After Typhoon Nesat ravaged Taiwan in late July, a transmission tower at the Hoping private power plant in Hualien was damaged, disabling the regional grid’s supply capacity. Consequently, the DPP government told us it was time for a power shortage.
Suddenly, the public realized how precarious Taiwan’s power supply truly is. How could the suspension of a single private power plant affect the entire nation!? What happened to Tsai Ing-wen’s campaign promises that Taiwan wouldn’t face a power crisis, or her goal of a “Nuclear-free Homeland” by 2025? It turns out it was all empty words.
To secure the votes of young people and environmental groups, the DPP and Tsai Ing-wen spoke beautiful words before the election, completely ignoring engineering expertise and realistic environmental needs. They constantly catered to the idyllic fantasies of the “artsy youth” (wenqing), only to find themselves in a bind. After trapping society in a corner, the DPP government then tells the people: “Oh, it’s all your fault; time to weather the storm together, stop complaining.”
Some DPP officials even have the shamelessness to say, “Being anti-nuclear has nothing to do with not using air conditioning.”
Listen, high-ranking official, your logic is seriously flawed. We aren’t in kindergarten; at least show some growth in your IQ!! Not using air conditioning might arguably be unrelated to nuclear power, but your failure to propose an effective energy solution makes the relationship very clear. You can’t just skip nuclear power and expect your air conditioner to only use energy from your preferred power plants. Do you think this is grocery shopping? You might as well just “generate power with love.”
Just like today, because the Hoping plant is temporarily offline, the Executive Yuan immediately issued orders to all public offices nationwide, stating they must restrict electricity between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM, even threatening to use performance reviews as leverage. And you still say using air conditioning has nothing to do with nuclear power??
Even Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je, hearing this stupid policy from the Executive Yuan, led the charge: “Where do you expect everyone to hide??”
And those frontline civil servants—whose pensions you’ve cut, whose salaries you won’t raise, who never get the good news but are always first in line for the bad—are cursing nationwide. A civil servant from Taichung, surnamed Yang, fumed: “Has the central leadership become brain-dead from the heat?”
Even citizens visiting government offices for business are constantly wiping sweat, questioning if this actually saves any electricity.
No, the government making things difficult for public offices and visiting citizens is purely a “feel-good” exercise. They just want to capture news headlines and let everyone know they are “doing something.”
Even if that “something” is stupid.
From ordinary citizens to civil servants, and even experts and scholars, people are speaking up, saying this only endangers health for an actual energy-saving benefit of less than 0.01%. Yet the DPP and Tsai Ing-wen government remain deaf to it all. This kind of arrogance, contrasted with the “humility” Tsai shouted about when elected, makes one wonder if this government developed some sort of psychoneurosis during the eight years of Ma Ying-jeou’s administration just for the sake of winning the election!?