Is the EPA earning its keep?
What useless thing is the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) going to do next? I laughed with schadenfreude when six months ago they had a “crackdown” on scooter tailpipes that point upward, blowing carcinogenic smoke into the trailing drivers’ faces. Drivers could have seen “heavy fines” if they didn’t get their tailpipe adjusted to point ... downward. Great. That’s progress. Thanks, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
And are police ticketing violators or are grassroots groups supporting this initiative? Not that I see on my daily bicycle commute. What changed? I don’t support the death penalty, but I observe that the EPA’s policies are in effect driving their own children to an early death. Along with oil, Earth’s human life expectancy rates have hit a peak and are expected to crash over the next 15 years worldwide.
Now the EPA is announcing a “crackdown” on large noise-polluting motorbikes, according to a very forgiving Shelley Shan (“EPA to crack down next month on large motorbikes that cause noise pollution,” April 11, page 2). Why am I not surprised that the EPA is doing nothing about air pollution? No matter that Joanne Rosen contracted asthma and must flee Taiwan for safer air (Letters, April 6, page 8). I’ve been making the same plea to drivers for years to turn off their scooters at long lights.
According to the story, this noise pollution is caused by “bikers who gather or race,” and I myself have seen this phenomenon in person while on mountain biking trips, including zooming parades of imported Italian and German sports cars on provincial highways. With fond memories of having my own sports car in Taiwan, I would happily do the same thing, but I agree that motorists should make sure they’re not too loud.
Meanwhile, what is the EPA doing about garbage trucks? From my sixth-floor balcony, Fur Elise gets blasted at me for a full hour every evening, three times in my neighborhood. My measurements suggest that it’s 75 decibels (dB) inside my apartment and even if I turn my guitar amplifier up to 11, I still can’t drown that darn song out.
Standing next to it, my slow-moving local garbage truck pumps out more than 115dB, which is more than enough to deafen both the helpless children in nearby strollers and those in the womb.
Rosen is completely correct when she pleads that Taiwanese begin, finally, to wake up and take care of our precious children. Did you know that in the US, one out of five teenagers of college entry age is ... deaf?
According to Shan’s story, members of the public should report offending vehicles, and so I would encourage the public to send in the license plate numbers of their local garbage and recycling trucks to the EPA. When you live in any place in Taiwan for a week, how do you not know when it’s coming?
Finally, aren’t speeding motorcycles and racing sports cars on the provincial highways a matter for the police to deal with? This all begs the question: Does Taiwan have any CCTV cameras that are connected to electricity?
TORCH PRATT
Yonghe
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
Taiwanese pragmatism has long been praised when it comes to addressing Chinese attempts to erase Taiwan from the international stage. “Taipei” and the even more inaccurate and degrading “Chinese Taipei,” imposed titles required to participate in international events, are loathed by Taiwanese. That is why there was huge applause in Taiwan when Japanese public broadcaster NHK referred to the Taiwanese Olympic team as “Taiwan,” instead of “Chinese Taipei” during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics. What is standard protocol for most nations — calling a national team by the name their country is commonly known by — is impossible for
India is not China, and many of its residents fear it never will be. It is hard to imagine a future in which the subcontinent’s manufacturing dominates the world, its foreign investment shapes nations’ destinies, and the challenge of its economic system forces the West to reshape its own policies and principles. However, that is, apparently, what the US administration fears. Speaking in New Delhi last week, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau warned that “we will not make the same mistakes with India that we did with China 20 years ago.” Although he claimed the recently agreed framework
RSS