The government should repeal subsidies for the use of renewable energy sources to avoid distorting the energy market, while investing in energy-saving and environmentally friendly industries to promote saving energy and carbon emissions reductions, an economist said yesterday.
“Distorting the energy market refers to government control of energy prices,” Daigee Shaw (蕭代基), president of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (中華經濟研究院), said during a two-day “green” energy forum.
The international forum, organized by the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD), brought together environmentalists from Taiwan, the rest of Asia, Europe and the US to discuss energy saving and carbon emissions reductions.
“The government should safeguard the energy market mechanism, which signals the true costs of an activity, by canceling any price ceiling to help reflect the true internal costs of energy consumption,” Shaw said.
He said the government should “internalize external costs” by imposing “green” energy taxes, saying that revenues from the environmental taxes could be used to “finance reductions in existing revenue-raising taxes.”
Since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) assumed office in May 2008, the government has launched a four-year NT$145.2 billion (US$4.54 billion) program to cut carbon emissions, CEPD vice chairman Hu Chung-ying (胡仲英) told the forum.
The Renewable Energy Act (再生能源發展條例) was enacted last June as part of the government’s efforts to encourage the private sector and the public to enhance energy efficiency and management, he said.
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