The historic UN climate talks in Copenhagen have good intentions, yet set a perfect example of how an indecisive assembly can end up being eco-unfriendly.
Developed countries should feel duty-bound to ease concerns raised by developing countries at the summit and show a firm commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Otherwise the summit will collapse and the divide between developed and developing countries will grow even wider.
Unfortunately, it seems very unlikely that a new climate change deal enabling a concerted effort to fight global warming will be struck before the summit ends on Friday.
Nevertheless, the Copenhagen talks have shed some light on the urgency with which the world must deal with its inerasable carbon footprint. Alternative and clean energy sources will provide the best solution, and the world is already starting to feel the pinch, which should spur some delegates into action.
That bodes well for Taiwanese high-tech industries, some of which have invested in the solar energy sector — particularly solar panels and batteries — for more than a decade and the light-emitting-diode (LED) industry for almost three decades. Hit by the global recession, the local LED industry may suffer a 6 percent decline in total output value to NT$50.8 billion (US$1.6 billion) this year — still the world’s second-largest, after Japan — from NT$53.9 billion last year, according to the Industrial Technology Research Institute’s Industrial Economics and Knowledge Center.
As more countries, including Taiwan, start to replace traditional street lamps with energy-saving LEDs, a replacement wave may soon be triggered.
The nation’s solar energy industry is growing quickly and is expected to reach an output value of NT$450 billion in 2015 from NT$101.1 billion last year and NT$53.5 billion in 2007, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council has said.
The potential of solar batteries is burgeoning, and can only grow as breakthroughs are made in creating cheaper batteries with shorter charging times, increased capacity and longer life cycles.
Rechargeable lithium-iron batteries — a newer kind of battery used to harness solar energy — may be the answer for now, although further technological innovations are likely to follow.
As a local lithium-iron battery manufacturer put it: “With the revolutionary lithium-iron batteries, which are highly efficient in power storage, Taiwan can help replace existing power grids anywhere in the world.”
It is in such a world that business opportunities will emerge for local companies, enabling Taiwan to give something back to the international community. This is all the more important given that Taiwan’s progress in cutting emissions this year deteriorated to 47th among 57 countries with the world’s largest carbon dioxide emissions, the latest Climate Change Performance Index showed.
Cost will be another major concern. Unless consumers fully commit to energy-saving products to spur demand, it will be difficult to reduce manufacturing costs to make them more affordable.
So those shopping for electronic gadgets should pay extra attention to energy-saving features, for the sake of saving money and the environment.
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS