Greenpeace Taiwan yesterday asked President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to quickly devise long-term solutions to energy issues and climate change.
The group said that 1,298 government agencies and organizations worldwide have declared a climate emergency to combat climate change consequences, but Taiwan still lacks adequate action plans.
During the presidential campaign period, climate policies proposed by the three candidates, including Tsai, were rated by Greenpeace Taiwan, which concluded that they all performed “below average.”
Photo courtesy of Greenpeace Taiwan
The Tsai administration has failed to present proactive carbon-cutting goals and long-term plans for energy transformation, it said, adding that the results of carbon reduction in the past four years were disappointing, while a lack of improvement would make it difficult to keep the climate crisis at bay.
Without stricter measures to reduce carbon, Taiwan would only slow other countries down in the global efforts to mitigate climate change, Greenpeace Taiwan energy project campaign specialist Alynne Tsai (蔡篤慰) said.
While Tsai Ing-wen has unveiled long-term plans for the development of offshore wind power, other areas of green energy development still lack vision, making development goals after 2025 for other renewable energy sources an urgent need, Alynne Tsai said.
Now that Tsai Ing-wen has won a second term, she should follow the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change guidelines to keep rising temperatures within 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels to prevent a climate catastrophe, Greenpeace Taiwan said.
A complete timeline to phase out coal power is needed, too, it said.
Greenpeace Taiwan said that the government’s four most urgent climate change policies are, in descending order: carbon-cutting goals, long-term plans for the development of renewables, renewables obligations for major power consumers and a timeline to phase out coal power.
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:
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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