Taiwan’s current energy and food situation is unsustainable — and an alarming security issue.
Emma Sky, an expert on conflict and reconciliation and director of Yale University’s International Leadership Center, says that tackling climate change and shoring up Taiwan’s security are two sides of the same coin.
“Taiwan imports 97 percent of its energy, two-thirds of its food — that’s not sustainable, that’s not moving towards net zero,” she says, adding: “what you need to address climate change is the same as what you need to do to become more resilient to withstand the squeeze from China.”
.jpg)
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
She adds that since COVID and the rise in global tensions, countries are “derisking,” by shrinking supply chains, and focusing on food production at home — changes that Taiwan needs to accelerate.
“Food, energy and water security makes Taiwan more capable of coping with a strangulation of a blockade and those types of scenarios,” she says.
Sky, who spent years advising the US military in Iraq and later fostering Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, will draw on her extensive experience in conflict resolution to discuss the reasons why climate change should form the centerpiece of all government policy.
Photo courtesy of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation
The speech, titled Peace Does Not Come Through Passivity and open to the public, will be held tomorrow evening in Taipei and moderated by Lung Yingtai (龍應台), a former minister of culture and founder of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS