Suga’s net-zero pledge sparks fierce debate

When Yoshihide Suga became prime minister of Japan in September 2020, nobody really knew what his agenda would be. He had promised to continue the policies of his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, but that was about it.

Suga’s first address to parliament was therefore an important occasion. It turned out he had just one big proposal to make and that was a complete surprise: Japan would achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“Aggressive measures to tackle climate change can transform our industrial structure,” Suga declared. “We need to change our way of thinking to see [cutting carbon emissions] as a big source of growth.”

It was a departure from the Abe era — the former prime minister never showed much interest in climate change — and marked an end to the paralysis in Japanese energy policy since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

That accident, when three reactors melted down after a tsunami knocked out their cooling systems, led Japan to take its nuclear plants offline and burn more fossil fuels instead.

But the prime minister was not finished yet. Shortly before a climate summit convened earlier this year by US president Joe Biden, Suga declared an even more ambitious goal: Japan would cut emissions in 2030 by 46 per cent relative to 2013 levels, a shift of 20 percentage points compared with the previous target, to be delivered in less than nine years’ time.

These targets suggest that, after years of caution, Tokyo is finally getting serious about climate change, not least because its mainstay industries — notably, automobiles — fear a drastic loss of market share if Japan keeps burning petrol while the rest of the world shifts to electric vehicles.

Decisions, decisions

Setting targets is one thing, though. Meeting them is quite another. Suga’s new policy has ignited a fierce debate about how Japan will source its energy in 2050, and how the government will induce utility companies to make the shift. A new energy strategy, currently in preparation, is supposed to provide the answers.

“Japan’s carbon-neutral strategy was delayed by one round [because of Fukushima],” says Takeo Kikkawa, a professor at the International University of Japan and a member of the government’s energy council. “But the goal is to return to the global standard.”

The 2030 objective, Kikkawa admits, will be difficult to achieve. “We can’t catch up on that one round of delay in just eight years,” he says. “But for the 2050 carbon neutral target we still have 30 years and we can create a plausible strategy.”

Poor in resources, Japan has been wrestling with its energy strategy for centuries. For electricity generation, the current starting point is a mix of 32 per cent coal, 38 per cent natural gas, 7 per cent oil, 6 per cent nuclear and 17 per cent renewable — much of which comes from large hydroelectric dams.

The mooted energy mix for 2050 is 50-60 per cent renewables, 30-40 per cent nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage, plus 10 per cent from imported hydrogen and ammonia.

If nuclear and hydrogen prove impossible, then renewables and fossil fuels would go to the top of their respective percentage ranges.

Decisions taken now will shape the energy mix for decades, says Yukari Takamura, a professor at the University of Tokyo. “So much infrastructure was constructed around 1970 and it’s almost at the end of its lifespan,” she says. “I think it’s very important for Japan to make wise decisions now, especially when we decide on infrastructure.”

There is, however, no shortage of sceptics as to the viability of the 2030 and 2050 goals. “Japan will make a plan to achieve the 46 per cent target and put that into effect,” says Taishi Sugiyama, research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, a think-tank. “They will seriously try to achieve it, but if the economic burden is too big or the effects on national security are too big, then they’ll have to think again.”

The impact of energy prices on industrial competitiveness with China, plus the need for security of supply in a volatile region, will make it hard to deliver net zero, Sugiyama says.

Japan’s interest in the use of hydrogen (H₂) and ammonia (NH₃) as carbon-free fuels stands out compared with other countries. At present, they are not commercially viable, and almost all the existing supply comes from fossil fuels. But Japan sees them as a business opportunity, as a way to make use of existing fossil fuel infrastructure, and as a means to keep importing some energy from friendly neighbours.

“The big thing there is to be able to use the existing coal infrastructure [to burn ammonia],” says Kikkawa. “The other is methanation [of hydrogen] to use existing gas pipelines. For other Asian countries, Japan’s ammonia path will be useful. In that way, Japan can make a big contribution.”

Time for a carbon tax?

Even when Japan settles on a target energy mix, it will still have to find a way to push utility companies towards it. Japanese industry wants subsidies to develop and adopt green technology but, with an ever rising bill to support the ageing population and public debt at an all-time high after the coronavirus pandemic, it is likely to be disappointed.

Instead, the country is giving serious attention to the once-taboo idea of a carbon tax. “We should work on a carbon price linked to economic growth,” said Suga earlier this year.

What exactly that means is hotly contested, and it could yet turn into an emissions trading scheme of the kind used in Europe and the US. The difference today, says Kikkawa, is that carbon pricing has some business backing: companies such as Sony, the entertainment conglomerate, are under pressure from customers — technology giant Apple, for example — to go carbon-free.

The past year has been a big one for Japan on climate change. However, the country’s broader attitude to concepts such as sustainability is somewhat different from the idealistic environmentalism found in Europe.

Civic duty and the idea of shared responsibility for the local environment are deeply ingrained in Japanese society. “Separating the rubbish or keeping the street clean — I think Japanese people take that more seriously than people in Europe,” says Sugiyama. “Japanese people are used to natural disasters.” But environmentalism and sustainability are usually cast in terms of their benefits to people, rather than to the natural world. “That sense of worry about the environment is relatively mild in Japan,” says Kikkawa.

Suga mainly talks about his net-zero push in exactly this language — as a source of new growth opportunities for Japanese industry, rather than as a duty to the global environment. If the public starts to feel the pain of a carbon price in higher energy bills, the question is whether those hypothetical growth opportunities will be enough.