Category Archives: Life

I thought this document from our Ministry of Social and Family Development about Singapore’s social compact is really interesting. It neatly articulates many challenging issues and dilemmas that policy makers have, and also the challenge to try and articulate decisions made. I think our approaches in terms of communication has become more complex over time as Singaporeans demand more sensibility and sensitivity from our government.

Shanmugam’s conversation on BBC Hardtalk Podcast itself is probably a best practice for Singaporeans and politicians in Singapore representing our country and the social dimension of the approaches we have taken. At the same time, we must not shy away from asking these hard questions and to get an account of why we are doing things the way we do. We as a society cannot be relying on foreign countries to try and ask our government these questions; we ourselves have to be the ones asking that as a society.

Maybe sometimes we are afraid that there are no answers or solutions; but that’s not the point of the discussion. To bring up what is perceived as a problem is the first step to possibly resolving the knots that we have in our hearts. What our government cannot do is to say that they have better things to do than to answer the pesky questions of citizens. Or that these questions stand in the way of a better, harmonious society. Typically they don’t.

People who have known me for years will know that I’m incredibly passionate about education and I can probably speak for days what is wrong with the education system, and what is my vision the ideal system. Or at least just some elements of it.

And that is why I think Sal Khan of Khan Academy is incredible. How he came to find the Internet as a powerful medium and channel for learning and meaningful, educational interactions that allows us to deliver education at a fraction of the costs. He spent the years, resources, gathering support and building up Khan Academy, extended his philosophy and even announced a new collaboration with Arizona State University to set up a real school. He has indeed manage to attract a good following a lots of support to make his vision closer to reality.

I wonder if one day I’d be able to set up an alternative structure like that to mainstream education in Singapore; or perhaps I would be better off trying to do something like this in a developing country to help intelligent but underprivileged students gain access to the opportunities that better education can afford like how Mohnish Pabrai’s Dakshana.

How mission-oriented are we as a society? When Kennedy decided that America was going to send man to the moon, the economy and society responded. The government put in funds from taxpayers, the people supported the goal, the companies took risks to develop the technologies required, first with the government as customers but just having faith those technologies will find application in other areas. Research institutes, students’ aspirations were radically influenced by that sense of mission. Even if it just meant you were acting as a ‘calculator’ to make complex calculations for the space mission, it was a great deal. The Americans all felt they were involved in one large national project.

In many ways, Japan is a society that always seem to be on a mission. The government is able to come up with really long term plans and roadmaps and push funding to galvanise the society and people towards various different areas of technical and economic progress. I would say that growing out of “losing” World War II, emerging as the world’s third largest economy for most of recent history is still an incredible feat that Japan has pulled off as a country that is just a collection of islands. The fact that Japanese society was homogeneous helped but the kind of long term mission they have is equally admirable.

The question is what about Singapore? What is our mission? Can our mission be just about survival? Because it once seemed to be just that but we have not just survived but thrived, while being mindful also that we are always just really close to losing everything we had built. The only problem is that we now have so much more to lose. So we need a mission that is not about loss-prevention, not about avoiding being a laggard (though we indeed can’t afford to be); but it is about creating a future that we actually want to live in. Because, I don’t think I want to be living in an island economy powered by lots of carbon-emitting industries, or a society stubbornly maintaining internal-combustion based engines burning fossil fuels. More significantly, I don’t think we want to live in a future where mental health continues to be a great challenge with work being so stressful and schools being so competitive and education sector being such a nightmare for young aspiring teachers. We need to reimagine and envision our advantages, resources, and strength that we can evolve and create which would make sense in 2050 or 2100 as we move towards the first century of our independence as a nation.

What is your mission in this world? For me, I want to be part of creating a future we want to live in; and I’ve chosen to start in the world of sustainability and environment. This is not only because that is a ‘hot topic’ right now but because I am convinced that it is one of the greatest and trickiest problem confronting mankind.

I first learnt about global warming and carbon dioxide concentrations rising in the atmosphere when I was in secondary school. That was more than 18 years ago; and subsequently I learnt a lot more about it during Junior College days as part of my geography curriculum. This little geography topic came to the fore during my university days as I became the first official cohort for the LSE100. In that year, we actually had Nicholas Stern who published the Stern Review give us a lecture on why Climate change is such challenging problem to settle from multi-disciplinary lenses considering the politics involved, the social and economic sacrifices, etc. Apart from seeing it as a problem of coordination, I recognised it also as an opportunity for the world to work together, and for businesses to move beyond their obsession with profits and work for the society.

I probably would not have expected myself to end up taking on the role of a consultant with a strategy firm that focuses on accelerating the energy transition. What I love about my job is that I get to live out that mission – a large part of it – to be working with various organisations and stakeholders across the energy value-chain to create the future that we would like to live in. Your mission may not be lived out through your work, but it still matters that you know your mission.

I’ve written about first principles problem-solving before and what I want to share here is why that is a superior approach to a lot of our problems. There are a lot of work in the world today that is about incremental improvements and innovation. That typically involves isolating part of the difficulty or problem and then trying to deal with it by throwing different solutions. Often, you arrive at a solution by identifying a similar problem. That sort of tinkering on the edge of development, of management by exception is responsible for the solar panel costs to have fallen so much over the last decade it could be the cheapest source of electricity in many places (provided you have enough space); and for batteries to have become energy-dense and light enough to be powering ordinary cars.

But the challenge with such approach is that it gradually accumulates a lot of legacy issues in the overall system. There are parts of the system that developed solutions for problems of the past that might have gone away or there are clunky processes and work-around designed to solve problems created by another part of a system. This is why when Elon Musk set out to create Tesla or SpaceX, he ended up actually reworking a lot of supply chains for the existing products because the original supply chains had inefficiencies made what he was aimming for impossible.

A lot of our public systems have such legacy issues because they evolved by some measure of consensus over the decades or centuries and accumulate different constituencies and stakeholder groups. Which is to say that first-principle approach to problem-solving is very critical. I certainly welcome the exercise to refresh our social compact in Singapore and hope that it can be something we build from ground zero rather than be bogged down by past legacy issues. It is heartening that Lawrence Wong is actually taking time and intellectual bandwidth to ponder some of these issues; it will take decades to translate them into action but if we all can buy into the process, it’d be worth the effort to make the translation.

The Haber Bosch process for synthesis of ammonia using atmospheric nitrogen was discovered early 20th century and subsequently scaled up into an industrial process in 1910. It was perhaps an important industrial innovation that really made a significant impact in the progress of mankind that we often overlooked.

Before the process was invented, the fertilisers that were produced relied on nitrates from niter deposits and guano (the poop of certain birds and bats). These were all short in supply globally while the demand for nitrates and ammonia increased steadily. Note that at the point of human history, the global population was somewhere around 2 billion.

To a large extent, food resources was soon going to be placing an upper limit on how far the human population could go. The artificial synthesis of ammonia enabled large scale production of fertilisers, revolutionized modern agriculture as well as chemical industry. Nitrates were important for other applications beyond fertilisers, and for a long time, ammonia was an important precursor to that chemically.

Interestingly, in the more recent times, ammonia had become interesting for the fact that it held a fair amount of hydrogen, and is a relatively stable way of holding hydrogen chemically without using carbon. Hence the talks about ammonia as a fuel. It was actually used in 1942 in Belgium when there was a shortage of diesel; engineers had discovered that they could combust ammonia with the help of mixing a small amount of coal. 80 years on from that mini experiment, we are here thinking about how to use ammonia as a fuel again – not because we’re short of hydrocarbons but because we probably over-used it.

There is a certain quality about the modern appreciation of the meaning of our jobs and the impact we are making in the world. Of course, we have to start by appreciating that to even bother with whether our work is meaningful is in itself a reflection of privilege. It is often because we no longer have to worry that much about bread and butter that we can ponder over whether we should take on a job at a place that makes an impact or not, rather than just deciding whether our work place has a comfortable level of air-conditioning.

But so much of that is actually in story-telling. The banker likes to think that they enable the infrastructure they are financing – just consider how UOB engaging BBC Storyworks to run ads about lighting up Myanmar. Honestly, I’d say it is the businessman who borrowed the money, pulled together the resources and built the power plant who lighted up Myanmar and created jobs. The bank that provides financing shares only part of the risks.

And depending on whether you think McDonalds is bringing happiness or destroying people’s health, you might find working there meaningful or not. Or, if you care just about bringing in the dough in the most pleasant environment, you’d prefer to work at McDonalds compared to a stall at the hawker centers in Singapore that do not have air-conditioning.

So if much of our job’s meaning is storytelling, why don’t we learn to be better at that? And more importantly, why are we not recognising how our employers are trying to define those narratives, and shouldn’t we as employees be holding them accountable to the stories they are telling?

I was giving a presentation over this week and the topic was around new fuels like hydrogen and ammonia. The key to these “no-carbon” fuels is how they are produced. Because hydrogen and ammonia does not occur in huge quantities in nature and is not a stable form taken to store energy, they require energy from other sources to be produced as fuels themselves. As a result, though they emit no carbon when they are combusted, there might be carbon dioxide emitted in their production pathways. In that sense, saying they are no-carbon is a bit of a misnomer.

The challenge for all the equipment, vessels, engines looking at which fuel to run on is that they have to start re-tuning themselves to be able to burn these alternative fuels but then things will not be able to switch over all at once. Greener versions of these alternative fuels still takes time to be produced. There is about 185 million tonnes of ammonia produced each year and more than 99% of them are produced using natural gas as feedstock to provide the hydrogen required. In addition, energy is used as an input to the Haber Bosch process which further increases the carbon emissions of ammonia.

Yet we all have to start somewhere and pushing along the end-use equipment to adopt these alternative fuel is a large step. Perhaps larger than producing the green versions of the alternative fuels. It’s the same with electric vehicles which are being touted as low-carbon. Well, it all depends on the grid. We can switch all our cars to electric cars but if the subsequent increase in electricity demand causes countries to reactivate their coal power plants, the overall emissions are going to increase and not decrease.

For now, it still seems like carbon emissions have to go up further in order for it to go down.

Subsea cables uses loads of materials and for power evacuation, it makes more sense to lay a really high capacity cable rather than low capacity one if one is to invest in doing it over long distances. The environmental impact to marine life is unclear; and given these electronics components, they actually might last only 25 years.

So Singapore is importing electricity through interconnectors, and the first seem like they are going to come from Laos through Malaysia and Thailand? While the deal seems sealed, it is not clear when the physical electrons will be arriving in Singapore. Next up there’s the request for proposal by Energy Market Authority around importing electricity from neighbouring countries, likely though some kind of new subsea interconnectors to draw power from some renewable energy projects.

Given the requirement for firm electricity supply, the solar or wind projects will require battery storage. The green electricity from Laos is different as they are hydropower which has much more dispatch-ready quality to them. The subsea cables, the energy storage systems as well as the solar or wind projects are going to be very costly and the fresh infrastructure is supposed to somehow displace some of the infrastructure we have already built in Singapore such as the LNG terminal etc. Since the renewable electricity should probably replace some of the local gas-generated power?

Why don’t Singapore consider greener fuels instead such as looking at biomethane and building out the supply chain in the region. It can concurrently achieve some positive impact in the region by reducing toxic palm oil waste, and hence pollution, harness waste into a resource while achieving decarbonisation by leveraging existing infrastructure. Granted, it is a long journey and might be more tedious to pull off than just calling an RFP and importing electricity through a sub-sea cable.

But don’t we want to participate more in regional infrastructure?

In economic accounting, there’s an issue of double-counting when a transaction is counted twice. It can lead to overestimation of costs or value of goods, etc. In particular, if we sum up the value of intermediate goods transactions and then final goods transactions, we might double-count and overestimate the value of economic production. So second-hand transactions cannot be included in national income accounting.

In the workplace, a boss may claim credit of the work of his staff while leaving the staff to also take full credit of the work. The warm glow and glory of the work gets multiplied though it is probably an happy affair.

There are cases when it is not happy. When it comes to the environment, there’s a risk of double-counting of the carbon emission reductions or avoidance when more than one party claim the same reductions. If someone is generating their own electricity using solar, registered for renewable energy certificates and then sell it for a stream of payment so that someone else is able to claim the green attributes, then the one generating the solar power can no longer claim his carbon footprint is reduced by his own solar panels. The de-coupling of actual generation from claiming the attribute is a mechanism to improve efficiency of the market but creates the double-counting problem.

This problem has been talked about since a really long time ago but there is no clear consensus on how to solve it. The worry is that countries are counting the same reductions towards their nationally determined contributions to carbon reduction. When does this really happen? Perhaps when companies take the carbon reductions they have in another country either through purchase of green electricity or renewable energy certificates and then claiming to have achieved carbon reduction in their facilities in a particular country.

Technically it should not matter if that is somewhat registered nationally and there’s a cross-border trade in that contribution but it is probably too complex for the nation’s own accounting. So as long as we don’t allow companies to make such claims and to deal with all their emissions with local abatement, that should work. But it creates some really round-about issues which is inherently a little inefficient such as the actual, physical electricity import into Singapore through sub sea cables. That’s for another day.