Premier Lin Chuan (林全) and the Cabinet have, since February, been working on a “forward-looking” program — the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program — trying to push a special budget of NT$880 billion (US$29 billion) to break the political deadlock.
This is a project with no central guiding idea and it needs to be modified appropriately to overcome criticism from experts and political boycotts, and to achieve its goal of creating a new political environment.
The fundamental and fatal mistake of the program is to apply 19th century thinking to national development planning in the 21st century.
Developing railways, urban and rural areas, casting concrete and burning coal to make steel for aquatic environment infrastructure will all cause increased carbon emissions, exacerbating the greenhouse effect and worsening environmental pollution in Taiwan.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs estimated that by the end of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) term, coal will account for 50 percent of total energy consumption. That is, carbon emissions and air pollution will only increase, and floods and droughts will become more frequent.
The program’s aquatic environment development plans, designed with current conditions in mind, might not be able to cope with the more severe storms, rainfall and drought climate change could bring.
Britain, where the industrial revolution began, has already decided to give up coal-fired power generation: On April 21 it even went without coal generation for 24 hours.
Clinging onto coal is neither forward-looking nor sustainable.
Railways as a form of mass transportation were conceived in the 19th century. Up to the present day, basically only Europe, Japan and China have benefitted from urban rail networks.
Using rail networks to enhance urban and rural development is suitable for societies with growing populations: it is not applicable here, where the population is decreasing. The nation needs to leapfrog in its development, not regurgitate ideas that have one foot in the past.
The world is moving toward networked driverless cars, new transportation, a new economy and new industries. If the nation is going to have a forward-looking policy, then what it needs is rail-less infrastructure supplementing zero-emissions cars and motorbikes to counter air pollution and fight global warming.
The forward-looking program funds should be put to work replacing the 13.4 million high-pollution motorbikes made and ridden in Taiwan, and the millions of imported diesel-powered cars with new electric or other non-carbon emitting vehicles.
Taisi Village (台西村) in Changhua County’s Dacheng Township (大城) suffers from pollution from the nearby sixth naphtha cracker. Its situation is particularly dire when south winds waft airborne carcinogenic toxins from the plant. The people in the village have no defense against the pollution and nowhere to go to avoid it. It is a terrible state of affairs, and yet it has been allowed to continue and the plant still belches out pollution.
If the government took even a tiny fraction of the funds for the forward-looking program and allocated them to helping the residents of Taisi village to come up with their own plan for a “green” village, then it might be able to achieve its goal of transitioning to “forward-looking,” “green” energy.
If it fails to succeed in realizing even this eminently rational and reasonable demand, it would beg the question of what exactly the government means by “forward-looking.”
Chan Chang-chuan is associate dean of National Taiwan University’s College of Public Health.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai and Paul Cooper
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