end up limiting our lives. Because of the way we have come to perceive them.

Earnest expectations

So I continue my 800th post no longer continuing from the streak I had nurtured over the past two years or more. It doesn’t mean anything as long as I don’t allow it to. Streaks work because it helps build habit and some kind of psychological strength. But if the streak is short, it is way harder to resume when it is broken. Maybe it has to do with having established our expectations of ourselves.

For me, the short pause in writing was during a period of genuine break from the distractions of the world and for the first time since the pandemic started, I had some kind of real rest. One that was more extended than what I had since 2019.

I realised how much more we have drifted from being human, the kind of expectations we have of ourselves and society. There were much bolder and better expectations we can have but we choose not to, rather falling back on productivity and some numerical metrics. What about being kinder, or more patient, or caring better for others? What about refusing to do anything that can cause me to feel ashamed should I have to account the deeds to my family, or a journalist, or the world?

There are better high expectations we can have of ourselves. They are waiting for us to adopt them.

Value of a dollar from carbon business

The market values goods and services. And it also values the revenues generated from them. That’s what the capital markets are doing. What is interesting is that the capital markets have its own taste and preferences despite what we consider about rationality of businesses.

A dollar of revenues from unpopular industries can be treated as less than one from the ordinary industries. Just as the dollar of revenues from more popular industries can be seen as being more valuable.

At the moment, climate related businesses gets their chance in the limelight. And in the same vein, the coal businesses were being battered. Yet one can still consider all that rational considering the regulatory risks and issues around availability of feedstock to continue operating.

So is the value of a dollar from different businesses the same? Ultimately it is a question of what you think is the purpose of a business: to make money or to serve the customers.

Demand reductions

We perform a lot of demand forecasting for energy players and increasingly we need to forecast energy or fuel use for other industries. Often the players are thinking about greening their production, supply chain, etc. so we are forecasting how much fuel will be needed, or fleets of ship, volume of goods, amount of energy consumed.

In the climate transitioned world, we envision a greener version of our world when actually, it’ll be a different world altogether. It will not be the same as the one we are in today. For example, the energy content of hydrogen or green ammonia is a fraction of what we currently use as maritime fuel. If long-haul vessels are to switch fuel, they need more frequent refueling and bunkering activities will no longer be as concentrated as today. What will happen to Singapore as a bunkering hub?

Likewise, if companies are starting to be concerned about Scope 3 emissions, are we sure they would just pay more for green logistics? Won’t they procure more of their supplies locally? If we care about sustainability, will we not change our supply chains to switch out carbon-intensive materials.

The metrics around overall goods demand and where they come from will change fundamentally in a climate-transitioned world. ESG or climate is not just compliance, regulatory risk and reporting.

Picking problems II

I wrote about how people can’t solve problems that they are not willing to have. Yet one has to master the art of picking the right problems to work on as well. There had been times in my life when I wasn’t sure which problem to pick on dealing with and my attention became so diffused I wasn’t actually solving any problems but simply touching and going.

A lot of that life was during my previous career. We were often under a lot of pressure to do many things and deal with lots of problems with limited resources. And the result was the need to frequently and quickly get through a problem, declare it solved, and then go on to another one. There were long term issues, and shorter term ones. And one must learn to be able to prioritise them, as well as to properly trade-off resources across the long and short term challenges.

That prioritisation eventually becomes another challenge in itself. And this sort of self-referencing issue keeps popping up over my professional life. I discovered the importance of setting up buffer time for planning, to set aside budget for solutions to manage budgets and to ensure sufficient rest to be able to actually be producing more. Often times, we don’t recognise that the problems we pick naturally lend themselves to some peripheral problems that we need to deal with. That problems actually comes in a package when we are picking them.

Real circularity

There is a collorary to our economic system in nature. It’s not considered a single subject or discipline but involves a mixture of physical geography with ecology, biology and so on. Nature is truly circular to the extent that the outputs of one system feeds into the input of another and the overall grand scheme of things is in a kind of dynamic equilibrium that eventually shifts over time.

For a while humans have mimicked nature in creating circularity in our economy. And then we gave up because it was easier to scale things up and create wastage in order to fulfill profit motives. The unequality in an economy, the more wastage is produced because production gets inevitably skewed towards satisfying a demand that is aligned more to the distribution of “means” rather than a distribution of “needs”.

Nature behaves differently because the currency of nature is multi-dimensional and rich. There is no “monetisation”; nature do not base its value on a single commodity. You can’t exchange one calorie for another easily within the diet of most animals.

Real circularity involves richness that the industrial capitalist manner of approach cannot replicate.