TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) current policies will not help Taiwan achieve its aim of reaching zero carbon emissions by 2050, Nobel Prize laureate Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) said Wednesday (Oct. 12).
During a radio interview, the former president of Academia Sinica said government policies were wrong and would not improve the environment. The government was promising the public that living standards would continue to improve, but that meant pollution and emissions would only increase, taking the country in the wrong direction, Lee said.
Instead, both demand and consumption should be cut, yet leaders are still talking about economic development and GDP growth, he added. In this scenario, it would be impossible for Taiwan to achieve the government’s goal of cutting carbon emissions by half by 2030 and ending them by 2050, CNA reported.
Lee also cautioned against abandoning the aim of turning Taiwan into a nuclear-free homeland by 2025. Nuclear energy meant leaving problems to the next generation, and only a safer new form of the technology could bring about a change, but it was difficult to predict when that would be available.