Energy minister cautions against "resource nationalism"

But Mr. Wong is just calming his supporters and securing his position. Actually, he's in panic mode 😂. The Indonesian government should have done this a long time ago. Singapore has long been manipulating Indonesia through greedy businessmen. Singapore has also long been hiding funds of corrupt people from Indonesia and other countries. Hiding behind financial regulations.

you should at least understand your own country’s situation, its energy needs, <br>and the good relations it has maintained with several countries supplying its energy. <br><br>so why are you the one causing trouble and then playing the victim?<br>and now you want to sue the very country that has been supplying your country with energy all this time?<br><br>what a shameless parasite country.

Let’s expose the sheer theater of this carbon credit charade: the government is aggressively hiking our domestic carbon tax to S$45 per tonne, forcing Singaporean citizens to pay heavily inflated electricity bills under the delusion that we are saving the planet.
<br>The entire global framework is a joke—Singapore has only managed to sign binding Article 6 carbon agreements with a handful of remote, economically irrelevant nations like Ghana, Peru, and Paraguay. Meanwhile, global manufacturing giants and our immediate neighbors—China, Japan, and Indonesia—are completely absent from this agreement. They continue to burn massive amounts of cheap coal to keep electricity affordable for their own citizens and industries, while Singaporean households are financially squeezed to fund a green optical illusion.
<br>Squeezing a captive domestic audience changes absolutely nothing globally when the real industrial polluters operate completely outside the system. This isn&#39;t environmental leadership; it&#39;s a calculated revenue extraction ploy wrapped in green compliance to deceive the nation.

The climate goal is basically piling an 800% to 1,500% carbon tax hike (from S$5 up to S$45–S$80) to force net-zero by 2050, baking in inflation to artificially prop up growth metrics and justify their own relevance at our expense, while other governments actually protect energy affordability for their own people.
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The whole transition is a three-way squeeze on the public: upfront tax money funds corporate R&amp;D, power plants pass the carbon tax straight into higher electricity bills, and industries bake those compliance costs into everyday product inflation. We pay to subsidize the tech, pay at the socket, and pay at the checkout—with no tangible real climate achievement other than tax hikes. Time to rethink clearly at the next poll.
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From a purely volume-based perspective, it is easy to see why it looks like Singapore is making a mountain out of a molehill. Indonesia is operating within the legal limits of its agreement. The numbers clearly show that the risk of a real energy shortage is practically nonexistent .

When officials say the carbon tax hike only adds about S$3 a month to a 4-room HDB, most people naturally read that as the total hit to their monthly budget. It isn’t. That S$3 is strictly a narrow, direct-meter calculation for home electricity and gas, assuming everything else in the economy stays completely frozen.
<br>It completely leaves out food, hawker meals, wet market groceries, and daily essentials. When power plants and industrial facilities pay that S$45/tonne tax, those compliance costs cascade down into commercial electricity rates, shop rentals, cold-chain logistics, and transport fares. You end up paying for it downstream at every checkout counter and hawker stall when a plate of chicken rice, fresh produce, or a bus ride creeps up in price.
<br>Labeling a single utility line-item as &quot;the household impact&quot; is pure statistical sleight of hand. Whether it&#39;s GST or carbon levies, it is all consumer and taxpayer money feeding the fiscal pool. We end up subsidizing transition tech upfront via public grants, paying higher tariffs at the socket, and absorbing product inflation at the checkout—a three-way squeeze that treats everyday households as the shock absorber.

When a minister paid at the top tier of global compensation acts surprised that a sovereign neighbor pulled a legal trump card, it treats Singaporeans like we have zero commercial literacy.
<br>Every standard long-term gas supply contract held by GSPL and Sembcorp through 2028 is written with explicit &quot;Change in Law&quot; and &quot;Government Directive&quot; clauses. When Indonesia’s upstream regulator enforces Article 8 of their Oil and Gas Law to prioritize domestic grids, the supplier isn&#39;t breaching the contract—they are operating under an excused, legal curtailment built directly into the fine print. Pretending that our commercial entities can just &quot;pursue recourse&quot; through arbitration against a sovereign emergency mandate is either empty posturing or a refusal to read the contracts sitting on their own desks.
<br>Waving around the &quot;less than 2 per cent of total demand&quot; stat is economic gaslighting. Power grids don&#39;t price electricity on averages; they price on the marginal unit. Knocking out cheap baseload piped gas forces generation units onto volatile spot LNG or emergency diesel during a strained global market, and that price shock gets blasted straight into business operating costs and household tariffs.
<br>We watched this exact script play out with the historical sand and granite bans. Calling structural resource nationalism a sudden shock—and then telling people to keep calm while passing down the bill—shows a foreign and energy policy that keeps backing us into predictable corners. If the defense against a foreseeable geopolitical squeeze is just telling us the water is fine while the heater maxes out, maybe the accountability for the job needs a reality check too.

Singapore should carefully review the cross-border gas pipeline agreement; the reduction in gas supply implemented by Indonesia amounts to only 31 BBTUD (approximately 8%) of the total 409.55 BBTUD exported to Singapore via the pipeline—well below the agreement&#39;s threshold of around 10%.