Green Steps By The New Administration

The government's own Taiwan Journal reported today that:

Taiwan's new administration announced it had begun introducing guidelines for government departments and agencies to save energy and reduce carbon emissions, which are considered one of the major causes of global climate change.

[On] May 22, Presidential Office high-level officials began using smaller cars instead of limousines, reserving the larger vehicles for visiting foreign dignitaries.

Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo has instructed the ministry to use a video conferencing system, so that officials in remote areas do not have to travel to Taipei for meetings. In addition, the MOTC plans to install technology that is able to adjust settings on air conditioning systems based on a room's humidity and temperature. It was estimated that such a system would reduce energy consumption by up to 30 percent.

All moves in the right direction, for sure, but the government also needs to pump money into MRT schemes instead of road-building programs, and tackle the massive CO2 emissions of certain private enterprises, such as the Formosa Plastics Group.

The ideas are right but the goals could be more ambitious:

[Yeh said] employees were also being encouraged to use public transportation at least once a month.

Once a month? Why not twice a week?

50 Ways To Help The Planet - A Checklist

Take a look at this and see what else you can do for the environment. To put a more local twist on some of the 50 items, rather than worrying about coffee stirrers (no. 44), we should be worrying about disposable chopsticks and plastic straws.

Few people in Taiwan use dishwashers, so no. 3 isn't of much relevance here. The recycling rate for glass (no. 5) isn't very good; discarded Whisbih bottles are all over the place. No. 7 urges people to dry their clothes on a line, not in a dryer. One advantage of Taiwan's warm climate is that people here don't need dryers.

I'm already vegetarian at least one day a week (no. 8). A lot of Taiwanese are vegetarian twice a month for religious reasons. As for buying local (no. 22), I do when it comes to beer. No. 24 is "invest in your own coffee cup." For Taiwan, this should be "invest in your own tea cup," as millions of styrofoam cups are thrown away each day.

There are no excuses the lack of telecommuting in Taiwan (no. 33), as this article explains. Plastic bags are massively overused in Taiwan (no. 40), but there's hope they can be made to decompose.

I don't pay my bills online (no. 47). I'm not sure how this can be done in Taiwan. I do know that if you pay automatically by bank arrangement, they still mail you a receipt. Here in Taiwan, bank statements mailed out at regular intervals (no. 48) are rare. Banks and the post office issue account holders with a passbook which gets updated everytime you deposit or withdraw money.

Rice And Methane

Looks nice, doesn't it? But according to the New Scientist, rice fields are a massive source of methane, a greenhouse gas that's more potent than carbon dioxide.

What can be done? Weaning Taiwanese off rice is even less likely than weaning them off air-conditioning.

Converting the land into forests would be good for Taiwan's CO2 situation, but would surely add millions of food miles, as replacement rice would have to come from Thailand, Vietnam or the USA. Even if that weren't an issue, the rising price of food guarantees they'll be no cuts in local agricultural production in the near future.

Can Three Experts Be Wrong?

Stephen Hesse, a columnist for The Japan Times, doesn't think so.

The experts in question, James Lovelock, Lester Brown and Jeffrey Sachs, are heavyweights - and they're all calling for immediate action on global climate issues.


"All three strongly agree that prompt and concerted action is needed to ensure supplies of food, energy and fresh water, and to deal with climate change, poverty and population, as well as the feedback loops that inextricably link all of these together. If it sounds to you as though these guys are concerned about, well, most everything, you're right. However, their approaches and conclusions can differ dramatically."

Lovelock is fatalistic. Brown and Sachs think the day can be saved, if we roll our sleeves up immediately. I'm too young (and, more importantly, so is my son) to give up.

Earth Hour 2008

Earth Hour 2008 will be in a little over two weeks, on Saturday, March 29th. Of course, you needn't wait until then to turn off unnecessary lights and appliances.