The government is planning to create a legal basis for the nation’s efforts to reach net carbon neutrality by 2050 by amending the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act (溫室氣體減量及管理法) and renaming it the “Climate Change Response Act,” the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said on Thursday.
The draft amendment changes the emissions goal stipulated in the act to “net zero” by 2050, the EPA said, adding that the act currently only aims at a 50 percent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels.
Efficient use of energy is the key to carbon neutrality, and the draft amendment introduces mechanisms that would control and reduce emissions in the manufacturing, transportation and construction industries, the EPA said.
The regulations would counter recently emerging pollution sources by using the best available technologies and step up incentives for companies, factories and local governments to voluntarily cut emissions, it said.
The draft amendment would introduce a carbon tax to fund efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, develop low-carbon or carbon-negative technologies or industries, subsidize investment in technologies that decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and develop a low-carbon economy, it said.
The draft amendment also introduces a standard to calculate the carbon content in products, and taxes would be levied on carbon-heavy products to increase competitiveness in the global market, it said.
The draft amendment allows the government to enforce carbon footprint management, and encourages producers to provide low-carbon alternatives by increasing the responsibility manufacturers shoulder, it added.
The draft amendment includes regulations for the capture, reuse and storage of carbon emissions, it said.
The EPA has been in discussions with representatives of industries that would be affected by the new rules and has held public meetings, as required by law, it said.
The EPA welcomes feedback from the public and the corporate sector during the next 60 days, it said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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