A carbon tax, an energy tax and a ceiling on carbon dioxide emissions are all indispensable measures to reduce greenhouse emissions, Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Stephen Shen (沈世宏) said yesterday
“I hope the Executive Yuan will propose an energy tax bill as soon as possible so that the legislature can push through the bill and a greenhouse gas reduction draft by the next legislative session,” Shen told reporters at a press conference.
When the legislative session came to a close on Tuesday, the greenhouse gas reduction draft act had still not cleared the floor, despite promises from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
“Environmental protection groups and the Democratic Progressive Party had hoped to be able to include a greenhouse gas reduction target in the bill, which [the Executive Yuan] did not agree to. The DPP said it would rather wait and review the bill after the climate change talks scheduled for December in Copenhagen,” Shen said.
Some opponents of the greenhouse gas draft legislation considered it to have a lower priority than enacting an energy tax bill, Shen said, adding that the EPA disagreed with that view.
“Experiences in many European countries have shown that a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and the introduction of carbon and energy taxes complement each other. They serve different purposes and are targeted at different groups,” Shen said.
A carbon trading system, to be established once the greenhouse gas reduction draft act is passed, would be effective in forcing big polluters to reduce emissions, while the introduction of an energy tax would be aimed at encouraging individuals to save energy, he said.
The carbon tax was mainly designed to encourage businesses to reduce emissions, Shen said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
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Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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