New Japanese prime minister pledges 25% cut in emissions

JAPAN’S next prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has delighted environmental activists but worried business leaders by vowing to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 25% from 1990 levels by 2020.

The target is far more ambitious than the 8% reduction advocated by the outgoing government.

“We welcome new prime minister Hatoyama’s courage,” said World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Japan office chief Takamasa Higuchi. Japan until now “lacked an ambitious attitude because it was largely influenced by an industrial sector that is backward-looking in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

“It is hard to believe,” Nippon Oil chairman Fumiaki Watari said. “I want to ascertain his intention,” he said yesterday while visiting Beijing with a delegation of Japanese business leaders.

“It is nothing but preposterous,” Kobe Steel advisor Koushi Mizukoshi said. “It will undoubtedly run counter to national interests.

“It will become impossible to conduct manufacturing activities at home.”

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that the new target “will be an encouragement for other countries to show a greater level of ambition”.

Greenpeace also called it “a major step forward”.

“This is the first sign of climate leadership we have seen out of any developed country for quite some time – the type of leadership we need to see from [US] President [Barack] Obama,” said Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace International.

He said the target fell short of a 40% cut by 2020 required from industrialised countries as a group and warned that it needed to be a domestic target, not achieved through international offsets.

Outgoing premier Taro Aso’s business-friendly government was criticised for bowing to pressure from Japanese manufacturers who have pushed for a new reduction target of no more than 6%.

Hatoyama, whose centre-left Democratic Party of Japan will take office on September 16, said Tokyo would ask other major greenhouse gas emitters to also set tough targets on emissions blamed for raising global temperatures.

Japan, the world’s second largest economy, will present its goal at talks in Copenhagen in December.