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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
One of Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's first public acts, in September, was to propose a 25% cut in the country's carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, relative to 1990 levels. This forthright declaration from Japan, long a laggard in dealing with climate change, captured world attention in the fraught lead-up to the December 7 to 12 Copenhagen meeting. The Obama people may yet fail to deliver, but unlike the Bushies they won't have a slavish Japan backing them up. Hatoyama's policy announcement has also earned the wrath of Japan's emissions-intensive industries, hitherto largely left to design their own voluntary agreements. They and their allies in the media and academe insist there is no hope for achieving such a cut without ruining the economy.
1 On June 10 of 2009, former PM Aso Taro had formally committed Japan to a 15% cut – versus 2005 emissions levels – by 2020, a target that was effectively a mere 8% cut from 1990 levels, and thus widely ridiculed.
2 The November 2009 edition of “Wedge,” a Japanese-language business magazine carries a “special report” that essentially brands Hatoyama's commitment as economic lunacy. But though the articles in the special are written by such luminaries as former METI bureaucrat (and now senior fellow at the 21st Century Public Policy Institute) Sawa Akihiro, they deploy tendentious economic models and ignore the facts on Germany. A previous and translated anti-Hatoyama piece by Sawa, one that also ignores German successes and other realities, can be found here.
3 The World Future Council which “regards the feed-in tariff as the most effective available policy to increase the deployment of renewable energy,” has a concise summary of feed-in tariffs and their effects here.
4 Japan became a member soon after the US and others announced their intention of joining. Americans should be interested in Mexico's announcement, since Mexico their third major oil supplier, is likely to lose the capacity to export in a few years. Without a robust green-growth sector in Mexico, Americans will not only have no oil from that country, but the prospect of even more chaos extending across their border. Such are the realities in the sunset of the oil age.
5 Link
6 The report is available here.
7 The real target apparently ought to be 350 ppm, according to an increasingly persuasive argument. On the background to the debate see this link.
8 The latter is a technology for removing CO2 from coal combustion and then injecting the trapped gas into underground storage. It is not deployable at present, and may not be until at least 2020. It is also a “fata morgana” according to Helene Pelosse, director general of IRENA (link).
9 For comprehensive figures on renewable energy trends, see this link.
10 In fact, Japan has ample wind and geothermal resources, but lacks robust policy incentives for deployment and further technological advances: link.
11 The open letter is here.
12 Beyond the influence of vested interests, there appears to be a psychology that opposes any sort of change. Note, for example, that in the 1880s the Statue of Liberty was resolutely opposed by many interests in New York, including The New York Times: link.
13 On the alleged health problems, the Chief Medical Officer of Health for the Province of Ontario (Canada) is definitive: beyond anecdotal reports, “there is no scientific evidence, to date, to demonstrate a causal association between wind turbine noise and adverse health effects” (link).
14 Link
15 A press release describing the report as well as how it may be obtained is here.
16 Contrast that figure with a paltry USD 29 billion for renewables over the same period. The report is available here.
17 See Iida Tetsunari, “The Japanese Green New Deal,” in Sekai, May 2009 [in Japanese].
18 Back in the 1990s, the utilities had sought to deflect pressures for a robust feed-in tariff by setting up their own, adopted in 1992, one hemmed in with all kinds of restrictions. On these pressures, see Saijo (2002)
19 METI's own 2009 white paper on energy shows that escalating fuel costs as a driver of higher electricity costs is prominent among consumer's concerns (see the chart 112-2-9)
20 On the German developments, see this link.
21 Link
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