Environmentalists yesterday accused President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of breaking his promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and warned that signing an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China would only bring more environmental disasters to Taiwan.
“Ma said on the second anniversary of his inauguration on Thursday that he wants to ‘save the country with environmentally friendly policies.’ Well, I think it’s just an empty slogan rather than a serious policy announcement,” Wang To-far (王塗發), a professor of economics at National Taipei University and a member of Taiwan Environmental Protection Union’s (TEPU) academic committee, told a forum organized by the group in Taipei yesterday.
“If we look closely at what Ma has done in the past two years since he took office, he talked more than he did, and what he did was often different from what he said,” Wang said.
PHOTO: WANG YI-SUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Wang also said that while Ma often talks about “saving energy” and “reducing carbon emission,” bills that could help achieve such goals — including a bill on an energy tax and a bill on reducing greenhouse gas emissions — have been in the legislature without coming any closer to becoming law.
Instead of passing laws to limit carbon emissions, the government has shown a favorable attitude toward plans by the petrolchemical and steel industries that are highly polluting, Wang said.
“Premier Wu Den-yih [吳敦義] has said earlier that the environmental impact evaluation for Kuo-kuang Petrochemical Technology Co’s [KPTC] plan to built new oil refineries in Chuanghua County must be completed by June,” Wang said.
“The KPTC’s planned new refinery has about the same capacity as Formosa Petrochemical Corporation’s refinery in Meiliao [麥寮], Yunlin County, which already emits about 67 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year — which is about one quarter of Taiwan’s total annual emissions,” he said.
Although KPTC said it would use the latest technologies to cut emissions by half, “it would still be emitting at least 33 million tonnes of carbon per year,” Wang said.
Gloria Hsu (徐光蓉), a professor of atmospheric science at National Taiwan University and a TEPU academic committee member, said it was ironic that “the only factor that had helped reduce carbon emissions in the past two years was not government efforts, but rather the global economic downturn.”
The TEPU also said in a press release that many high-polluting and high-emission industries, including the petrochemical, machinery, steel refinery, textile and plastics industries would likely be beneficiaries of an ECFA, “which means that the trade pact could lead to more environmental disasters to Taiwan.”
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