Lawmakers yesterday froze the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) environmental impact assessment (EIA) budget for fiscal year 2019, citing its controversial approval of a gas terminal project last month.
A proposal by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) to freeze NT$10 million (US$323,562) of the agency’s budget was approved by the Legislative Yuan’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee in a meeting chaired by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wu Kuen-yuh (吳焜裕).
The EPA last month pushed through CPC Corp, Taiwan’s plan to build a liquefied natural gas terminal in Taoyuan in a vote where the majority was provided by government representatives as a number of other EIA committee members expressed their opposition by boycotting the meeting, Wang said.
The case highlights the shortcomings of the current EIA system, and part of the agency’s budget should be frozen until it proposes plans to close the system’s loopholes and forwards draft amendments to the Environmental Impact Assessment Act (環境影響評估法) to the legislative committee, she said.
The agency followed due procedures in convening several review meetings for the project, which were also live-streamed, EPA Department of Comprehensive Planning Director-General Liu Tsung-yung (劉宗勇) said, adding that the approval process was transparent.
It has amended minor EIA regulations and would present draft amendments to the act by the end of next month, as required, he said.
However, Liu still accepted the legislative committee’s resolution.
DPP Legislator Huang Hsiu-fang (黃秀芳) proposed a cut of NT$300 million to the agency’s budget for a garbage disposal project, which she said would push it to improve the capacity of government-managed landfills.
He proposal was reserved for further discussion.
The nation’s 67 operating landfills have an average capacity of only 11.2 percent and 13 are almost saturated, Huang said.
As of August, Miaoli County had one saturated landfill, while Chiayi County and Kaohsiung each had two, Taitung County had three and Yunlin County had five, EPA data showed.
Starting from 2016, the agency has provided local governments with subsidies to improve the capacity of landfills, with Kaohsiung and Tainan, as well as Chiayi, Hsinchu and Yilan counties being the first recipients, EPA Bureau of Environmental Inspection Director-General Lee Chien-yu (李健育) said.
Up to 600,000m3 of new capacity would be added at landfills by 2021, 40 percent of which would be managed by the central government for emergency use or for non-flammable waste, Lee added.
Additional reporting by Hsiao Yu-hsin
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