Japan’s main business lobby will release a report this summer detailing how deeply industry is prepared to cut greenhouse gases by 2020 to stop the government demanding deeper reductions that could drive factories from the country.
Japan’s Democratic Party-led government has pledged to bring greenhouse gases down by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, more than triple the amount suggested by the previous administration, and has proposed a climate bill including a mandatory emissions trading scheme.
“We’re asking each industrial sector to come up with their best available numbers in a bottom-up approach,” Masayuki Sasanouchi, acting chairman of the subcommittee on the global environment from the Nippon Keidanren lobby told Reuters on Monday.
The Japanese parliament is expected to pass the climate bill by July. The bill also includes a green tax system that will come into effect next year, given the dominance by the Democratic Party and its coalition parties. But details of each policy scheme will be crafted later this year.
The lobby is wary of scaring off factories if the kind of volume caps on major emitters in emissions trading systems such as that in operation in the EU are introduced, given Japan’s already efficient economy that emits only half as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as the EU or the United States per unit of economic output.
Nippon Keidanren insists that the new scheme in Japan, the world’s fifth-biggest emitter, allows caps on emissions per unit of production, which it says would encourage companies to invest in renewable energy and energy conservation while still allowing them to increase output.
TOUGH GOAL
Sasanouchi also said the previous government’s minus-8 percent 2020 goal would be tough to meet even with the best available technology.
“We can hardly expect any key breakthrough in green technology by 2020. It’s wishful thinking as the period is equal to, for example, two model-change cycles for the auto industry,” said Sasanouchi, also a senior general manager in charge of environmental affairs at Toyota Motor Corp.
The comments showed a stark contrast to a recent environment ministry report suggesting the minus 25-percent 2020 goal can be met with domestic efforts only while the economy will likely be underpinned by green jobs and products.
Nippon Keidanren, whose members include power and steel companies, account for about half of Japanese emissions, have led efforts to put Japan on track to achieve its binding emission cut target under the Kyoto Protocol.
Japanese industrial sectors currently bind themselves to self-pledged goals over Kyoto’s 2008-2012 period, most of which are based on emissions per unit of production.
Sasanouchi said Japan does not have to use the EU’s cap-and-trade scheme as benchmark as the global fight against climate change intensifies. Australia has postponed its emissions trading plan and the U.S. plan faces political difficulties.
