Singapore

I was very pleased to be invited by the Energy Studies Institute (ESI) of the National University of Singapore to make a presentation at a conference entitled ‘China Energy Issues in the 12th Five-Year Plan and Beyond,’ held in late February. ESI invited 16 speakers, assigning each of us a topic – and mine was “Carbon Pricing Strategies in China: Carbon Tax or Emissions Trading?” All of the presentations are now available on the ESI website, and it was really nice to be able to meet the other speakers, many of whom I knew solely by reputation or from reading their (often extensive!) publications. And a word of appreciation for our ESI hosts is certainly warranted – they did a really great job & put on a first-rate conference.

Old Ford Factory

While in the city, I took a guided walking tour around the old Chinatown section, and was surprised to find that a small hotel I had stayed at in a previous Singapore visit had a reputation because of its previous occupants – it had been a well-known brothel! (Wonder how I missed that one before!) The city was commemorating the 70th anniversary of its surrender to Japan during my visit, and I was able to reserve a place at one of the sessions held at the Old Ford Factory, the location of the British surrender. There is a fascinating museum there now, and the commemorative sessions had speakers and a graphic documentary film. You might recall my visit to the Changi museum on my last Singapore trip — & as before, I was struck by how much the city has changed, and how much for the better!

On this visit, I was reading William Gibson’s latest book, Distrust That Particular Flavor. I became a Gibson fan back in the mid-1980s, when I picked up a copy of Neuromancer, his first novel & my introduction to ‘cyberpunk’ fiction — & now I read his newly-published books as soon as they come out. This new one is a bit different, since it is his first non-fiction work, a collection of formerly published articles, speeches, book forwards, etc. Interestingly, one of the articles (from the early 1990s) was about Singapore. Given its title — “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” — you can probably guess that it was controversial (it even has its own Wikipedia page), & wasn’t particularly well received in the city. But what attracted my attention were his comments about information technology:

“They’re good at this stuff. Really good. But now they propose to become something else as well: a coherent city of information, its architecture planned from the ground up. And they expect that whole highways of data will flow into and through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won’t affect them. And that baffles us….”

My presentation at the ESI session discussed how emissions markets were increasingly moving towards what is often called “big data,” massive streams of ubiquitous energy and environmental data, flowing in real time – and how disruptive this will likely be for China’s environmental governance system (which still considers much of this information to be “state secrets”). But perhaps not surprisingly, I found that Gibson had already explored the topic – almost two decades ago!