Life Archives - Page 6 of 66

Remembering Tim Keller

More than 10 years ago, when I was exploring the Christian faith, my housemate got me to read ‘Counterfeit Gods’ by Timothy J Keller. It was a relatively easy but not quite comfortable to read. Tim Keller explained eloquently how we live diminished lives pursuing counterfeit gods who promise much but never delivers; and the deepest needs of our hearts are never satisfied by the things of this world. For me, it helped me desire more to explore the bible for myself and the gradually, as I delved into the riches of scriptures, I discovered more of how the gospel really changes our understanding of life and the world and is capable of shaping our response to it. I recognised the meaning of what good news it is for Jesus Christ to be my Saviour and God.

I went on to read the more difficult ‘Reason for God’ and went through a lot of Tim Keller’s sermons before I came to accept the faith. Of course, there was the help of my local church community, friends, not forgetting prayer and the scriptures. He came to be my favourite preacher and when I started dating my wife in college, the contents of ‘Meaning of Marriage’ both challenged and excited me as I come to appreciate more and more what God intends in the relationship between man and wife. As I learnt to navigate my work and career, I continued to draw upon the lessons from the scriptures with the help of Tim Keller’s preaching – which I would listen to during times when I did laundry, am alone running long distances or go on walks.

God had certainly reached out and enriched my understanding of His word greatly through the teaching by Tim Keller. Today, Tim Keller has gone to be with our great Saviour. And I want to remember his intellect, strength and wisdom enabled by God and used to do the good works that he has been prepared for. My heart is truly heavy at the loss of such a great teacher but I have full assurance that Tim is rejoicing with God. And I am challenged to grow and develop further my knowledge of God and my spiritual life, having seen how the richness in God works itself in the life of Tim Keller.

Magic of going through the bad

If you think you are not good enough to do something, then ask yourself if you’ve been bad enough. I recall a time when my English was really bad. Actually it is still bad. And so is my writing. But I never let ‘my bad’ stop me; it is precisely going through being bad that one can be good.

And this animation by Danny Gregory puts that message together nicely. Enjoy.

Short pause

Taking a short pause from the consecutive days of posting. This is the 799th consecutive post since I started posting daily. The target was to keep this going. This special week however, I’d like to devote to thinking, reflecting a lot more about my faith and spiritual walk so I’ll be taking a week-long pause from posting my views on various things. I’m sure there will be new ideas coming along.

Importing green energy

Singapore is going to import low-carbon electricity soon; well, technically it already has been importing these electricity through some “small pilots”. The idea of importing electricity isn’t new. For a long time, Thailand had been importing power from Laos, developing hydroelectric plants there and building transmission lines into their network.

Most regional electricity markets started out first with interconnectors to help with load balancing, which also provides for imports and export. The Nord Pool in Nordic states started out that way. And the purpose of that had always been to enhance resilience and promote regional integration.

Singapore’s case is interesting because of the focus on securing green electrons. From a GHG Protocol carbon accounting standpoint for Nationally Determined Contributions to emission reduction, the electrons that are imported are carbon-free. This is because countries only need to care about Scope 1 emissions. That is to say the electricity exporting country will need to care about their energy mix and be responsible for the carbon emitted during the power generation process.

At the country level, all imported electricity is carbon free. But for companies consuming the electricity, things can be complicated. Do they use the grid emissions factor assuming the imported electricity is carbon-free? Are retailers who purchase the import electricity able to claim the power is carbon-free?

Because of these controversies, Singapore took the clear path of requiring the power imported to be from low-carbon sources / renewable sources. So hydroelectricity qualifies, and so does solar and wind. The challenging layer that Singapore added to the electricity importers is for the power to be firm; ie. the solar power cannot be just supplied in the day when the sun is shinning. The message is that we want green electricity but not the intermittency that comes with it. Nevertheless, managing the intermittency will come down to the importer rather than the exporter since the requirement comes from Singapore.

I do wonder if this whole musical chairs around who should own the cost or benefit to the matter of carbon emissions a big distraction from the world’s attempt to reduce carbon emissions though. If Singapore could simply develop more projects overseas and secure the relevant credits from other countries on a government-to-government basis, we could still create new instruments that could help to release more supply of green energy for companies in Singapore to meet their obligations.

At some point we need to cut through the whole posturing, learn to be strategic together as Team World and work on the problem of climate change together.

Smoking and carbon emissions

When dealing with a global issue with local variations of a problem and the need to change culture the way we are trying to do with climate change, there are important lessons we can learn about curbing smoking, especially here in Singapore.

Before we go there however, I want to first envision a state of the world where carbon emissions become more like stigmatised like smoking. Carbon-emitting industries would be like the cousin or uncle we have who is our relative and we can’t quite shake off but still be puffing away, causing our clothes to smell and our lungs to be polluted. We would want them to smoke far from us but they will inevitably bring that odour and whiff of smoke, and also ash back to us.

As employers, we would have competent workers who are smokers – and while we know that they might be taking smoke breaks, we still need to keep them as they are largely productive. So they will continue to exist, but we can treat them a little badly to nudge them to reduce their carbon emissions. Currently, we’re definitely not doing enough.

Some ideas on how to treat the carbon-intense companies/industries like smokers:

Labels could be slapped on all of the products and service invoices of these companies – imagine going down the aisle of supermarkets and seeing these labels on the fresh beef packaging.
These industries could be made to situate together (maybe within a yellow box); and if they are not in that given zone, they cannot run processes that emits carbon dioxide above certain threshold.
Tax them based on escalating, progressive carbon tax rates; this is above
These companies are not allowed to emit carbon dioxide until they registered their business in the jurisdiction and operated for at least 21 years.

So consider if we are doing enough for climate change; compared to public health. Both concerns survival of a nation, of the entire mankind.

What would a net zero business in your industry look like?

We spend a lot of time thinking about emission reduction. And it is all based on considering the existing state of affairs and how to move ahead from here. So we often consider how a process can be optimised to use less energy, or to use alternative materials. So a decarbonisation roadmap plays an important role in considering an existing business and how carbon emissions can be gradually eliminated from the workings of the business to transit it towards a low-carbon economy.

But just as important is how we can envision a new business to perform exactly the functions of an existing business but with zero carbon emissions. It is no longer about mapping or developing emissions baselines but rethinking how the same process can be achieved without emitting as much carbon. It is rethinking processes altogether. Heck, it might even involve rethinking products.

Major oil & gas companies are now refashioning themselves as provider of energy, competing with their customers who are power generators. Or they can think of continuing to supply the electricity generation players by going into mining and extracting of minerals and metals that are needed for wind turbines and solar panels. Or they could reconsider that they are actually logistics players ferrying molecules around and look into dealing more with chemicals transport. They could even consider themselves producers or inventors of new materials.

This exercise can be repeated for other industries and we could potentially have very interesting outcomes.

Do less work

This is not about quiet quitting. It is about doing good work. Sometimes you can only do this amount of good quality work and no more. Because good work takes time, effort and attention – all of them are short in supply. Work is not short in supply. There is plenty of work. But good work is, because there is only a limited amount of work that is actually worth doing.

The other work are mostly responses to corporate pressure, urges or itches from bosses, the kind of work that involves corporate politics, and so on. If we could all do less of those and focus on the good work, we can be sure the world will be better.

So if you’re in a place of influence, maybe focusing on a more fundamental cause of doing less work would be good. The world doesn’t need more work; it needs more good work.

Forgetting ignorance

Once we learn something, it is hard to unlearn it. In fact it is impossible to unlearn it to the extent of being ignorant of what you have learnt. In some sense, learning changes us irreversibly. In learning something, we forsake the ignorance. And we forget what it is like to not know.

That is really something we can’t forget.

Problems don’t end the world

Emily Kingsley wrote a tongue-in-cheek blog post on the point that yes there are problems in the world but the world doesn’t end because of it. It is one that is fitting for a time of the big overwhelm, when the world is struggling with huge problems that are so intractable the younger generation feels hopeless.

Yet problems are unlikely to be causing the world to end. It is quite likely that the world ends because actions were not taken to deal with the problems. I’m not saying here that blindly taking actions are going to solve all our problems. But action is necessary to recover our sense that we can do something, to prevent us from spiraling into hopelessness.

‘And’, which Emily Kingsley was trying to cling on to in her blog post is the notion that the mere presence of a problem itself should not be enough to defeat us or lead us into paralysis. Ultimately if anything kills, it’s not the problem but the paralysis that we induce ourselves into by telling ourselves the wrong stories about those problems.

Serving the user

Following my observations on Google’s mutated identity, there’s more news of the company’s “decay”. The focus here this time is something else; about the shift in the company culture that results in a bureacracy that plays it safe. There’s a common strand around the fact that Google has changed. And part of the change involves becoming removed from the needs of the user and a bit less grounded on realities.

Indeed, reality is about what the market wants when your company is small and just leading parts of a large market – usually a small part. Yet when a company grows, the insides of the company and the decisions of the management often can be more real than the user. In fact, your boss is likely going to have way more influence over your fate than the users have over the fate of the company. At least in the short term.

So should we have a cultural metric that is about how much a company revolves around serving the user? Maybe. But it is only possible from the top-down. The management have to model and lead that. Yet the management is usually selected by shareholders and at some point when the company grows big. At some point, the short term interests of the shareholders can conflict with that of the user. Moreover, the business model of Internet companies like Google is “ads” – which means users don’t even contribute directly to the revenues of the company!