The Kaohsiung City Government vowed yesterday to cut the city’s carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2020.
Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said that although the city government and residents had joined hands to improve the environment over the years, the city’s annual greenhouse gas emission per capita still topped the nation at 22 tonnes — much higher than the nation’s average emission per capita of 10 tonnes.
“But this is not the fault of Kaohsiung residents. This happened because the central government favored northern Taiwan over southern Taiwan for many years and made Kaohsiung a base of manufacturing and energy supply,” she said.
CHANGE TODAY
“We should change the situation today,” Chen said, adding that she had asked the city’s Education Bureau and school principals and teachers to develop a series of courses aimed at raising students’ awareness about reducing carbon emissions in their daily life.
Chen said she hoped the utilization rate of the city’s mass transportation system would reach 30 percent by 2020 while the city’s carbon emission would have dropped by 30 percent by that time.
She urged local business leaders to take the initiative to cut their firms’ carbon emissions.
“Otherwise, global warming may cause an unemployment problem for the city in 10 years,” she said.
DOCUMENTARY
Chen’s call came after she watched the environmental protection documentary ±2˚ (正負2度C), with environmentalists and the film’s producers at the World Games Stadium on Friday night.
Chen said the documentary was the first of its kind to discuss the issue of climate change from Taiwan’s perspective.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,