Alleging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deliberately kept important cases off the Environmental Impact Assessment Committee's (EIAC) agenda, a member of the committee protested outside the agency yesterday rather than attend the committee's last meeting.
Gloria Hsu (徐光蓉), Taiwan Environmental Protection Union chairwoman, said the EPA's "stalling tactics" means that environmental damaging construction projects likely to be rejected by committee could be approved by the next committee, whose members have yet to be convened.
Each EIAC has a two-year tenure, after which a new committee is selected by the head of the EPA.
PHOTO: CNA
"What is the point of attending the meeting?" Hsu said.
"Only five insignificant cases are discussed while many important cases that should have been brought before the committee languished," she said.
She was joined by former committee member Thomas Chan (
Both Hsu and Chan tied pieces of red fabric bearing the words "Environmental assessment is already dead," around their forehead.
Hsu accused the EPA of avoiding placing cases such as Formosa Plastic Groups' steelworks, the conjunctive utilization plan of Surface water and groundwater in the Chuoshui River alluvial fan and others before the current committee.
"They want to drag these cases out so that they will not go before this committee," Hsu said.
"I heard that our committee has been dubbed `the obstacle committee,'" he said.
"Are they delaying important cases from coming before the committee until it reconvenes with more business-friendly members?" Hsu said, "Why else are the keeping important cases from being heard?"
Also at the protest was the secretary-general of the TEPU, Ho Tsung-hsun (
"The EPA is derelict in its duty to protect the environment in Taiwan," Ho said, describing the agency as a "soft-legged shrimp" in the case of the sixth naphtha plant.
The agency previously meted out fines in March that was subsequently revoked by the Executive Yuan, Ho said.
At yesterday's press conference, EPA Deputy Director Chang Tzi-chin (張子敬) said the tenure of the current committee was about to end, meaning that there would not be enough time for the case of the sixth naphtha plant to come before it. However, Chang said the new limits will not necessarily be the 351,000 ton limit approved by the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
"It is up to the new committee, yet to be convened, to decide what the upper limit of water use could be for the sixth naphtha plant," Chang said.
Although fellow committee member Robin Winkler did not join Hsu's protest and attended the yesterday's meeting, he did offer a show of solidarity.
Coming down from the 13th floor where the meeting took place, Winkler ripped up a copy of the Basic Environmental Act (
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater