With enough political will to foster a two-punch strategy that encourages energy conservation and provides governmental incentives to overcome environmental obstacles, Taiwan could be an eco-friendly nation, said Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Winston Dang (陳重信).
"Taiwan's environmental efforts only started in recent years, but in the past decade alone we have cleaned the nation up quite a bit," Dang said in an interview with the Taipei Times last Monday, during which he spoke on Taiwan's environmental past efforts and future aspirations.
Since rivers are to land what blood vessels are to the body, the country's environmental improvement could be illustrated by how much the rivers have been cleaned up, he said.
"In the 1970s and 1980s, Taiwan's environment suffered as its economy flourished -- rivers around the nation were nicknamed `Heilongjiang' [黑龍江, a river in China, whose name means `black dragon river'] and carried a distinct stench," he said. "But in the late 1990s, the government started making efforts to conserve our river systems."
Since the EPA started cleaning the Puzih River (
As an indicator of a sound ecosystem, Puzih River now boasts 180 species of birds, "which feed on fish in the river that cannot survive unless the water is clean," Dang said.
Asked whether he was optimistic about Taiwan's future in terms of its environmental wellbeing, Dang said that with sound central policies and the cooperation of local governments, Taiwan's increasing awareness for environmental protection could bring fruitful outcomes.
"For example, compared with the Puzih River, which received a NT$400 million [US$13 million] budget for its cleanup, NT$16.5 billion has been spent on the Tamsui River in Taipei since 1998, but the improvement has only been 20 percent," he said.
And the central environmental policies in the future should be a two-punch scheme to decrease Taiwan's reliance on coal-burning power plants while providing incentives for renewable energy (RE) technology developments, he said.
"Taiwan is too dependent on imported energy [98.24 percent], especially oil and coal," he said, adding that the over-dependence brings two negative consequences.
First, Taiwan's energy-related carbon emission is about 1 percent of the global total, ranking 22nd in the world despite the fact that the nation comprises only 0.35 percent of the world's population, he said.
Second, although Taiwan is advanced in RE technologies, the nation's dependence on RE is only 0.7 percent.
"Many of the nation's politicians lack vision in terms of environmental policies -- a fearless politician should go ahead and say, `I'm going to charge more for water and electricity from now on,'" he said. "When water and electricity are too cheap, no businesses would be willing to invest in water treatment, seawater desalinization facilities or renewable energy technologies. Users of water and electricity would also not realize the extent of the world's shortage."
In Singapore, for example, because fresh water is scarce, seawater desalinization and water treatment technologies are extremely advanced, Dang said.
"Once seawater is desalinized into fresh water, they repeatedly process it with water treatment facilities after use, but [in Taiwan], we emit waste water directly into the ocean, which is a terrible waste," he said.
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