Activists yesterday urged the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to reject the Central Taiwan Science Park’s Houli expansion project during an environmental impact assessment (EIA) meeting next week, warning they would file a lawsuit to overturn the decision and cause more losses to investing firms.
Although a court ruling in January revoked the EIA granted in 2006 for construction of the complex in Houli Township (后里), Taichung County, following a lawsuit filed by environmental groups three years ago, the EPA said that as the court only revoked the result of the EIA, the Houli project does not have to go through the whole EIA process again.
On Wednesday, the EPA gave its initial approval in an EIA meeting — considered a “continuing meeting” — and is expected to make a final decision on Tuesday.
“The meeting should not [result in] approval for such a controversial project. [If it does] we will again file an appeal to overturn the decision in court,” Lin San-chia (林三加), a lawyer representing the environmentalists, told a press conference at the legislature.
“When the ruling comes in a few years — which we believe we’ll win — it would cost more losses to the companies that have invested so much money in the project,” he said.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) berated the EPA for saying the project only needs to present the results of another EIA rather than going through the whole process again.
“When a decision by the government is revoked by the court, it means the whole thing is revoked, not just the result,” Tien said. “How can the EPA, a government agency, twist a court ruling and humiliate the court like this?”
Wild at Heart Legal Defense Foundation chairman Robin Winkler (文魯彬) said that if the government was so “pro-business” and unwilling to respect the law, “it would not be able to attract good, responsible businesses from abroad to invest, but only the worst, because they know the government would help them do anything they want.”
Meanwhile, environmental activists and researchers yesterday questioned the accuracy of an EIA presented by Kuokuang Petrochemical Corp.
Gloria Hsu (徐光蓉) of National Taiwan University (NTU), who is also a member of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU), told a press conference that the union would soon publish a brochure titled The Illusory Petrochemical Kingdom to highlight the major mistakes and unanswered questions in the report.
The pamphlet was written by Hsu, Lin Pi-yao (林碧堯) of Tunghai University, Chou Chin-cheng (周晉澄) and Wu Ching-chi (吳清吉) of NTU, as well as other TEPU members.
TEPU said the petrochemical company’s claim that it would create 692,000 jobs once operations began was proof it was exaggerating its statistics.
According to the 2009 Human Resources Report by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), the chemical and petrochemical industries accounted for a total of 268,000 jobs.
“Does the work force also include the ladies that sell betel nuts outside the factory?” Hsu asked.
Hsu said Kuokuang’s report showed that its scale of operations would be comparable to Formosa Petrochemical Corp’s naphtha cracker in Mailiao (麥寮). Formosa Petrochemical has said its naphtha cracker emits 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, but Kuokuang said its annual emissions would only be 12 million tonnes.
Hsu said Taiwan imports almost all of its energy sources, with the petrochemical industry consuming about one-third of this but contributing only about 4 percent of GDP.
“We’re not asking that the petrochemical industry be reduced to nothing,” Hsu said. “But the petrochemical sector already takes up a large share of the nation’s industry and should not be expanded anymore.”
Lin also said Kuokuang would not be using new production processes and could cause severe pollution.
He said the government was only thinking in terms of profit from the sale of petrochemical products to China under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), a strategy that would cause serious suffering to Taiwanese.
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