Taipei, April 30 (CNA) Three laws proposed by the Ministry of Environment to promote carbon reduction through the use of carbon fees would only have a limited impact on reining in emissions if adopted, experts warned Monday.
Earlier the same day, the ministry proposed three new laws based on the Climate Change Response Act, one on collecting carbon fees, one on managing a voluntary emissions reduction program, and one on how carbon reduction goals should be set for companies subject to carbon fees.
According to the proposed bills, entities that emit more than the equivalent of 25,000 metric tons of carbon emissions a year will have to pay carbon fees starting in 2025, with the threshold being lowered over time, to 10,000 metric tons by 2030.
Liou Ming-lone (劉銘龍), an adjunct assistant professor in National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, was not optimistic about the proposed laws' impact on emissions.
In a Facebook post, Liou said the carbon fee system will only have a limited substantive effect because the government has also proposed offering a preferential rate or a discount on carbon prices for target industries that take measures to reduce emissions.
He suggested, instead, that Taiwan's carbon fee rate be finalized and announced immediately after the new Cabinet takes office on May 20, and urged that it not be set too low.
The government has hinted that the rate might be NT$300 (US$9.21) per metric ton of carbon emissions, but environmental groups have proposed a minimum rate of NT$500 per metric ton.
The government should also re-examine the real effects of the carbon fee collection mechanism on Taiwan's carbon reduction efforts, Liou suggested.
Environmental Rights Foundation lawyer Lu Kuan-hui (呂冠輝) agreed, saying the Environment Ministry should assess the amount of carbon emissions that could be cut under the proposed carbon fee collection system.
A joint statement by environmental groups, including Lu's ERF, further bashed the draft laws as "discounted sales" for companies subject to carbon fees.
The proposed laws would not only offer preferential carbon fee rates, but provide additional discounts to those carbon-intensive companies deemed as having "high carbon leakage risk" (those that could move offshore to avoid carbon fees).
The statement also accused the proposals of not following the United Nations-backed Science Based Target initiative (SBTi) standard, which is stricter than Taiwan's own goal of reducing emissions by 2030 by 23-25 percent, as the government had once promised.
Greenpeace, meanwhile, said the motivation for enterprises to reduce carbon emissions depended on the carbon fee rate.
If the final carbon fee starting rate was less than NT$500, there would not be enough of a financial incentive for businesses to reduce carbon, making the carbon pricing system ineffective, it said.
