Reasons for BAU levels and Government actions

BAU levels shows Singapore’s emissions unchecked by policy intervention. Given this figure the government has planned to reduce their emissions by 7% to 11% below the BAU level by 2020.

Reasons for this increase and some steps to counteract the problem posed:

Fossil fuel consumption. Singapore’s energy is mostly imported. Singapore is making constant efforts to shift is energy generation from fuel oil to natural gas, natural gas being more environmentally efficient. The government is also trying to replace our dependence on these fossil fuels with other renewable resources, but their use and potential is extremely limited. Hence in 2020 Singapore predominantly remains reliant on fossil fuels for their energy needs, with roughly 75% coming from natural gas and the remaining from fuel oil.

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Transportation:  More people mean more cars on the roads, which will lead greater carbon emission. The government hence makes a lot a of effort to keep a check on the number of cars on the road. An example of this is the bidding for Certificate Of Entitlement which allows the owner the legal right to use a vehicle in Singapore for a period of 10years. They encourage Singaporean’s to use the public transport as it is much more environmentally efficient. Further LTA and public transports operators have been working on hybrid buses for Singapore.

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Personal consumption. Growing population means greater energy usage. Further due to increase in the average temperatures people will again resort to even greater energy consumption. The government has launched various awareness programmes to urge people to reduce their energy consumption. An example of which would the national energy statistics that are shown on the energy bill, this tells the individual whether their usage is above or below the national average. And this sort of feedback is quite effective because it creates a high amount of dissonance in a person as there is a gap between their ideal self (be the ones who use less energy) and actual self (are the ones that use more energy). This dissonance leads to people trying to justify and when they cannot justify they will change their behavior.

Industry. Singapore is a key market for the petrochemicals and manufactured products. Going by the trends of increasing global demand of these products, this industry is expected to rise expand even further. But the problem here is that this means these industries will account for 60% of the 2020 projected emissions. Given these statistics the government is promoting these industries to opt for more energy efficient ways. They provide financial assistance such as Design for Efficiency Scheme (DfE), Grant for Energy Efficiency Technologies (GREET) and Investment Allowance (IA).