earth june 2013
World oceans day June 8HISTORY
World Oceans Day was proposed by the Canadian government at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio and supported by UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission in 1998. Since 2003 World Oceans Day has been coordinated jointly by the World Ocean Network and the American association, The Ocean Project. INTERNATIONAL REACH
Every year, across the 5 continents, aquariums, research centres, museums, associations and institutions with a marine environment outreach role celebrate the 8th June. More than 200 organisations from 50 countries come together to take part in this festival of the ocean. On the programme there are organised activities, games, arts and craft workshops, conferences and films ; it’s a fun day out and entirely dedicated to the ocean. THE DAY'S CHALLENGES AND KEY OBJECTIVES Inform the general public of the dangers facing the ocean and of the impact of human activities, Create a world-wide citizen’s movement, Raise awareness about the crucial role the ocean plays in all our daily lives, Mobilise people around sustainable ocean stewardship projects, Encourage everyone to take action to preserve the ocean and its riches. Celebrate World Oceans Day and participation in the day’s festivities. JOIN IN ON THE FESTIVITIES IN ASIA
(Click Cities for more details) MALAYSIA- Snorkel and Dive (Malaysian Nature Society), Beach Clean Up (UMIT), Coral Propagation (Ocean Quest Malaysia) BRUNEI- Celebrate the Sea Festival (OceanNEnvironment) HONG KONG- World Ocean Day Clean Up across HK (Living Seas Hong Kong)/ Wear Blue Tell Two (Carthy Ltd) INDIA- Seminar on Marine Bioprospecting (National Institute of Technology Calicut) JAPAN-Creature Observation Event (Ministry of Environment Chubu), Aquarium Celebration (Enoshima Aquarium) MALDIVES- Beach Clean Ups (John Keells Maldivian Resorts (Pvt) Ltd) PHILIPPINES-Coastal and Beach Clean Ups (CTP Construction and Mining Corporation, FMC Philippines) SRI LANKA-Photography and Video Competition (National Zoological Gardens of Sri Lanka) TAIWAN- Beach Clean Up, Aquarium, Museum (Taiwan Environmental Information Association (TEIA), Society of Wilderness) THAILAND-Cosy Beach Clean Up (Green Pattaya) |
book review: the prize
Ivan Goenawan, fund manager, takes a geopolitical tour through the founding and development of the oil industry and gleans investment insights along the way from this Pulitzer Prize Winner.
(Bottom) Eating sustainable seafood Get your country's Sustainable Seafood Guide here! (Click now!)
Eating Sustainable Seafood is a powerful way of taking action to ease the plight of the overfished oceans. Simply choosing or requesting for seafood from sustainable sources sends a powerful signal to the fisheries that this is what you, their market, wants. The WWF highly recommends the following list:
You may not be cleaning a beach this World Oceans Day, but in choosing sustainable seafood everyday, you can make an ocean of a difference. |
the history of oil
Book Review: the prize
By Ivan Goenawan
Ivan is an independent investor and coffee dealer based in Indonesia. He manages funds and reads newspapers, industry journals and annual reports for a living. In his spare time, he reads Spanish and Latin American literature, goes scuba diving and joins yoga festivals. Oh, and if you need some fresh Java beans, ping him at igoenawan@gmail.com
Reading The Prize is like sitting through a grand symphony in five parts, each of which represents that definition of a generation: The founding and disassembling of the Standard Oil combination; World War I and the foray into Middle Eastern oil; Japan, Germany and World War deuce; The founding of OPEC; and The Gulf War. The book mercilessly dishes out recorded data and references across wars, genocide, conglomeracy, bankruptcy, technological progress, economic booms and crashes and the founding and toppling of nations and leaders, leaving one open-ended conclusion after another. Rich in characters, timeless historical figures and the actions they took pertaining to oil,those who had read the auto/biographies of John D. Rockefeller Sr, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the French Rothschilds, Henry Ford, Calouste Gulbenkian, King Ibn Saud, General Hideki Tojo, J. Paul Getty, Richard Nixon, Ayatollah Khomeini, T. Boone Pickens, George Bush Sr and Saddam Hussein would relish at the opportunity to measure their character perspective against the oil industry as a pivot point across history and geography.
Through the course of reading this book, I am most often reminded of concepts presented to me in certain books I have read in the past, namely: Life is What Me Make It by Peter Buffett, Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin and the Tao Te Ching. By nature, I am an optimistic skeptic and I cringe at promises of surefire successes. I do, however, take comfort in varying likelihoods of events occurring based on hindsight and that often objectivity is simply widely accepted subjectivity. While Rockefeller leverages his Christian faith as his drive to exploit his knowledge and capital through Standard Oil, that spiritual justification might not be relevant in the case of the Japanese national protectionism to secure their energy needs by any means necessary; the Middle Eastern and Latin American oil embargoes to secure monarchical and populist interests; the dynamic progressive American lifestyle enabled by the miles per gallon; and even the federally mandated break-up of Standard Oil. Again and again, past justice has become the new taboo. It was, in a way, liberating for me to be avoid judgment and take the events in The Prize as random. Joined at the hip would be the data used in the oil industry: proven reserves, energy equivalence, production and consumption rates and all others that were used in decision making and bargaining chips. I find that theoretical measurements have this amazing nasty habit of being completely irrelevant overnight as new measurement practices are accepted. Yet theoretical measurements often find their merry way into top sovereign and corporate level negotiations as reasons for causes in the scale of world wars, corporate nationalizations, coup-de-tats and capital punishments. Alas, in my own line of work and life, making decisions on incomplete information and relying on margins of safety often satisfies the gut instinct much more than inaction.
Understandably, economics of scale in a capital intensive industry such as oil is critical. Oil field concessions and contracts do not come with guarantee and often takes indeterminate time to yield. Even then, risks of abrupt contractual adjustments and outright nationalizations often hinge on the popular opinion of the resource country or the character of the leader. Indeed technological advancement has allowed leapfrogging of efficiency in exploration, exploitation and downstream processing, but rarely any of them are proprietary enough to allow outright monopoly, post Standard Oil. Indeed most of the major corporate were started by wildcatters who struck the right field, but they are also statistical aberrances. Dismal success-to-failure rates do not occur only in the dot-com industry. However, oil companies are able to nurture consumer dependency as they grow in working capital. While perseverance is often the secret sauce in virgin oil fields, outright mule headedness can lead to tomfoolery in established oil field contracts. A logical, agnostic spread of oil field portfolio allows a buffer against total loss. Regarding downstream or retail, I noticed various efforts by major oil companies to market purported additional values to gasoline, such as anti-rust, prolonged engine life etc without actual scientific backing. While these and promotional prizes such as free maps had created the occasional sensation, ultimately it seems rather difficult to escape the commodity nature of fuel.
Finally, I noticed that a critical skill in this business seems to be the patience and finesse in managing through frequent, unexpected negotiations as producing countries cry foul for inadequate compensations for alleged exploitation, while oil companies justify set prices as calculated premium they needed to assume exploration risks.
Ivan is an independent investor and coffee dealer based in Indonesia. He manages funds and reads newspapers, industry journals and annual reports for a living. In his spare time, he reads Spanish and Latin American literature, goes scuba diving and joins yoga festivals. Oh, and if you need some fresh Java beans, ping him at igoenawan@gmail.com
Reading The Prize is like sitting through a grand symphony in five parts, each of which represents that definition of a generation: The founding and disassembling of the Standard Oil combination; World War I and the foray into Middle Eastern oil; Japan, Germany and World War deuce; The founding of OPEC; and The Gulf War. The book mercilessly dishes out recorded data and references across wars, genocide, conglomeracy, bankruptcy, technological progress, economic booms and crashes and the founding and toppling of nations and leaders, leaving one open-ended conclusion after another. Rich in characters, timeless historical figures and the actions they took pertaining to oil,those who had read the auto/biographies of John D. Rockefeller Sr, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the French Rothschilds, Henry Ford, Calouste Gulbenkian, King Ibn Saud, General Hideki Tojo, J. Paul Getty, Richard Nixon, Ayatollah Khomeini, T. Boone Pickens, George Bush Sr and Saddam Hussein would relish at the opportunity to measure their character perspective against the oil industry as a pivot point across history and geography.
Through the course of reading this book, I am most often reminded of concepts presented to me in certain books I have read in the past, namely: Life is What Me Make It by Peter Buffett, Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin and the Tao Te Ching. By nature, I am an optimistic skeptic and I cringe at promises of surefire successes. I do, however, take comfort in varying likelihoods of events occurring based on hindsight and that often objectivity is simply widely accepted subjectivity. While Rockefeller leverages his Christian faith as his drive to exploit his knowledge and capital through Standard Oil, that spiritual justification might not be relevant in the case of the Japanese national protectionism to secure their energy needs by any means necessary; the Middle Eastern and Latin American oil embargoes to secure monarchical and populist interests; the dynamic progressive American lifestyle enabled by the miles per gallon; and even the federally mandated break-up of Standard Oil. Again and again, past justice has become the new taboo. It was, in a way, liberating for me to be avoid judgment and take the events in The Prize as random. Joined at the hip would be the data used in the oil industry: proven reserves, energy equivalence, production and consumption rates and all others that were used in decision making and bargaining chips. I find that theoretical measurements have this amazing nasty habit of being completely irrelevant overnight as new measurement practices are accepted. Yet theoretical measurements often find their merry way into top sovereign and corporate level negotiations as reasons for causes in the scale of world wars, corporate nationalizations, coup-de-tats and capital punishments. Alas, in my own line of work and life, making decisions on incomplete information and relying on margins of safety often satisfies the gut instinct much more than inaction.
Understandably, economics of scale in a capital intensive industry such as oil is critical. Oil field concessions and contracts do not come with guarantee and often takes indeterminate time to yield. Even then, risks of abrupt contractual adjustments and outright nationalizations often hinge on the popular opinion of the resource country or the character of the leader. Indeed technological advancement has allowed leapfrogging of efficiency in exploration, exploitation and downstream processing, but rarely any of them are proprietary enough to allow outright monopoly, post Standard Oil. Indeed most of the major corporate were started by wildcatters who struck the right field, but they are also statistical aberrances. Dismal success-to-failure rates do not occur only in the dot-com industry. However, oil companies are able to nurture consumer dependency as they grow in working capital. While perseverance is often the secret sauce in virgin oil fields, outright mule headedness can lead to tomfoolery in established oil field contracts. A logical, agnostic spread of oil field portfolio allows a buffer against total loss. Regarding downstream or retail, I noticed various efforts by major oil companies to market purported additional values to gasoline, such as anti-rust, prolonged engine life etc without actual scientific backing. While these and promotional prizes such as free maps had created the occasional sensation, ultimately it seems rather difficult to escape the commodity nature of fuel.
Finally, I noticed that a critical skill in this business seems to be the patience and finesse in managing through frequent, unexpected negotiations as producing countries cry foul for inadequate compensations for alleged exploitation, while oil companies justify set prices as calculated premium they needed to assume exploration risks.
celebrating singapore's marine biodiversity the Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey
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Singapore- You would think that urbanised and reclaimed Singapore can have nothing more than migratory bird tourists and a few remaining native animals- that is probably true on land. But the port city's seas are teeming with rich marine biodiversity.
Recent findings have shown that Singapore's waters harbour some 250 species of hard corals, or a third of the world's hard coral species. Half the number of seagrass species in the Indo-Pacific region can be found within Singapore's waters. More than 100 species of inter-tidal sponges have been recorded and many more, according to the Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey, started end 2010 and slated to complete end 2013. |
The survey, led by the National Parks Board (NParks), brings together the larger community of experts from tertiary institutions, non-governmental organisations and individual enthusiasts. Shell Companies in Singapore has donated S$500,000 to the National University of Singapore for conservation activities, of which S$300,000 will go towards bringing in scientific experts for this survey. The Care-for-Nature Trust Fund has sponsored S$250,000 to the Garden City Fund, which will finance equipment required for the survey. The aim of the survey is to know comprehensively, what we have, where they are and how best to conserve them in order to continue to efficiently balance development and marine conservation in spite of our limited space and resources, for Singapore to remain a sustainable coastal city. This is certainly something for Singapore to be proud about this World Oceans Day. Spider Crab photo credit Peter Ng |