ANALYSIS - Japan Needs Policy Overhaul to Avoid Kyoto Failure
Date: 30-Oct-06
Country: JAPAN
Author: Neil Chatterjee and Ikuko Kao
The world's fifth-biggest polluter has failed to rein in growing industrial or residential emissions through voluntary measures, leaving its emissions up 0.6 percent in the fiscal year to March and 14.1 percent adrift of its Kyoto target to cut.
Together with many European Union countries whose emissions are ballooning, Japan would have to impose much tougher rules on domestic emissions and boost spending for credits to emit from projects overseas on a growing carbon market.
"Japan can meet the target if they implement extremely unpopular mandatory policies, but the question is why they have to when others don't seem to be really serious," said Yonghun Jung of the Asia Pacific Energy Research Centre in Tokyo. "There is neither clear incentive for Japan, nor the time."
An inability to deliver on commitments to the pact signed in Japan's temple city could mean a failure to reduce greenhouse gases, blamed by scientists for global warming and a greater risk of storms, droughts and species loss.
The Japanese government has so far avoided imposing mandatory caps on industrial emissions for fear of hurting competitiveness, unlike the EU, where voluntary measures would likely be ignored.
It is testing a voluntary trading scheme, which saw its first trial trade this month. Firms proposing emissions cuts get government subsidies to invest in energy efficiency. But cuts for this fiscal year are 0.02 percent of Japan's total emissions.
"The scheme is one step to get utilities involved in emissions trading but they have not succeeded -- an actual outcome has not been produced," said Kuniyuki Nishimura, director of global environment research at Mitsubishi Research Institute.
Heavy-emitting utilities have not signed up, though top polluter TEPCO says it will keep buying credits as it tries to meet a voluntary target to cut its power emissions by 20 percent.
Japan's largest business lobby group Nippon Keidanren opposes any mandatory caps or trading, but the voluntary emissions scheme could still pave the way and the government is studying it.
"We're looking at it -- we hope to do it," said Ryota Kondo, deputy director of climate change policy at the Ministry of Environment. "The EU scheme is one type -- we have our own economic culture and we have to think about how."
He said a system with a lax allocation of credits to industry -- as in the EU last year -- would mean other sectors would have to shoulder even more of the burden, and there was debate over whether to include such sectors as aviation and transport.
But analysts say working out a mandatory system will take several years, too slow to meet the 2008 Kyoto start period.
HOMEOWNERS
Japan's industrial emissions are only one part of the problem -- they grew just 0.2 percent in the last fiscal year -- compared with residential emissions which jumped 4.5 percent.
This was pinned on a surge in heating demand for kerosene in the coldest winter for two decades. But there have been no Japanese government moves on reducing oil use for heating other than voluntary pleas on thermostat levels.
Officials say households are the most difficult to regulate.
"They didn't account for all the growth in personal computers," said an official at Mitsubishi Corp.
The government still hopes for a 13.4 percent cut in emissions, or the bulk of its excess, to come from domestic greenhouse gases. It is aiming for greater use of energy efficiency, nuclear power, biofuels and public transport.
"We think it is possible -- we have many measures and policies to make an achievable plan," said an official at the Ministry of Environment, who declined to be named, though he admitted lower emissions may be difficult with a growing economy.
Japan's emergence from a decade of economic stagnation makes it less willing to impose curbs even as it raises the risk of higher emissions, analysts say.
Top polluter the United