As a rally looms, the Tsai administration is finally being forced to get serious about Taichung’s pollution crisis.
The News Lens
Date: 2017/12/16
By: Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文)
After a year and a half of treating the issue of air pollution as something that will be
台中火力發電廠。Photo Credit: 阿爾特斯 CC BY SA 2.0
improved far off in the future, President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration has dramatically shifted course in the past three weeks.
The Cabinet rushed through a proposal on Dec. 14 to tackle the issue in the short term, and Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) has announced he will step down if there isn’t a reduction of 20 percent in the number of days marked “red” (unhealthy) on the air pollution scale compared to 2015 levels.
What suddenly lit a fire under the DPP administration? While here in Taichung we snickered that it was probably the recent wave of higher-than-normal air pollution in Taipei that reminded the bureaucrats in the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國, slang for aloof Taipei) of the issue, the reality is it’s the 2018 local elections – especially in Taiwan’s second-largest metropolis, Taichung. [FULL STORY]