The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) launched a series of activities yesterday to mark World Environment Day next Thursday by unveiling its two newest anti-global warming "campaigners" — a polar bear and a Formosan black bear — and called on the public to start living low carbon lifestyles.
“In the past 20 years, the polar ice sheets have dropped by a rate of 100,000 square kilometers per year because of global warming due to industrialization,” said Hsiao Hui-chuan (蕭慧娟), director-general of the EPA’s Air Quality Protection and Noise Control Division.
survival
PHOTO: WANG MIN-WEI, TAIPEI TIMES
Because ice sheets are now further apart, polar bears need to swim longer distances to gather food, making their survival doubly difficult, she said.
Likewise, Taiwan’s degenerating and increasingly warm environment has made it harder for wild animals, such as the Formosan black bear, to stay alive, Hsiao said.
“When you think about it, [global warming] is not just a problem for the North Pole or Taiwan — it is a problem that affects all of us on Earth,” she said.
With this in mind, the EPA is sponsoring a series of activities from now until World Environment Day next Thursday, including a photo exhibition at the Taipei MRT Zhongshan station.
“We have also set up a Web site for people to learn about 10 ways to reduce carbon emissions and vow to follow these guidelines,” Hsiao said.
So far, the EPA has received 97,697 signatures from people who have made promises ranging from using mass transportation instead of driving and eating vegetarian meals and locally produced food, she said.
'No regret' policy
At a separate press conference yesterday, EPA Minister Steven Shen (沈世宏), responding to media questions on how he planned to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions, said that individuals should follow a “no regret” policy to help combat global warming, which affects people worldwide.
“There are a lot of areas in our everyday lives where we can save electricity, such as switching off lights when you leave a room,” Shen said.
As carbon reduction is something that everyone needs to do, instead of offering incentives to individuals: “We need to promote a ‘no-regret’ mentality from the top down. Environmental protection is an increasingly common social value, and going green is something one would not regret doing,” he said.
Shen said a two-stage plan would be offered to industrial and business energy users, with subsidies provided for the purchase of energy-efficient equipment in the first stage and restrictions on carbon emission amounts in the second.
“Though these restrictions would depend on the passage of a carbon emission reduction law in the legislature, there is a consensus that this law would be passed — the legislature is now only mulling over the details of the law before passing it,” he said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: