Two months after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government resumed power, the Cabinet announced nine new energy-saving measures on Friday in the hope that the nation can save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions, providing a greener environment for future generations.
The Cabinet’s announcement reflected the government’s approach to offering a clean environment with reduced emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It also comes as part of the government’s effort to decrease the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels after global crude oil prices skyrocketed in recent months.
Of these measures, the Cabinet said it would like to have all the nation’s taxis running on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) by 2012. Currently, about 16,000 to 17,000 of the nation’s 100,000 taxis are running on LPG, the government’s latest data shows.
LPG-powered vehicles offer many advantages over other types of clean-energy vehicles — such as the low cost and stable supply of fuel. Moreover, an LPG vehicle emits around 15 percent to 17 percent less carbon dioxide than a petroleum-powered vehicle.
Taiwan has been promoting the use of LPG vehicles for more than a decade. Unfortunately, support for this conversion following the Cabinet’s Friday announcement is mixed, and one of the major disputes regarding the proposal is over the number of LPG refueling stations.
While government agencies will discuss how to provide financial incentives to encourage taxi drivers to make the switch — such as a cut in excise taxes for buyers of LPG vehicles or an offer of fuel subsidies — what is important is not how high the subsidies will be, but that the number of refueling stations should be increased.
With only 23 LPG refueling stations run by state-run refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) and some by private gasoline-station operators, the Cabinet’s four-year plan to increase the total number to 150 within five years nationwide is far short of what the market will need. In comparison, there were 2,659 gasoline stations nationwide as of last month.
Moreover, an estimate made by CPC shows it normally takes up to four-and-a-half years for station operators to receive an operating license to run an LPG station.
The reason it takes so long to launch an LPG station is because many local residents have traditionally considered LPG stations to be a time bomb, and have fought against having them placed in their neighborhoods.
Even if the government imposes zoning deregulations on the launch of LPG stations, protests by residents remain a matter of concern.
Make no mistake: The plan to replace taxis that use gasoline with LPG-fueled vehicles is one with many options and can help cut fuel costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But the Cabinet must also acknowledge that the problem with taxi emissions is not just about the type of fuel they use, but also the number of empty taxis on the street.
In other words, if the government aims to target taxis as a way of cutting the nation’s energy use and cutting the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, it needs to control the number of taxis and get empty cabs off the road.
So many empty taxis cruising the streets reflects the difficulty in helping self-employed drivers find a better job elsewhere in the labor market, a complex socioeconomic problem that the Cabinet may find more challenging to deal with over the next four years than the fuel conversion issue.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS