environment Archives - Page 9 of 11

Great works

Do you create great art by thinking, designing and conceptualising until you eventually have a great piece of work to execute? Or do you execute along the way and figure out how it will look then it becomes great randomly without your control or preparation?

Or does making something great involve continuously trying to make something that serves your interest, purpose and the audience you are developing? Is it the trying that makes works great? Rather than the work itself?

I think as we accumulate experiences, life and mistakes in our lives, they inevitably make their way into our works. If we don’t keep trying and working through struggles and mistakes, the chance of a great work emerging will certainly remain close to nil.

Valuing time

As one grows older, one comes to value time more. It’s maybe the busier lifestyle from the commitments accumulated over a longer life, or perhaps becoming more cognisant that time is running out somehow. Time is an interesting object interwined with ones’ life and ability so much that when we consider how we can value it, the whole concept of valuation falls apart pretty quickly.

One person’s time is different from the other depending on how the time is used and what sort of talent underlies the time of that person in question. The opportunity cost of time is also really subjective and hard to determine; because the actual point in time and the place or context determine the alternatives possible.

Is productivity and trying to not “waste” time by trying to produce more output really about valuing time more? Or is it a greater mark of respect for the time we have when we actually use it for much-needed leisure? Is time only well spent when it generates economic fruits?

These questions are important because our society and the pressure of our culture around us constantly presses a particular view on these things upon us. We can be more conscious about how we can better value and approach our time and the way we spend it.

Resource-rich

There is always this age-old question of what you’d do if you’re rich. And then you might give an answer of an outcome that is already within your reach so then wanting to be rich is more about the identity that one would like to associate with.

What if you were resource rich? Like having lots of friends, or lots of land, or lots of cars, or collectible figurines? Do you think of those resource or things in terms of money? What if they don’t easily convert to money like friends or time? Does it matter?

How do you steward the resource that you are rich in? Does it matter if you can monetise it? Or whether its benefit is depleted by some actions you undertake? How do you think about it? What does it mean to “cash out” on your resources?

We all have a common resource and that is our atmosphere’s carrying capacity for carbon dioxide before climate goes completely amok and make our planet inhabitable. Sacrificing it could give us some money and maybe some comfort to certain extent. How would we steward it?

Everybody and nobody, everywhere and nowhere

When you try to please everyone, very often, you end up doing and producing things that would make nobody happy. When you try to be everywhere, as I’ve seen some of my college coursemates who tried to attend multiple parties and networking sessions on the same evening, they end up nowhere.

Fearing that you miss out inevitably means you miss out on everything because you’re not even at where you’re physically present, which is just about the only joy you really can have.

We are not capable of pleasing everyone, nor designed to be everyone, or to be everywhere. Let us enjoy these things that constrain us rather than putting our emotional selves intensely at odds with them.

Physical networking

Been at a few business functions lately; far more than I’ve been the past two years. It’s becoming a less surreal experience as the world eases into the state where covid-19 is endemic. Restrictions have eased and culturally, people are less wary about mask-wearing. The common flu and other cold bugs are back, ordinary immunity is probably improving.

I welcome the return of physical interactions as much as I discovered how many of them are actually easily substituted with online means. It is true that most of the online interactions lose out so much rich details and non-verbal dimensions of communication. In fact, especially for new connections and interactions, having that physical connection might be useful.

From just those physical functions, I discovered so many more companies I’ve never heard of. There are activities in the industry I wasn’t aware of from just reading materials online. A lot of chance encounters in the physical world are simply not possible online. In fact, I thought the online networking tools where you scroll through a list of conference attendees as poorly designed. Imagine in a real world when you try to go towards someone you want to speak to while the person is unaware and they are trying to talk to someone else. And all the responses are not exactly synchronous. Physical distances and actual visual observations in space performs a coordination function that technology has not been able to replace.

When you know something

When do you choose action when you’ve the knowledge? For example, when you know that your boss is saying something that is wrong to the client, when do you choose to correct him (or her)? What would you say?

What about when you know that you’re generating more trash by using the disposable takeaway container, or the cutlery? How about when you actually have a reusable container to use but wonder if it’s worth the effort to wash it? How do you balance your knowledge with your actions?

For far too long, we recognise that awareness and knowledge is the first step. But then getting from this first step to the point of action where it really makes an impact seem like a mystery. Psychologist probably had less luck figuring this out than marketers and social media platforms. The world’s most intractable problems are not to be solved through knowledge but action – how much would knowledge spur action, and how the mechanism works remains much of a mystery. But whatever we discover that we can do, why don’t we direct it towards helping to drive positive action towards the most challenging problems that mankind faces?

Malicious obedience

I have been going through Bob McGannon’s Linkedin course on ‘Leading with Intelligent Disobedience‘, he brings up the concept of ‘malicious obedience’. It is the behaviour that follows from ‘well, if that’s what you want’. And it is probably what we engage in more often than we are proud of.

I think by juxtaposing intelligent disobedience with malicious obedience, one suddenly recognise rules for the place they should be. Yet more often than not, we follow rules somewhat blindly, out of laziness, fear or lethargy, when there might be more wisdom and intelligence in breaking them. Of course, here, we recognise another dimension for following the rules – it is to do so with malicious intent.

Of course, the malicious intent might not spring up overnight. It could be employees who knew something was wrong and sounded the alarms but the management refused to heed. It could be a child protesting the stupidity of a rule at home and not having received the appropriate explanation for why the rule was in place. So the risk of not empowering others with the ability to disobey intelligently is that we send the wrong message about what obedience is about.

Feasibility of an Infrastructure

A huge part of infrastructure development work upfront is the feasibility study. What exactly goes into a full feasibility study and why is it so important? This article aims to explain that simply and more accessibly to people outside the industry. We’ll focus on the feasibility study rather than any documentation on projects generated prior to that (sometimes called pre-Feasibility Study – which could be considered a ‘lite’ version).

The feasibility study is like a professional evaluation of a business plan. For any infrastructure project, this is a comprehensive look into all the practical, legal, technical and commercial aspects of the project. Often, it will include social and environmental dimensions of the project in order to ensure that the lenders (ie. financial institutions providing debt to the project) is satisfied. In markets where there is significant social and environmental activism, the lenders are also on the receiving end of hate-mail, harassment and boycotts. Major project finance lenders internationally have therefore got together to be involved in The Equator Principles – a risk management framework that banks sign up to abide in assessing the environment, social risks involved in projects.

What then constitutes environment and social risks?

Infrastructure projects are physical, and will almost always require clearing of a piece of land to allow construction to take place. This would mean either resettling villages, people, farms, or redeveloping urban spaces, or even clearing swathe of rainforest. In cases of large hydropower dams, it will involve spaces not only for construction of the dam but also planned floodplains which can include multiple villages, broad swathe of forests. All of these impacts on human lives, biodiversity, alters natural landscapes.

Of course, the banks, developers, and builders care about people and rainforests. But beyond that, they are concerned about being harassed, haunted by NGOs, activist organisations trying to run them down reputationally for having been involved in projects that destroyed natural habitats for endangered species, upsetting livelihoods. These forms the environment and social risks; and the feasibility study tend to cover aspects of the social and environmental impact assessment, as well as to propose means to mitigate. Through that, the developers of the project also forms an idea how much resources they might need to expend to support resettlement, to help rebuild livelihoods destroyed.

How about practical and technical risks?

The feasibility study also goes into the technical and practical aspects of the project, including studying the possible technologies to deploy, the actual site conditions: whether the land can accommodate the infrastructure, whether there is actually sufficient demand for that infrastructure, and if the infrastructure has everything needed to service that demand – this could take the form of water supply pipe network, or an inter-connector to the national grid for a power plant.

The study needs to ensure that the proposed technical solution is able to deal with the problem statement at hand. For example, if we are using incineration for the waste, then we have to ensure that the waste stream is not too moist. If the waste is wet, the incineration system may not perform properly, which leads to potential technical breakdowns or stoppage.

And not forgetting the legal and commercial risks?

At the end of the day, the project will have to comply with the law of the land, and often, there will be a lot of permitting, licensing, government approvals that are needed for various components of the project. The feasibility study will investigate all of these and the developers will also do their best to make sure the requisite approvals and permits are obtain in advanced even often in parallel with the feasibility study just to make sure that the project is progressing in a timely fashion. These documentation will often be studied alongside the feasibility studies by the lenders.

Lots of parameters, and results from various aspects of the feasibility study would be captured into the financial model that is used to work out whether the project is commercially viable – that is, the total revenues/payments expected for the lifetime of the project is able to pay for its total cost over its lifetime. Governments may also undertake an economic cost-benefit analysis, to see if the total economic benefit of the infrastructure project is able to cover the total cost to society (more on this from a previous article I’ve written).

At the end of the day, flagging out, assessing and then measuring these risks enables the developers, lenders, and the government to have a better picture of how viable the project really is, hence its feasibility – from the various risks perspective as well as the resourcing that can be availed to the project. Doing proper feasibility studies can also help government better plan areas surrounding infrastructure, whether it is to mitigate some of the impacts of the infrastructure, but also to see if developments around the infrastructure can help improve its feasibility (eg. a larger substation might have to be built in the area to be able to accommodate a large utility scale solar park which would not have been able to feed power into the national grid).

This article is part of a series I’m working on to make topics in infrastructure a little more accessible to students and people from outside the industry who might want to get involved.

Interesting ideas for green transportation

Well, I dont intend to touch on or cover the conventional ideas people have about green transportation, but I was quite intrigued by two innovations that The Economist introduced in their Technology Quarterly this week. These are places you normally wont hunt when thinking about cost-savings and environmental-friendliness, but it reminds you that there are actually many areas to work on to do your part for the environment, not necessarily on the biggest or most radical of ideas like, say, using electric cars.

The first innovation is a collapsible shipping container. If this catches on, it could overhaul the way ports work, as well as alter how our port at Tanjong Pagar and West Coast look like. Made from “a fibreglass composite”, it is cheaper to produce than the normal steel containers. The weight and space / volume savings would significantly reduce transportation costs (such as the number of ships used to transport the crates, the amount of fossil fuels used for the ships) which would then help reduce the environmental impact of shipping and trade. Treehugger has more details regarding this innovation.

The second innovation focuses on the wheels of vehicles and how they can be made more in more environmentally-friendly means as well as make driving more environmentally-friendly. The material used to make the tyres are now being modified to either increase fuel economy of the vehicles they are mounted on or to make the production of tyres greener.

Small improvements and advancements in terms of technology, but we need all these little contributions to “business as usual” by the private sector if governments are unwilling or unable to carry out the sweeping reforms necessary.

Planned Obsolescence

If you watched The Story of Stuff, which I introduced to this site several weeks back, it introduces several ideas that are perhaps unfamiliar to most laymen or locals for the matter. One such idea is planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence can be defined as “the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer”. In other words, when product engineers design your product, they purposely design it such that it will physically or psychologically become obsolete (i.e. useless) after a while.

This sounds like a very disturbing idea, but it makes sense to the producer of the good for the consumer to keep purchasing “updated and improved” goods from them as their old ones break down. Planned obsolescence may even be described as an art; it would take much ingenuity, in fact, to design a product such that it does not break down too obviously as a result of inferior quality but consumers still want to buy this product and its future “upgrades”.

If you wonder how planned obsolescence affects us, this article from The Daily Green is useful in highlighting some occurrences of planned obsolescence in products we use in our daily lives. So have you unintentionally succumbed to this phenomena?