EDITORIAL: Japan's role in battling global warming

On the morning of one sunny day during the Golden Week holidays, you and your family decide to visit an amusement park.

Just two days ago, you made a trip in your electric vehicle, but the vehicle's battery is already fully recharged using electricity generated by solar panels on the roof of your house, as instructed the previous day by the home energy management system (HEMS).

After your family leaves the house, the solar power generation system comes into full operation. When the entire family is away from home in the electric vehicle, which also serves as a storage battery, electricity consumption is close to zero.

Under such circumstances, most of the electricity generated by the solar panels is fed back into the power grid for sale to electric utilities.

Meanwhile, the regional electric power company starts receiving signals from smart meters installed at many households indicating that the electricity being produced is surpassing consumption. To avoid a power glut, the automatic supply control system starts lowering the output of the company's thermal power plants.

All this could--and should--become part of daily life in a near-future Japan that has transformed itself into a low-carbon society.

This summer, test operations of a Japanese-version smart grid will start at four locations across the nation in a government-supported project. It is a 100-billion-yen ($1.06 billion) undertaking financed jointly by the central and local governments as well as private-sector companies.

The goal is to establish a community-based system that reduces the use of fossil fuels by tapping renewable energy sources and realizes an efficient and stable supply of power while saving energy consumption within the area.

In Yokohama, a project is under way to build a system to adjust electricity supply to changing household demand by using smart meters installed at 24,000 households. The plan also calls for installing a HEMS in 4,000 households to cut their energy consumption.

In Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, a project is being planned to improve energy efficiency and ecological credentials by using plug-in hybrid cars and electric vehicles that can be recharged at home along with a HEMS that can store electricity.

The Kita-Kyushu city government and Kansai Science City in Kyoto Prefecture are planning to carry out their own experiments that are tailored to the regional characteristics.

These experiments represent a first step toward turning Japan into a low-carbon archipelago.

There are some more advanced green projects under way in other parts of the world.

The city of Tianjin, China, has a comprehensive plan to establish more eco-friendly waste recycling and transport systems. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is seeking to build an ultimate green city that relies on solar power and produces no waste nor greenhouse gases.

Such low-carbon cities attract all kinds of cutting-edge green technologies, such as systems to generate electricity by using natural energy sources, storage batteries, smart meters and eco-friendly cars, from all over the world. Businesses in the new low-carbon age will depend on the confluence of green technologies and systems available.

In order to ensure that Japan will be able to ride the surging waves of change that are pushing the world toward a new age, it is necessary to lower the carbon footprint of the nation's industrial structure and social systems through bold and speedy reforms.

Even if a regime change takes place, Japan should remain committed to the policy of promoting efforts toward a low-carbon society. This core principle must be confirmed not just by the government but also by all political parties through a nonpartisan agreement so that relevant investment and development moves in the private sector will pick up speed.

The Diet is considering legislation to set basic principles for promoting efforts to stop harmful climate change.

In addition to the bill presented by the government, the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito have submitted their own bills for such legislation. We hope to hear constructive debate over these proposals at the Diet.

Both the ruling and opposition parties share the same target of reducing Japan's greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from the 1990 level by 2050. The 80-percent reduction is widely seen as necessary to prevent a disastrous impact from climate change by limiting planetary warming within 2 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial levels.

Leaders of the Group of Eight leading countries agreed on the target at their summit last year.

The question is how to move the world toward the target.

The climate bill now going through U.S. Congress contains a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions for each and every year until 2050.

In contrast, Japan has yet to produce any clear and specific plan even for cutting the nation's emissions of heat-trapping gases by 25 percent from the 1990 level by 2020--a key climate policy target the administration of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has pledged to accomplish.

Reducing the carbon footprint of society is not only good for the health of planet Earth, but progress toward a low-carbon future could also enhance efforts to tackle various policy challenges facing the nation, such as job creation, regional development and energy security.

With this in mind, the government should map out a strategy for cutting Japan's emissions of carbon dioxide as an integral part of its economic growth strategy.

Debate on specific emissions targets and policy issues is unlikely to lead to any significant achievement unless it is underpinned by a clear vision for creating a greener future of the nation.

International negotiations for a new framework to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol have bogged down.

The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held late last year in Copenhagen, highlighted bitter discord between industrial and developing countries over the issue of how to stem global warming. Prevailing in the aftermath of the wrangling at the Copenhagen conference is the pessimistic view that a final agreement on a new climate treaty can only be reached at the COP17 in 2011 at the earliest.

Some members of the Japanese business community question whether it would be wise for Japan to lead other countries in taking aggressive steps to curb global warming under such circumstances.

But the fact that international talks are stuck in an impasse makes it all the more important for Japan to demonstrate a strong commitment to moving forward on a low-carbon path and make bold proposals about the post-Kyoto Protocol framework.

At the same time, Japan needs to speed up its own reforms for a low-carbon society and do more to spread internationally the technologies and systems it develops in the process. If many technologies and systems made in Japan become the global standard, the international community will find it hard to ignore Japan's proposals.

Japan became a major economic power through strenuous efforts to catch up with its Western rivals. Now, it is time for Japan to open new pathways to a low-carbon economy on its own and lead the world toward that vision with its technology and ingenuity.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 2