Taiwan should help on climate change: Ma

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.

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