A Conference and Consequences
How about being a a bureaucrat stuck in the transition of political ruling then being presented with a chance to revisit his youth passion in Geosciences, however remotely related to it?
I jumped at the opportunity.
As it happened, there is an Environmental Conference organized by a pension fund institution. When I asked permission from my boss to attend, she herself was perplexed, why on earth a financial institution organized an environmental conference?
“Probably a CSR thing, it has WWF (the World Wildlife one, not the wrestling one) with it,” I answered.
She gave me the green light, off I go.
Early bird gets the worm
The conference started at 8.30 on a Tuesday in KL City Centre. I hated traffic jam, so I decided to leave home at 5.30 and reach the hotel at 6.30 a.m., performed my prayer there then what?
I walked around the KLCC, had my breakfast at Wisma then walk again. It was fun to see an image of (rare) tranquility in KL.
Sunk-Cost Fallacy
During lunch I escaped to the one special place I always frequent when I am in KLCC, Kinokuniya. Recently I learned how funny Richard Thaler is, a Nobel Laureate (in Economics) from Freakonomics podcast. I bought his book, Nudge, only to lose it at the end of the day. In my defense, I vividly remember pushing the book into my bag. The book should be somewhere along the conference hall and the basement parking, but the six-star hotel claimed it’s nowhere to be found.
I mentioned the author in Twitter and this happened…
Anyway, the fact that a Nobel Laureate noticed me is a good enough amusement for the day.
Commuter is fitter!
On the second day, while I was struck with flu, I chose to commute to KLCC using ERL and LRT. It is in my deep vested public interest I said this: DRIVING IN KL DOESN’T WORTH THE EFFORT. On the first day, the pressure crept up to me as soon as I exited the hotel basement parking. Cars just lined up and maneuvering my way within so many road renovations here and there that making driving not just difficult, but a stressful event too.
Many steps of walk, short visit to KLCC shopping mall then Nu Sentral made my step counts and the stairs I climbed for the day doubled. My intensity minutes for the week also reached the target in just two days!
Huh, commuting make myself fitter I guess, except I was so sick that day from the flu and had to take a medical leave on the next day.
Uh, now the conference
So remember the conference I was talking about? It was organized by a pension fund to actually inculcate and create awareness in sustainable financing — a type of financing geared towards sustainability, forcing companies and enterprises to be more transparent in their supply chain and always favor the more sustainable ones.
This is interesting for me because in Malaysia it is always chicken and egg question when it comes to leading changes. Should state lead or businesses lead? With many huge investors, asset managers and asset owners in Malaysia are GOCs/GLCs, the matter is another layer of vagueness. However, the fact that this kind of conference, although highly technical for a mere bureaucrat like me, being held is a good sign for sustainable financing ecosystem in Malaysia.
Many hot button issues were pressed in the conference, such as one panelist’s institution is kind of double-sided coin in their sustainability investment for doing sustainable investing at one front, and non-sustainable investment on another front, especially in palm oil and energy sector.
Let us digress with this one fun fact: TNB “diversified” their energy generation from 27% coal/68% natural gas to 53% coal/42% petroleum — and keeping hydro at 5%. You think Kenyir dam is supplying a whole lot of energy, but it is not. And increasing coal, coal?! The dirtiest source of energy there is!
Now with the government targeting 45% reduction of carbon emission, I am particularly curious on how are we going to achieve that with no diversification plan in our energy supply. I am skeptical about the electric car too since the number of cars keeps increasing year by year and with source of electricity is mainly from fossil fuel (more electric cars = more electricity needed = more fossil fuel burned = more carbon emission) may just cancel out the impact of using electric car to curb down emission.
