Environmental Plan Long on Ambition, Short on Details

Prime Minister to be, Hatoyama Yukio today again mentioned his ‘Hatoyama Initiative’ to be detailed at the UN later this month, which includes ambitious targets for environmental reform, including cuts in ‘emissions’ of 25% from 1990 levels by 2020. This is the same target that was included in the DPJ’s Bill of June 2008, which focused on global warming countermeasures.

There is so little information in Japan regarding ‘global warming’ and the debates surrounding it, that these measures are likely to be passed and hailed by most in the media and even most Japanese people. Certainly everyone that I speak to believes the government and media rhetoric on the issue as gospel. And yet, in recent exit polls after the election, the issues of the environment and global warming didn’t even rate as important political issues. While DPJ environmental policies were markedly stronger than those of the LDP, there simply wasn’t a groundswell of people that were interested in that as a major issue.

In an Asahi poll taken just a month before the election, adults were asked what policies would be most important to them in determining who they would vote for in the election. 27.6% responded that economic policy was most important, following by 27.3% for pension and welfare reform, 22.3% for cutting waste in government spending, 8.7% responded that their highest priority was childcare and education, and 4.7% mentioned foreign affairs and security. The environment didn’t even rate a score, and would presumably be included in ‘Other’, which pulled just 2.2%, or ‘Don’t know’, which had 3.3% of respondents.

I am certainly not against improving and caring for the environment, and nor do I have anything against aiming to improve energy efficiency and to develop technologies that can provide more energy in a renewable way. In fact, I’m all for it. That is certainly the way of the future, just as surely as steam power was the way of the future for those who got around on horseback, and the oil and gas economy developed from there. For decades nuclear power has been taking a foothold too, as a replacement for fossil fuels, but Japan and other countries are still reluctant to move wholeheartedly to this alternative energy that is ready to go, in spite of the doomsday scenarios that are spouted by some if we do nothing.

I find myself squarely in the room with guys like Bjorn Lundgren, who argues that while there may be some damage done to the earth by virtue of man’s activities (the scope of which and the extent to which this can be reversed still being up to massive debate amongst scientists), there is nothing seriously to be gained by mandating shifts that the market is not ready for. He argues that the billions and billions of dollars that are earmarked for spending on compliance with arbitrary political environmental goals that may not even have any effect could be far more effectively used for the eradication of disease and hunger in the third world. I agree wholeheartedly.

The biggest problem I have with the snippets of the DPJ plan (which I will read in full when it is announced), is that it will have a disasterous effect on the economy, at a time when the Japanese people (and others around the world) are relying on their governments to help free the system up so that they can find jobs and grow the economy. This is no time for the imposition of arbitrary taxes and charges on production. It is certainly no time to mandate expensive energy options, or to impose a tax on carbon emissions, which was mentioned as part of the DPJ manifesto. Such a tax would be a disaster, and yet it seems clear that Japan is determined to bumble on into the face of such a disaster without so much as a debate about the issues involved…

The DPJ manifesto which was released prior to the election had explicit costings and budgets for all of their policies from education to highway policy. But I noticed at the time that it was missing any details at all about the expected costs of its environmental plans. Either they don’t know the costs, or they are so high that they simply couldn’t be included for political expediency. As I said at the beginning, I am all for research and development of new energy technologies, and I would be for the government doing all it can to open up resources in the market place for this kind of development. It is clear to me that Japan is well placed to be a leader in this kind of technology, and renewable energy technologies have the potential to make Japan a dominant economic force again. But they need to drive this with the government getting out of the way and allowing private innovation and ideas to flourish. Government mandates and taxes will only muddy the waters and make the transition more difficult. And its highly debateable, and I would even say dubious, especially in light of policies from other major industrial countries, whether deep cuts in Japan would have any effect whatsoever.