Thousands of people yesterday marched in Kaohsiung against air pollution, calling on the city government to regulate coal burning and scrap a planned petrochemical plant near an elementary school.
The march started at Kaohsiung MRT Central Park Station at 1pm, from where protesters made their way to Kaohsiung City Hall.
It was the second of three marches against air pollution planned for this month and drew nearly 5,000 people, event organizer Southern Taiwan Anti-Air Pollution Alliance convener Chen Jiau-hua (陳椒華) said.
Photo: Wang Jung-hsiang, Taipei Times
The alliance has five demands: that the city government limit local plants’ coal use; a trade mechanism between stationary and mobile pollution sources stipulated in the Air Pollution Control Act (空氣污染防制法) be abolished; China Steel Corp (中鋼, CSC) transform its coke wet quenching tower into a dry one; Taiwan Power Co (台電) convert coal-fired units at the city’s Sinda (興達) and Dalin (大林) power plants to gas-fired ones; and that Taiwan-Japan Oxo Chemical Industries Inc (曄揚) scrap a plan to build petrochemical plant 200m from an elementary school, it said.
Kaohsiung mayoral candidates Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) of the Democratic Progressive Party and Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) also joined the march.
Proposing several plans to alleviate air pollution, Chen said that if elected, he would re-evaluate the allowable and actual emission levels for local factories, use artificial intelligence to predict and control air quality, establish an air quality regulation committee and transform the heavily polluted Kaohsiung into a green and livable city.
Photo: CNA
Han, along with KMT Tainan mayoral candidate Kao Su-po (高思博), pasted stickers bearing angry facial expressions onto Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Lee Ying-yuan’s (李應元) image in front of city hall.
The EPA and the Kaohsiung Bureau of Environmental Protection both issued statements responding to the appeals.
The Sinda plant’s four coal-fired units would be decommissioned by 2023 and 2024 at the earliest, and it would be equipped with three gas-fired units that would become operational from 2023, the EPA said, adding that the Dalin plant is planing to install ultra-supercritical coal-fired units to reduce pollution.
CSC is planning to build a dry coke quenching tower as the alliance has suggested, the EPA said.
The agency did not accept the protesters’ request to abolish the pollution trade mechanism, but said it has imposed regulations to regulate the trade and a 10-year sunset clause.
Establishing new regulations for coal use is not feasible, considering that the Yunlin County Government’s regulations were not approved by the Executive Yuan and those of the Taichung City Government do not stipulate any penalties for violators, the bureau said.
Instead, it has restricted power plants’ coal use by reducing the maximum amount of coal use in their permits, the bureau said.
Since the Kaohsiung City Government’s Regulation Standards for Air Pollutants Emitted by Burning Facilities (燃燒設備空氣污染物排放標準) took effect in July, it has required 2,282 facilities to bring their emissions to the level of gas-fired facilities, thereby eliminating 1,900 tonnes of sulfur oxides emissions and 480 tonnes of nitrogen oxides emissions as of September, the bureau said.
State-run factories and top 20 polluters in the city have also eliminated 5,736 tonnes of emissions in the first nine months of this year, it added.
The bureau said it would continue to strictly supervise Taiwan-Japan Oxo Chemical’s construction project and require it to continue communicating with local residents.
The company is CPC Corp, Taiwan’s (台灣中油) joint venture with Japanese petrochemical firm KH Neochem Co, whose plant is expected to be completed by the end of 2020.
Additional reporting by Tsai Ching-hua
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B