President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday urged companies to go green and become competitive in the increasingly important renewable energy industry, while pledging to help the government catch up with the private sector’s pace to “jointly foster Taiwan’s green competitiveness.”
“Environmental protection is not simply a moral issue, it is also a business opportunity,” Ma said in his latest online weekly journal.
“A country’s green competitive edge will decide its position on the world stage 10 or 15 years later,” Ma said, adding that “no individual or enterprise can afford to ignore the effects of climate change taking place around us.”
In the online journal, Ma also had an online chat with Delta Electronics founder and chairman Bruce Cheng (鄭崇華) on the issue of creating business opportunities using the nation’s advantages in the information industry.
Taking Delta Electronics as an example, Ma said that if the company could improve the energy efficiency of its power supplies by 5 percent, the amount of electricity saved could be equivalent to several times the electricity produced by the Linkou power plant near Taipei each year.
Delta Electronics is one of the biggest power-supply makers in the world, selling more than 200 million units every year.
Ma also hailed the company as Taiwan’s best representative business group, as it has successfully evolved from an IT company to an energy technology-oriented one.
“Its transformation not only has provided a new development direction for Taiwan’s IT industry, but has also given a boost to the local green technology sector, which will be Taiwan’s most important industry in the coming two decades,” Ma said.
Cheng said Taiwan’s companies investment in green power technology would determine their position in the global market over the next 15 years.
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,