Really poor taste. And pretty 
that the mayor of a city that’s home to the third largest coal-fired plant in the world feigns concern over the health of her city’s residents.
5 Likes
I actually hope KMT continues pissing off the US to the point that Washington straight up wipes the party out of the planet.
In case you didn’t know, she got elected by attacking the power plant, despite the fact that 36% of Taiwan’s air pollution comes from traffic, and 27% comes from China. Power plants only accounts for 2.9% of Taiwan’s air pollution. That’s even less than 6.2% released by the restaurant business.
Anyway, Lu is building her career on feigning to have people’s health at heart.
3 Likes
I would think in Taichung it’s significantly more than 2.9%.
Yeah. These numbers are for the whole country.
Would they be different for Taichung?
I would think that one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants being right outside the city will have an impact on air pollution in the city. Not a fan of the KMT, but in the couple of years before Lu the air in Taichung looked more grey.
4 Likes
As noted above, these are for this KMT leader supposedly parallel and not conflicting issues—prospective US ractopork and the huge coal power plant in Taichung are due to DPP policy incompetence.
Never mind that the KMT is the developmentalist party extraordinaire—the ones that decided to build such plants in the first place.
Guy
2 Likes
That has nothing to do with Lu.
1 Like
Not this again, ractopamine is the least of Taiwan’s worries. I trust imported pork more than the meat at most restaurants which probably come from wet markets where the meat sit out in the open for a whole day and have all kinds of parasites.
1 Like
The amount of carbon released by Taichung’s coal power plant has been decreasing every year since 2014. By 2019, the carbon released was just half of 2014’s amount.
In fact, since the wind comes from the North during winter, and pollution from China gets trapped by the central mountain range, Taichung’s AQI value is worse in winter. That is also when the coal power plant is producing the least electricity.
The only correlation between the coal power plant’s energy production and the air quality is a inverse one.
Bigger issue is why the US-Taiwan FTA Coalition doesn’t speak up.
There’s hardly anyone rosier about Taiwan’s future than Christiansen.
An AIT internal memorandum is probably now doing the rounds, entitled “In future no staff are to meet with KMT small fry.”
2 Likes
We don’t want imported pork. Ok. We want family farms where most of our pork comes from not more than 30 KM away, and the farmer’s money pays the tuition for my students.
We have no supply chain problem like they did in the states. Farmers killing and disposing animals that couldn’t make it to market because of COVID. Keep food production local.
3 Likes
I don’t disagree, and I don’t mean to be alarmist, but what bothers me about the ractopamine issue is that–regardless of whether or not it’s justified or rational–it appears to contain the potential to give the Kuomintang a new lease on life. Why is the DPP letting them have this microphone?
As I’ve posted elsewhere, if some of the relevant US companies are willing to accommodate other countries’ demand for ractopamine-free pork, I don’t see why Taiwan can’t be included in that accommodation. Somebody needs to talk to somebody.
–Krissa Welshans, “Tyson moves to ractopamine-free pork production,” Feedstuffs, October 17, 2019
2 Likes
The real question would be why is the US forcing the DPP to give KMT a microphone? What exactly is so important about selling pork to a tiny market like Taiwan that it is worth sacrificing the strategic advantage the US enjoys when the DPP is in power?
2 Likes
Does it?
1 Like
And what’s keeping you from doing that?
They did?
Agriculture and fisheries are odd things in developed countries in that they are a tiny part of the economy but the people involved in them hold enormous political clout.
3 Likes