And this time on the environmental front. Reading this on Fox’s post made me pretty upset, albeit for somewhat different reasons Fox gives.

When I saw the title of the ST article I really wanted to believe that I was going to hear more about how Singapore’s push into investments in environmentally friendly technologies1 will be complemented with the introduction of new policies designed to encourage people and corporations to incorporate such technologies into their daily lives and operation procedures.

Then came these few paragraphs:

But the Government’s bottom line is that it makes no sense - economic or otherwise - for Singapore to take the lead in the push to cut carbon emissions.

Articulating what he termed a realistic and pragmatic approach to going green, Mr Tharman said in his Budget speech: ‘Singapore is tiny. What we do cannot make a significant difference to global warming or the ozone.

‘If big countries like the US, China and India do not come on board, everything we do will be in vain.’

SPRINTER has not posted the Budget speech yet, so I can’t comment whether the quote was taken out of context.2 But to me, this is a glaring sign of unwillingness to take leadership in an issue that really matters. Climate change3 is something that will affect small islands like Singapore the most drastically. (I will not comment on Mr Tharman’s use of the obsolete term ‘global warming’.)

Granted Singapore is not in the same immediate dire straits of the Maldives, an island paradise built on top of shallow coral reefs whose very existence is threatened by rising sea levels. But just because we’re a small nation doesn’t mean we can give the excuse of “what can we do?” to justify inaction. If you lived downstream from a large industrial factory and one day the river outside your house smells funny and the water looks a sickly yellow-green, I bet the last thing you’d do is sit back and say, “I’m sure the factory is to blame, but, well, it’s not my problem. I trust the company officers to look into it on their own.”4

I once had this debate with a scholar-type about exactly this question. He came to my house and saw that I separated my trash for recycling and was using CFLs for my lighting. He then commented that it was nice, if somewhat futile, that I cared enough to do so. His point was that the net effect of being conscientious about such things in the end just makes me feel good about myself, and that it won’t change anything.

Herein lies the paradox: how can the actions of an individual have any possible effect on a collective characteristic or phenomenon? Or to give concrete examples, how can democracy, civic activism, or consensus-building work?
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Footnotes
  1. I’m sure I read this somewhere, but I can’t remember where.↩
  2. This is a bigger problem than you might imagine in the media, especially the Singapore media.↩
  3. What used to be called global warming, but this term is now abandoned by the scientific community since it reflects an overly simplistic view of how human activity affects the planet’s climatological mechanisms.↩
  4. This is the main problem with climate change, that the consequences of deleterious actions on the environment rarely have such immediate and tangible consequences.↩