Environmentalists protested in front of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) yesterday, accusing the government of not developing green and alternative transportation methods in the east of the country as promised while moving ahead with the controversial Suhua Freeway under the table.
The protest came just days before the Global Day of Action against global warming on Dec 6.
Chanting slogans such as, “December 6th, Taiwan be cool” and “Drive less, fight global warming,” Society of Wilderness spokesperson Tony Chou (周東漢) told reporters: “We all thought the Suhua Freeway issue was closed, but in reality it is still very much alive.”
PHOTO: WANG YI-SUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
The disputed project, proposed more than a decade ago, was halted on April 25 when it failed to pass the Environmental Protection Administration’s environmental impact evaluation.
The project was returned to the ministry, which means that if the ministry wanted to go ahead with the project (pending Cabinet approval), it would have to begin a new environmental review process.
The protesters were angered by the ministry’s proposed budget for next year, which is due to go through a legislative review process between now and January, Chou said.
“While not a single dollar has been allocated for the purchase of new trains for the east coast and there has been no mention of the Suhua Freeway alternate route that Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) spoke about earlier, a budget for the Suhua Freeway has been listed from now until 2014, amounting to about NT$93 billion [US$2.8 billion],” Chou said.
Chou was referring to Liu’s announcement in early July that the government planned to construct “an alternative road” to the Suhua Highway connecting Nanao (南澳) in Ilan County and Hoping (和平) in Hualien County. The announcement led environmentalists to accuse the government of playing name games, especially after Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) said soon afterwards that the alternative route would be “of freeway standard” but would not be the Suhua Freeway.
“There is only a brief mention of an ‘improvement plan’ for the Suhua Highway, with a budget of about NT$30 million,” Green Party Taiwan Secretary-General Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) said.
“To get the NT$93 billion budget for the freeway, the ministry will take NT$7 billion from its budget, request NT$20.4 billion from the national budget, while getting the remaining NT$65 billion from selling government bonds and going into debt,” Pan said.
“This is an act that would leave a heavy debt for generations to come,” he said.
However, national highway construction section chief Lan Wei-gung (藍維恭) said yesterday that it was necessary to list the freeway project in the budget because some accounts for the project had yet to be formally closed.
It was “like a company would list its losses on its books,” he said.
“This is just like any company’s accounts book … The Suhua Freeway had been going on for many years. It went through a formal budget review and bidding process, so the books must reflect the activities because some of the accounts have not yet be settled,” he said.
Budgets were planned for the freeway until 2014, but that does not mean that it would happen now, he said.
“From what we can see now, it would be impossible for the Suhua Freeway to be allocated funds in the 2010 budget book,” he said.
As for the improvement plan for the Suhua Highway, Lan said it was written in the budget book to offer legislators alternative options to the freeway or its alternative route.
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: