One most important parts of the international effort is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and Taiwan, whose population accounts for a mere 0.3 percent of mankind today, but releases at least one percent of carbon dioxide, must proportionately contribute to the struggle for limiting the damage of global warming, President Ma told three Pulitzer Prize winners.

One of the winners President Ma received at his office was Julie Cart, the climate change reporter of The Los Angeles Times.

“We are no signatory to the Kyoto Protocol,” President Ma said, “but we are doing what we can to reduce our fossil fuel gas emissions accordingly.” One measure the government is taking is to collect green energy taxes, requiring more fuel consumers to pay more in levies for their consumption. That is not enough, he added.

Another effort Taiwan is making is to participate in COP15 in Copenhagen on December 7-18. COP15 is the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties, the highest body of the U.N. Climate Change Convention.

But President Ma is not quite hopeful Taiwan will be represented at Copenhagen. “Our NGO (non-government organization), I believe, will take part,” he said. One of the most well-known COP meetings was COP3 in Kyoto, which resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, a document signed by over 180 countries and put into action in February 2005. Signatories have committed themselves to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by an average of five percent against the 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

Should Taiwan be fully and rightfully represented at COP15, it could better contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas missions, one major cause of global warming that has triggered climate change, President Ma pointed out. “We cannot,” he added, “because of the opposition from the other side of the Taiwan Strait.”

That opposition, President Ma went on, will be softened as relations between Taiwan and mainland China continue to improve.

President Ma expressed interest in learning more about how the United States has coped with the challenge of racial conflicts, albeit Taiwan has no racial conflict, but communal disharmony. Another of the Pulitzer laureates he received was Hank Klibanoff, the author of “Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation” that won the 2007 prize for history.

Long before Han Chinese settled in Taiwan, Austranesian peoples had resided on the island. The Han Chinese have no racial conflict with these indigenous peoples now, but are facing the challenge of communal disharmony, stirred up while President Chen Shui-bian was in office.

The feud between native-born Han Chinese islanders and Chinese emigrants to Taiwan after 1945 and their offspring born and brought up on the island had been all but disarmed by intermarriages and the removal of language barriers by the end of the last century. Chen pursued an anti-China policy, which arguably polarized the Han Chinese majority in Taiwan.

That disharmony is impeding the improvement of relations across the Strait, President Ma said. Taipei wants to promote peaceful cooperation with Beijing on the basis of the consensus of 1992, known popularly as the principle of one China with different interpretations. Under that tacit agreement, both Taipei and Beijing acknowledge there is but one China whose connotation can be individually and orally expressed.

Efforts are being redoubled to achieve consensus among the people on Taiwan on how to further enhance relations across the Strait, President Ma stressed.

Ma appreciated the pictures Damon Winter took in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election in the United States. Winter won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for covering President Barack Obama's successful campaign.

His photographs, President Ma said, have helped break the ethnic barrier in Obama's presidential drive. Winter was still another Pulitzer Prize winner the president met with in the morning.

All three prize-winning journalists took part in a two-day workshop at National Chengchi University, which closed in the afternoon. With “Rethinking the Concept of Professionalism” as its theme, the Pulitzer Prize Winners Workshop was organized jointly by the Central News Agency and Chengchi College of Mass Communications.

The forum, the second one held at Chengchi, will help improve the quality of news reporting in and about Taiwan, President Ma said. “In particular,” he stressed, “the three winners are specialized in fields where the press in Taiwan needs much more important.”

“Their participation will be of great help to our press to make the world know and understand Taiwan better,” President Ma said. Taiwan has so far failed to increase its news exposure the world over.