The government on Wednesday set a target of reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions to 260.717 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020, which is 2 percent lower than the 2005 level.
To demonstrate its determination to reduce carbon emissions, Taiwan in June 2015 passed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act (溫室氣體減量及管理法), setting a target of cutting carbon emissions to 80 percent of the nation’s total carbon emissions in 2005, a base year for the long-term effort, by 2030.
According to the framework, the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions would be just half of the 2005 total by 2050.
The nation is behind on the timeline for 2020 partly because the three nuclear reactors at the nation’s first and second nuclear power plants are not in operation, Environmental Protection Administration Deputy Minister Chan Shun-kuei (詹順貴) told reporters on Wednesday.
The slack is taken up by coal-fired and natural gas-fired power generators, which produce higher greenhouse gas emissions, as not enough clean, green energy is being produced to fill the gap, Chan said.
Under the greenhouse gas act, Taiwan’s greenhouse gas output should be 10 percent lower than the 2005 level by 2025 and 20 percent lower by 2030.
The rate at which greenhouse gas emissions are cut should pick up in the period between 2021 and 2025, and emissions cuts should gain momentum from 2025 to 2030, as more renewable energy plants come online, making Taiwan’s 2025 and 2030 targets attainable, Chan said.
Under President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) administration’s plan to make Taiwan a “nuclear-free homeland” by 2025, 20 percent of the island’s power would be supplied by green en
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