The governments of Taichung and Yunlin County were the most active of the nation’s local governments in their energy transformation efforts last year, while the Taipei City Government needs to improve, a survey released yesterday by the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU) found.
The union announced the results of its survey, which ranked the governments in four categories — promoting energy transformation, tackling public pollution, improving environmental conditions and encouraging civic participation in environmental policymaking — at a news conference in Taipei.
Twenty of the nation’s municipalities responded to the survey, while Hualien County and Hsinchu did not respond to requests for documentation, the group said.
Evaluation for the “energy transformation” category was based on opposition to nuclear power, promotion of renewable energy installations, energy-saving efforts and reducing carbon emissions.
Taichung and Yunlin County were found to be the most active in promoting energy transformation, scoring 24 of a possible 30 points, followed by Changhua County, Taoyuan and New Taipei City.
Taipei scored 16 points, which means there is room for improvement considering that its residents consume the most energy of all municipalities — an average of about 6,100 kilowatt-hours per person per year, union chairman Liu Jyh-jian (劉志堅) said.
Only Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung and Taoyuan, as well as Hsinchu, Changhua, Yunlin, Penghu and Yilan counties have objected to extending the life of the three operating nuclear power plants beyond 2025, the date by which the Democratic Progressive Party administration wants all nuclear facilities to be phased out, union member Liou Gin-show (劉俊秀) said, criticizing the governments that shied away from answering the question.
Changhua topped the list for renewable power installations, with a total capacity of 366 megawatts (MW), followed by Tainan with 207MW, Taichung with 198MW and Taoyuan with 168MW, while Taipei had just 6MW.
Changhua has taken the lead in developing renewable energy, and the central and local governments need to do more if Taiwan is to achieve the goal of getting 20 percent of its power from renewable sources, Liou said.
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:
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