Shell and other big oil companies must fall!" "We need economic degrowth!" "Let workers strike!" These are the cries of SG climate activist Suraendher Kumarr who lately emerged in the climate change scene.
Paradoxically, saving the world wasn't Kumarr's priority. Since his days in NUS as a political science student, Kumarr was dabbling in all types of issues such as student activism, LGBTQ, minority problems and labour issues, everything you title -- except the surroundings.
His present fascination with environmentalism goes only as far as it intersects with his pet issues of labor activism as well as his anti-capitalist ideas.
So he is just being an opportunist, nothing wrong with it, right? Well, yes but not when his ideas are still full of contradictions and are going to cause grave economic prices for the nation when heeded.
Take for example his call to pressure large oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobil to fall due to their role in carbon emissions. That would largely surely lead to a tragedy if it were to happen.
Oil and gas is still a very important industry and a big employer in Singapore. Imagine if it had been to shut, not only will there be mass retrenchments in the oil industry itself, a number of other businesses relying on gas and oil will be struggling as well with greater cost and thousands of workers would be put off. These workers can't be retrained immediately and they'd be forced into financial distress. Some might end up doing Grab. As someone who sees himself as a champion of workers' rights, it is absurd he is pushing for such a movement without considering just how impractical it is.
In a paradoxical way to demonstrate that he stands by employees, he led a request against petrol price hikes as he claims it is affecting delivery riders disproportionately.
So here we have a"climate change activist" opposing a measure to decrease emissions to the sake of demonstrating solidarity with disgruntled workers. This is not merely self-contradictory but myopic. Taxis, private hirer drivers and motorcyclists who use their vehicles for work will in reality get rebates so the immediate impact is minimal. In the long term, the increased impact is on energy reduction which is the motivation for the rise in petrol duty rather than revenue collection since most of the collected revenue is going to be channelled to consumer rebates to ease the transition for people relying on their own vehicles for their livelihoods.
For more information please click on this link
oil refinery.
