An Inconvenient Thought

Propensity to fight losing battles

  • IMO can vote on disagreements to move things along; UNFCCC can’t

    Another insightful tidbit from Josh Gabbatiss’s excellent explainer on IMO’s carbon pricing negotiations:

    Unlike COP climate summits, decision-making at the IMO does not need to be unanimous. Nevertheless, the net-zero target was passed unanimously and secretary general Arsenio Dominguez had indicated he did not want to push through a majority vote at MEPC83.

    […]

    This framework ended up being approved in an unusual turn of events, when Saudi Arabia, supported by other petrostates, called for a vote on the proposed measures.

    Of the nations that cast valid votes, 63 had voted in favour. Among them were the EU, China, India and Brazil.

    A group of 16 voted against the proposal, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other fossil-fuel producers.

    Isn’t it satisfying and refreshing to see Saudi Arabia calling for a vote on IMO’s carbon pricing rule, voted against the rule, and lost their fight to obstruct?

    Unlike the IMO, UNFCCC never formally adopted any rules of procedure because petrostates (chiefly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) opposed to voting as a last resort for making decisions. Every UNFCCC decision (including those under the Paris Agreement) has to be by “consensus”, giving petrostates unlimited opportunities to obstruct climate progress at every turn. It’s a miracle that 198 Parties could get anything done at all.1

    1. Coincidentally, the part in UNFCCC draft rules of procedure (an open agenda item for 29 COPs) that covers voting is Rule 42. That’s cosmically poetic. ↩

  • IMO agreed on the first real global carbon price for shipping, though it may not be enough

    Carbon Brief’s Josh Gabbatiss has a good explainer on the emission intensity standards and carbon pricing mechanism negotiated by IMO member states last week:

    The final IMO net-zero framework sets a lower emissions-intensity reduction target of 4% in 2028, which will rise to 30% in 2035. It also includes an upper target that will increase from 17% in 2028 to 43% in 2035.

    These targets represent a clear compromise, falling roughly in the middle of the ranges proposed by different countries.

    Any ships that cannot reduce their emissions intensity in line with these goals by switching to cleaner fuels will need to pay out.

    Ship owners who fail to meet the easier, lower target can purchase “remedial units” for $380 a unit, which would feed into the new “net-zero fund”.

    Alternatively, they can buy “surplus” units from ships that have reduced their emissions intensity to well below the target levels, or use their own surplus units from “over-complying” in previous years.

    Those who meet the lower target but fall short of the more difficult upper target must pay into the net-zero fund, but at the lower rate of $100 a unit.

    The base price of $100 per tonne of CO2eq is meaningful, and much better than the wimpy CORSIA:

    International aviation has an offsetting scheme called Corsia, but this is frequently criticised as ineffective and reliant on cheap offsets.

    As a comparison, the price of $380 per tonne of emissions for shipping fuel in the new deal is roughly one hundred times more than the average price paid for credits in the Corsia system in 2022 and 20 times more than current prices.

    Some climate people are (justifiably) disappointed that instead of a carbon tax that covers all shipping emissions, IMO chose a trading scheme the only prices emissions that exceed limits. But this still looks like a clear win to me. A universal levy approach may have broad support, but some of the supporters are asking for lowball prices like those in CORSIA.

    This compromise combination of reduction targets, timelines, and price levels may not be enough for shipping to achieve net zero by 2050, but it rules out the future of LNG and fossil fuels in shipping. It’s the first real global carbon pricing scheme that doesn’t involve bullshit offsets.

  • How would you like your iPhones tariffed?

    Erin Doherty, Hakyung Kim, and Lori Ann LaRocco reporting for CNBC:

    President Donald Trump exempted smartphones, computers, and other tech devices and components from his reciprocal tariffs, new guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows.

    The 20 product categories listed in the CBP guidelines are apparently exempt from the 125% tariff imposed by Trump on Chinese imports and the 10% baseline tariff on imports from other countries. A 20% tariff on all Chinese goods remains in effect.

    Remember when Apple scrambled at least five planeloads of products from India and China just before the tariffs kicked in? I’m sure they are still glad they did it, even with this new exemption. Classic example of a low-regret decision.

    Also, in Accidental Tech Podcast episode 634, two of the three hosts revealed that, in anticipation of supply disruptions and higher prices, they rushed to buy Apple products earlier than they originally planned to.

    If Apple raises its prices in the U.S., maybe I should start taking orders to buy Apple products from Singapore for friends living in the U.S.

  • Bernie still thinks America loses manufacturing jobs because China is cheap

    Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump don’t agree on many things, but they both think China is ripping off American workers. Bernie responding to Trump’s tariffs:

    As someone who strongly opposed disastrous unfettered free trade deals with China, Mexico and other low-wage countries, I understand that we need trade policies that benefit American workers, not just large corporations. Targeted tariffs can be a powerful tool to stop corporations from outsourcing American jobs. They can help level the playing field for American autoworkers or steelworkers to compete fairly against companies who have moved production to countries where they can pay starvation wages.

    That’s … wrong? Maybe it’s just how Boomers, socialist and Trumpian alike, see the world. But in my limited experiences, autoworkers in China are not starving.

    Sure, China has its fair share of inequality, but the reality is probably closer to what Tim Cook saw a few years ago:

    The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs. I’m not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor costs country many years ago. […] The reason is because of the skill, the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is. […] The tooling skill is very deep here. In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.

  • So, tariffs

    We all know what happened over the last two weeks: Trump started a trade war against the whole world with huge, sweeping tariffs. Naturally, the financial market panicked. Under pressure, Trump walked back most of his “reciprocal” tariffs except a 10% base rate for everything America imports, and even higher tariffs on China.

    Somewhat surprisingly, one of the most coherent and nuanced discussions about tariffs came from an American populist conservative think tank. In the first episode his new podcast Interesting Times, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat talked to Oren Cass, the founder and chief economist of American Compass. In the interview, Cass argued that carefully targeted and phased tariffs would help re-industrialise the US economy and isolate China.

    Douthat summarised Cass’s position as:

    And I’m going to put words in your mouth and say that the Oren Cass preferred tariff program is one that specifically tries to isolate China, generally imposes a 10 percent global tariff that is stable, persistent and compatible with global trade, and maybe includes some other country-specific tariffs related to negotiations.

    Cass also talked about the social case for re-industrialising the U.S. economy:

    It’s also the case that if you want to have good, highly productive jobs that pay a good wage, empirically, what you see is that those opportunities exist in the manufacturing sector, especially for people with less formal education, even though the average manufacturing job doesn’t pay more than the average services job.

    If you zoom in on one type of worker, like someone without a college degree, then what are the comparable service jobs they would otherwise have? The manufacturing jobs tend to be better.

    It sure sounds like a reasonable, albeit wishful strategy that aligns with what Trump has done so far. Is this what Trump has been planning to do all along? Who knows. He thinks America is getting ripped off with any amount of trade deficit. Re-industrialisation and geopolitics are probably not on his mind on “Liberation Day”.

    Forget about Trump’s stated desire for balanced trade with everyone, which doesn’t make any sense. Can his tariff achieve the two presumed goals of re-industrialisation and isolating China?

    To me, these two goals are connected because if the U.S. wants to form trading blocks with other democratic economies to exclude China, it will need to provide its trading partners an affordable, scalable and competitive alternative. Trump can impose high prices on Americans in the name of democracy, but it’s an entirely different thing to convince other countries to make the same sacrifice. America would probably want to be the one replacing China as a manufacturing powerhouse, and American workers would hope to benefit from this process. But can it match China’s manufacturing capabilities without China?

    What Cass didn’t talk about in the interview was what America needs to learn from China if it wants to re-industrialise its economy. After all, China is the most successful industrial economy over the past 40 years. China’s massive and competitive manufacturing supply chain is a complex ecosystem. At such scale and complexity, this ecosystem has evolved emergent properties (depth of technical expertise, hyper efficient logistics, etc.) that simply don’t exist in smaller manufacturing economies like the U.S. (or Japan and Germany, for that matter).

    If America wants to beat China at China’s game, it needs to learn how to play that game all over again because while America stepped away from the table to chase its free trade ideals, China has reinvented the game.

    Tariffs are something you do when your industry is behind. They keep you from getting completely wiped out, but you can’t get ahead with tariffs alone. In the past 40 years, China got ahead of other industrial powers by learning (and stealing) from the best (e.g., high-speed rail from Japan and Europe). Is America too proud to learn from China today?

  • What did they expect in a 3C world?

    Günther Thallinger, board member of German insurer Allianz SE, wrote on LinkedIn:

    Once we reach 3°C of warming, the situation locks in. Atmospheric energy at this level will persist for 100+ years due to carbon cycle inertia and the absence of scalable industrial carbon removal technologies. There is no known pathway to return to pre-2°C conditions. (See: IPCC AR6, 2023; NASA Earth Observatory: “The Long-Term Warming Commitment”)

    At that point, risk cannot be transferred (no insurance), risk cannot be absorbed (no public capacity), and risk cannot be adapted to (physical limits exceeded). That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.

    Yesterday I wrote about Wall Street “expecting” a 3C world. When analysts published these research notes, did they ever pause to ponder what it meant for the existence of their industry? Well, at least their long position on air-con stocks can beat the market.

  • Wall Street thinks climate goals will fail and we will need more air-con

    Oliver Milman, reporting for the Guardian:

    Recent reports by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance all make clear the finance sector considers the Paris climate agreement limiting global temperatures, signed a decade ago by nearly 200 nations, is effectively dead and investors should plan accordingly.

    “We now expect a 3C world,” states a March analysis by Morgan Stanley. This level of global heating above preindustrial times is well beyond the 2C limit agreed to by governments and would lead to catastrophic heatwaves, floods, economic strife and other upheavals.

    The Morgan Stanley investor research forecasts, though, that multiplying heatwaves will provide a windfall for companies that provide air conditioning, and that the global market could grow by 41% to be worth $331bn by the end of this decade. The analysis outlines several dozen air conditioning businesses around the world that are likely to profit from a hotter world.

    The finance whizzes on Wall Street think the world is not doing enough to stop climate change (partly thanks to their own moral cowardice), so we will need more air conditioning? No shit, Sherlock.

    Paddy McCully, senior analyst at Reclaim Finance, said it well:

    “It is to a very large extent being influenced by Trump and his agenda of accelerating climate change, although also due to banks using Trumpism as an excuse to roll back commitments that they had never actually intended to keep.”

    Morgan Stanley’s investor research on air conditioning is “mind numbingly cynical”, McCully said. “Especially as it comes just months after they first weakened their decarbonization targets and then quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance.”

    The problem with predicting the future is not that it’s futile. We should have all learnt the lesson since at least 2016. The problem is that predictions, especially reputable ones like this, limit our ability to imagine a different future.

    These predictions are different from IPCC saying “if we don’t stop using fossil fuels and halve emissions by 2030, we are screwed”. IPCC is not making a prediction about the future. They are connecting our collective choices with the consequences of these choices. Ultimately, it’s clear that the choice is in our hands.

    But when Wall Street says they “expect a 3C world”, they don’t mention the power and choices we still have to slow down and shave off every fraction of a degree in warming. They present one possible future as if it’s preordained because, well, if you don’t pay them $2,500 an hour to meet their stock analysts, who’d let you in on the secret that people will want more air-con as the world becomes hotter?

  • Logging Health data with Siri

    When I updated my iPhone to iOS 18.1 public beta in September last year, I changed both system language and Siri language to English (United States) in order to use Apple Intelligence. In the past few months, I have also started logging my blood pressure by double-tapping the bottom edge of the screen to type to Siri.

    iOS 18.4 added Apple Intelligence support for English (Singapore). After updating to the new iOS version this morning, I changed my system language and Siri language back to English (Singapore). When I tried to log my blood pressure by typing to Siri tonight, it didn’t work.

    Siri directed me to this Apple Support article, which explains:

    To access and log Health app data using Siri, you need:

    • iPhone with iOS 17.2 or later, supported iPad models* with iPadOS 17.2 or later, or Apple Watch Series 9 or Apple Watch Ultra 2 with watchOS 10.2 or later

    • Siri language set to English (United States) or Mandarin Chinese (China mainland). To check your Siri language: Go to Settings > Siri & Search > Language. 1

    I changed my Siri language back to English (United States) while keeping the system language as English (Singapore). Now I can type to Siri to log blood pressure by pressing the side button, but I can’t double-tap the bottom edge of the screen to activate it because, apparently, this is an Apple Intelligence feature which doesn’t work when system language and Siri language are different!

    What the hell, Apple.

    This experience highlighted to me, once again, the shitty mess that is Siri today. One of its features only works in two localised languages. Two. And it can’t tell you what month it is.

    Also, why does Siri need a separate language setting from the system language? Who’s using Siri in a language different that is from their system language? Maybe this is related to how Siri is implemented at a technical level, but as a user, I don’t care, and I shouldn’t need to care. Apple has always been good at eliminating unhelpful complexity from what they present to users. In this instance, they failed.

    1. You may have noticed that this Apple support article, published six months after the first Apple Intelligence feature shipped to the public in iOS 18.1, asks you to “Go to Settings > Siri & Search”. There is no such item on my iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 18.4 because this item has been renamed to “Apple Intelligence & Siri” in Settings app. In fact, in the same support article, Apple directs users to turn on Siri’s access to Health app data by tapping “Siri or Apple Intelligence & Siri”. What does this say about the state of Siri? You can decide for yourself. ↩

  • A grassroot solar revolution in Pakistan

    Here is a story I missed entirely: amid a spiralling economic crisis and recovering from a climate-fuelled, catastrophic flood in 2022, Pakistan imported at least 17 gigawatts of solar panels in 2024, making it the third-largest destination of Chinese solar exports, and the sixth-largest solar market globally. This amount is equivalent to more than a third of the country’s total installed capacity (46 GW as of June 2024).

    The most stunning part: this surge was entirely driven by bottom-up, distributed demands from millions of farmers, businesses, and households. No coordinated government policy push or subsidies. Millions of Pakistanis, fed up with paying high prices (electricity tariffs rose by more than 150% since 2021) for unreliable power supplies, took things into their own hands and put cheap solar panels on their farms and roofs.

    So far, this sounds like the breakout success of distributed renewables that we have all been waiting for. Renewables are supposed to democratise energy access and empower billions of people around the world. With renewables, people in poor countries don’t have to wait for governments and international lenders to build a grid for them. Pakistan is doing the distributed renewable revolution, at scale.

    But the flip side of this story is that millions of Pakistanis, those who can’t afford their own solar panels, still have to rely on an aging, poorly planned, and managed, inefficient grid. These grid governance failures are what drove people to rooftop solar in the first place. Now, with a shrinking customer base, a bigger cost burden is on those who are left holding the bag.

    Perhaps this is not the kind of energy revolution we want to see. The solution to universal clean energy access can’t be “build it yourself” and letting people fall through the crack if they can’t. Plus, a well-integrated and coordinated system with shared and pooled resources will be more resilient and efficient.

    Transforming our energy systems (power grids, transportation, and more) requires coordinated actions. A build-it-yourself mentality breaks down our commitment to coordinate with each other. It might seem easier to give everyone free solar panels than confronting deep, complex conflicts in energy systems, but I’m afraid quick fixes don’t exist for planetary problems.

  • CCUS in Malaysia

    A few days ago, the Malaysian Parliament passed the Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage Bill 2025. RimbaWatch, an NGO conducting research on climate-related issues, analysed CCUS projects announced in Malaysia, and found that, unsurprisingly, almost all of them support extracting and burning of fossil fuels:

    Of the 6 initiatives being proposed in Sarawak, five are linked to fossil fuel expansion, either through enabling sour gas developments or encouraging the development of a gas power plant. These CCUS initiatives are linked to some of the biggest gas discoveries in Malaysia, and the Kasawari and Lang Lebah fields alone hold a combined 16 trillion cubic feet of gas and 20.4 million barrels of oil equivalent of crude reserves.

    In Peninsular Malaysia, all four initiatives can be linked to fossil fuel production, either through enabling the development of a high-CO2 field with 4 trillion cubic feet of gas, or being attached to fields with either existing or future production.

    Some of the most high-profile CCUS projects in Malaysia, such as Kasawari, will be used to extract so-called “sour gas”. These are fossil gas fields that contain high percentages of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and carbon dioxide (CO2). These acidic (“sour”) gases can corrode and damage pipelines and equipment, so they need to be removed (“sweetened”) before the hydrocarbons can be used.

    After the CO2 is removed, where would it go? The simple (and cheap) answer is: just release (“vent”) them into the atmosphere, where they can hang out with all the other anthropogenic greenhouse gases! Or you can bury them somewhere underground, but that would cost more.

    Fossil fuel companies have to capture the CO2 in sour gas if they want to sell hydrocarbons, but they don’t have to store the CO2 like these proposed Malaysia CCUS projects. How nice of them!

    Why would they bother to store the captured CO2? I have two guesses:

    1. CCUS for these fossil fuel expansion projects is a smokescreen. This is classic greenwashing. By touting their flashy, futuristic CCUS, they try to recast themselves from climate villains into climate heroes.

    2. They can make up for the higher cost of storing CO2 by selling carbon credits, charging more for “low carbon natural gas”, or extracting more oil from depleted oil fields (“enhanced oil recovery”). 1

    If these companies are going to drill and pump fossil gases anyway, with or without the CO2 storage, then what’s the problem with having CCUS? Wouldn’t it be better to have CCUS, ceteris paribus, than not for these projects?

    A basic, well-known problem is, empirically, large-scale CCUS simply doesn’t work. There is a long list of high-profile CCUS project failures, including Chevron’s infamous Gorgon LNG project in Australia which happens to be “sour gas” too.

    But the most glaring, fundamental problem is that fossil fuel is fossil fuel is fossil fuel. No matter how much CO2 (or methane, for that matter) can be captured during the production processes and squirrelled away safely, all fossil fuels will eventually end up in the atmosphere as pollution. It’s simple: if something is good for fossil fuels, it’s bad for the climate.

    1. EOR is the most common use of CCUS, and historically, the financial viability of CCUS projects are inextricably linked to oil prices. Higher oil prices means more profits from EOR, so more likely the CCUS investment will pay for itself. RimbaWatch noted that, while the passed CCUS Bill prohibits using imported CO2 for EOR, it doesn’t say anything about using domestically sourced CO2 for this purpose. If Petronas can pump sour fossil gas, capture the CO2, and use the CO2 to pump more oil, isn’t it nice？ ↩