In March a report into its climate change politics pointed out that Taiwan exists as an “extreme case” in a number of ways, from its international isolation to its reliance on carbon-heavy exports. But one problem stood out as particularly depressing: On a local level, “green on green” disputes between conservation groups and renewable energy infrastructure projects are considered a major impediment to a green transition.
It’s depressing because green-on-green disputes look like a no-win situation. On the one hand, environmental groups want to preserve wildlife habitats or local people want to protect areas of natural beauty and their local communities. On the other hand, renewable energy projects are a part of a drive to reduce carbon emissions which will end up destroying the world. That, on a small island with 23 million people, seems like it means neither side is wrong in principle, but someone has to lose.
But what if it’s a false dichotomy?
“There’s always a solution,” Zoe Lee (李菁琪), a human rights and environmental lawyer who’s also a Taiwanese Green Party candidate for the Legislative Yuan, tells me at her office in Taipei. “It really depends on how much money you want to make.” Lee’s perspective comes from working within Taiwan’s environmental NGO sector and being in the meetings where these issues are hashed out. She offers a dispute over offshore wind farms on Taiwan’s west coast as an example of how two seemingly incompatible positions can be brought together if the money’s right.
A few years ago, working with a Taiwanese environmental group, Lee was involved in arguing that the process of driving the wind turbines’ piled foundations into the seabed was damaging to endangered Taiwanese White Dolphins. With the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government making wind power a key plank in its bid to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, this could look exactly like a clash of two principled yet incompatible green positions. The classic green-on-green dilemma. But Lee says that, up close, the technical details show the difference was really about money. Certain more costly techniques for installing the foundations make less noise, but the company involved in building the turbines wasn’t prepared to pay the extra costs. What’s more, the environmental group Lee worked for also argued that floating turbines — with no foundations — could be installed further out to sea, but this idea (which has been deployed elsewhere) was ruled out by the government on the grounds it could disrupt commercial shipping lanes.
The way Lee sees it, then, this wasn’t really a green-on-green dispute. It was green versus profit margins and government budgeting priorities. And while many might see the money side of that as important too, the point is: Suddenly what looks like an irresolvable tension between two green principles looks more like a clash of quite different priorities.
And this is a lens Lee applies to other Taiwanese climate issues, too. The largest polluters, such as TSMC, still receive “huge subsidies” for their energy bills, she says, and these would be better spent incentivizing the building of green infrastructure. The upcoming carbon tax, likely to be set at around 300 New Taiwan dollars ($10 USD) against the EU’s almost 100 euro rate ($104 USD), is “a joke” and should be higher. They’re both political and financial choices.
So, why does the renewable, environmental agenda keep coming second (or third or fourth) like this, even under a government that often talks about making them a priority? Lee’s explanation splits two ways. There’s the weight of slow and complex “bureaucracy,” and then there’s the idea that the current government — and its main governmental rival, the Chinese Nationalist party (KMT) — is made up of “businessmen,” for whom making money is the priority. “We’re selling our future to make money,” as she puts it toward the end of our conversation.
Of course, as Lee says herself, she’s biased — she’s standing for the Green Party at next year’s national elections. She says if that party won any more power or influence then it would shift the balance between money-making and environmental protection. But this begs another question: Why hasn’t the Green Party been able to break through electorally before now, when Taiwan’s environmental issues are seemingly so desperate?
“[In Taiwan,] you’re pro-China or you’re pro-Taiwan,” and that dominates national elections, Lee says. The framing squeezes out other issues, even ones as important as climate change, and it makes it extremely hard for a party like the Green Party to win votes or change the conversation. As a result, she says, their strategy for next year’s national election is not to contest local seats so as to avoid accusations of splitting the independence-leaning vote with the DPP, and thus gifting the KMT seats. Instead, they will only contest seats via the national list system.
Whatever the results there, it’s at least novel to hear someone involved in politics who believes that Taiwan’s pretty terrible environmental record is not an unsolvable problem made up of fixed positions and impossible choices. Last week Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) listed renewables generating 8% of Taiwan’s electricity as an achievement: With the world average at 28% and the average for Asia at 25%, the current government appears to have accepted a much more constrained version of what is “realistic.”
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