The three laws proposed by the Ministry of Environment to promote carbon reduction through the use of carbon fees would only have a limited impact on reining in emissions if adopted, experts said.
Earlier this week, the ministry proposed three new laws based on the Climate Change Response Act (氣候變遷因應法): collecting carbon fees, managing a voluntary emissions reduction program and how carbon reduction goals should be set for companies subject to carbon fees.
Entities that emit more than the equivalent of 25,000 tonnes of carbon a year would have to pay fees starting from next year, with the threshold being lowered to 10,000 tonnes by 2030, the proposed bills stated.
Photo: Chen Chia-yi, Taipei Times
The carbon fee system would only have a limited substantive effect, because the government has also proposed to offer a preferential rate or a discount on carbon prices for target industries that take measures to reduce emissions, Liou Ming-lone (劉銘龍), an adjunct assistant professor in National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering wrote on Facebook.
Instead, Taiwan’s carbon fee should be finalized and announced immediately after the new Cabinet takes office on May 20, and the fee should not be set too low, he said.
The government has hinted that the rate might be NT$300 per tonne of carbon emissions, but environmental groups have proposed a minimum rate of NT$500 per tonne.
The real effects of the carbon fee collection mechanism on Taiwan’s carbon reduction efforts must also be re-examined by the government, Liou said.
Meanwhile, a joint statement by environmental groups said that the draft laws were “discounted sales” for companies subject to carbon fees.
The proposed laws would not only offer preferential carbon fee rates, but also provide additional discounts to carbon-intensive companies deemed as having “high carbon leakage risk” (those that could move offshore to avoid carbon fees), the statement said.
Additionally, the proposals do not follow the UN-backed Science Based Targets initiative standard, which is stricter than Taiwan’s goal of reducing emissions by 2030 by 23 to 25 percent, as the government had once promised, the environmental groups said.
On the other hand, Greenpeace Taiwan said that the motivation for enterprises to reduce carbon emissions depended on the carbon fee rate.
If the final carbon fee starting rate was less than NT$500, there would not be enough of a financial incentive for businesses to reduce carbon emissions, making the carbon pricing system ineffective, Greenpeace said.
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