The Japanese government said on Monday that it did not buy any new UN-backed emission credits in the year ended March, as widely expected as it had already bought more than 97 percent of its planned volume by the end of March 2011.
Cumulative buying by the government totalled 97.559 million tonnes for delivery over the Kyoto Protocol’s 2008-2012 period, according to a statement from carbon marketing agency the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
Japan, the world’s fifth-largest emitter of global warming greenhouse gases, is reviewing energy and environment policies in the wake of a radiation crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, triggered by the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.
But Tokyo has maintained its plan to buy a total of 100 million tonnes carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent in UN emission credits to help meet its goal of cutting emissions by 6 percent below 1990 levels on average over the 2008-2012 period.
Big manufacturers in Japan, such as regional power companies and steelmakers, are also major buyers of Kyoto emissions offsets from abroad as each industrial sector has a self-pledged target for reducing emissions over the five-year period.
Many power generators are under growing pressure to buy more Kyoto emissions offsets, although a fall in prices recently failed to inspire buying in the sector amid uncertainty over government policy, traders said.
New safety guidelines imposed after the Fukushima crisis have kept all nuclear reactors already shut for routine maintenance from restarting, resulting in a jump in the sector’s usage of costlier and more polluting oil and gas, and forcing nine out of the 10 regional utilities to forecast a fall into the red for 2011/12.
Tokyo Electric has said it wants to review its self-pledged emissions reduction target, but other power companies have not done so.
The latest government data shows Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 3.9 percent in 2010/11, the first annual rise since 2007/08, due partly to unusual weather increasing energy consumption.
The data did not take into account the full impact of last year’s earthquake and tsunami, or the Fukushima atomic crisis.
