The US has identified renewable energy as a priority for the APEC summit next year and will continue to count on Taiwan’s support in its planned initiatives to deliver sustainability, the US State Department’s senior official for APEC affairs Robert Wang said in Washington yesterday.
Wang was scheduled to fly to China yesterday to attend the APEC Informal Senior Officials’ Meeting on Monday and Tuesday to discuss priorities for the APEC summit in Beijing next year with his counterparts from the other 20 APEC economies.
“We are looking at, among other things, energy, security and the environment,” although the US is primarily “in a listening mood” to try to see what China wants, Wang said when asked about the US’ priorities for the summit during a discussion with reporters.
The US, in conjunction with Brunei and Indonesia, launched the US-Asia Pacific Comprehensive Energy Partnership at the Seventh East Asia Summit last year, in which the US provides up to US$6 billion to encourage US companies to develop clean and renewable energy in Asia as part of US President Barack Obama’s plan to address climate change issues.
This year, Vietnam cochairs the partnership with Singapore. It hopes to identify clean and renewable energy projects, said Wang, who is to fly from China to Vietnam, where a US-sponsored technical assistance effort for a wind-power grid code is being undertaken by GE Energy Consulting and the Electricity Regulatory Authority of Vietnam to study the integration of large-scale wind energy to Vietnam’s power grid.
The area of energy security on the one hand and caring for the environment on the other hand is high on the Obama administration’s agenda, Wang said.
“We are hoping maybe to use this [2014] APEC year to try to make some progress, on, for example, fossil fuel subsidies reform to encourage countries to move away from inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that create problems for air pollution and climate change and to move towards clean and renewable energy,” Wang said.
The US hopes to get more countries to undergo peer review of fossil-fuel subsidies reform next year, including China, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, he said.
Singapore and the Philippines have already done away with fossil fuel subsidies, while Peru and New Zealand last month proposed a voluntary peer review process for fossil-fuel subsidies reform, which will be implemented next year, Wang said.
Asked about the role of Taiwan in cooperation with the US in this area, Wang said “we are hoping to get Taiwan to support the various initiatives we have in energy and environment, whether in terms of financing or in terms of fossil fuel reforms. We hope that Taiwan can contribute to these efforts.”
Wang has scheduled a meeting in Beijing with Taiwanese officials tomorrow morning, the first of a number of bilateral meetings with his APEC counterparts.
“We have a whole range of things we are working with Taiwan on, [but] I am not sure if energy would be the key topic for Taiwan ... we hope that Taiwan will also be glad to do something in this area, certainly in terms of financing a clean energy project,” Wang said.
Wang praised Taiwan for helping APEC to deliver the goal of inclusive and sustainable growth with its APEC Digital Opportunity Center, through which a wide network of training centers were set up in remote areas of many APEC economies to help people become more computer literate.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods