Taiwan's carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced. That is the message the Anti-Global Warming demonstration wants to send to the nation's citizens and elected officials.
The demonstrations come just over a week after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd signed the Kyoto Protocol, making the US the only industrialized country not to join.
Calvin Wen (溫炳原), a member of Green Party Taiwan's central executive committee, said Rudd's actions could serve as an example to Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電), Taiwan's state-run power company, and the nation's leaders. "Sometimes we are really pissed off at Taipower because it is given so many resources but does very little for the environment," he said. "They seem to spend more money on convincing people of their policies than creating long-range policies useful to the public."
PHOTO COURTESY OF GREEN PARTY TAIWAN
This year, though, demonstrators are taking aim at Formosa Plastics' (台塑) plan to build a steel refinery in Changhua, an ambitions proposal that, according to Wen, serves to highlight Taiwan's lack of progress in cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
Protest organizers are also trying to empower people from the bottom up, Wen said, in an effort to persuade Taiwan's main presidential candidates, the Democratic Progressive Party's Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and the Chinese Nationalist Party's Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), to make climate change a priority.
Beginning tomorrow, Anti-Global Warming rallies will be held in cities and counties throughout the nation. The Taipei march begins at the Guangfu South Road side of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall tomorrow at 1pm and will proceed to Taipei 101. For more information, visit blog.yam.com/climatechange.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
RSS