Despite being excluded from the UN, Taiwan yesterday made its voice heard on the initiatives to tackle global warming as 108 Taiwanese citizens participated in a simultaneous global democratic deliberation on the issue.
World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) launched the campaign with the intention of allowing citizens around the world to define and communicate their positions on issues central to the UN climate change negotiations (COP15) that will take place in Copenhagen in December.
The campaign called for about 100 ordinary people, chosen to represent their region's demographic diversity, to gather at a meeting yesterday to address an identical set of questions, vote on questions, as well as propose and prioritize action recommendations. An estimated 5,000 people around the world joined the deliberations yesterday on four themes: climate change and its consequences; the long-term goal and urgency of a new climate deal; dealing with greenhouse emissions; and the economy of technology and adaptation.
In Taiwan, the 108 citizens were chosen randomly from more than 700 people who registered for the event, with their ages ranging between 18 and 73 and coming from different backgrounds in terms of region and ethnicity.
Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy, one of the co-hosts of the WWViews meeting in Taiwan, reported its results on WWViews' Web site, where the outcome from 45 deliberations in 38 countries are also available.
After the eight-hour deliberation, the three most important issues selected by the 108 citizens were: adopting a vegetarian diet as an effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emission; establishing a fair and feasible new climate deal under which developed countries set higher targets for emission reduction than developing countries; and setting a global convention on climate change.
About 89 percent of the Taiwanese participants considered it “very urgent” to reach a global deal on climate change, saying it should be done at the COP 15 conference.
On the alternative energy issue, 45 percent of the participants said that governments of all countries should raise the price of fuel energy as a means to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and encourage the development of new energy.
Institute president Eugene Chien (簡又新) said the WWWViews project was held to let policymakers know that people are “aware of” the climate change issue, “support” them in tackling the problem and to “lobby” and even “pressure” politicians to take action.
“We are now facing a serious global climate crisis. Everyone knows we have to deal with the problem, but when it comes to initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, every country is only concerned about the impact of its own national interests and hopes others would do more,” Chien said.
Earlier this year, the government set its carbon emissions reduction target, saying it aimed to lower emissions from 2016-2020 to 2008 levels and further reduce them to 2000 levels by 2025.
Addressing the event before the deliberation, Environmental Protection Administration Deputy Minister Chang Tzi-chin (張子敬) said the exclusion of Taiwan from international climate agreements had posted difficulties for the country on emission reduction.
“As Taiwan is not a signatory to the international agreements, we cannot join the reduction mechanism such as CT [cap-and-trade], CCS [capture and storage] and the like. We are on our own,” Chang said.
Lin Kuo-ming (林國明), an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, said Taiwan was invited by Denmark to be one of the seven countries jointly initiating the WWViews projects in view of the country's previous dedicated pursuit of deliberative democracy.
The initiators also included Britain, Finland, Norway, Austria and Belgium, Lin said.
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
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
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