2019/09/24 22:27、SSJ-Forum Moderator <ssjmod@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp>のメール:

From: Peter Cave <Peter.Cave@manchester.ac.uk>

In Japan, on the other hand, a country of 126 million people,

severely affected by the climate crisis in all sorts of ways, including more frequent and more powerful typhoons (one just this month) and heavy rain resulting in disastrous floods last year, very little seems to be happening. When I look at the Asahi Shinbun (Japanese) website, there does not seem to be any mention of climate strikes, even overseas. The same goes for the NHK top page.

First, congratulations for starting such a timely debate.

Second, hate to be pedantic, but a quick Google search shows the Japanese media (from the Asahi to the Sankei) have been running "climate strike" items for months.

Just to continue the Japan-Australia comparison, both countries are

liberal democracies with a highly educated population, impressive universities and scientists, and a free press, and both are being significantly affected by the climate crisis. So why the huge difference? It's not as if people in Japan are completely unaware of the issues. The term 'global warming' has been current for decades, and ordinary people I know in Japan seem quite happy to acknowledge climate change.

I would also like to ask a related question about Japanese politics.

I have not been following politics in Japan closely for a while (aside from watching the news for the seven months I was in Japan during 2018), but my impression is that green issues hardly feature in Japanese politics.

Indeed, an interesting question. A lot of the back-and-forth on this thread seems to equate green with solar panels and other variable renewables (like wind). And to be sure, over 21% of Australian households have solar panels versus 8.3% in Japan (as of Oct 2018), and Japan's percentage is only expected rise to 9.7% by 2030.

Yet the latest comprehensive data indicate Australia's power-sector emissions (grams of CO2/kWh) greatly exceed Japan's, and even China's (https://climateanalytics.org/publications/2019/australias-power-supply-brown-and-polluting/).

So perhaps we need to expand the range of metrics we use in assessing what countries are doing, why, and the relative merits of their actions.

In this regard, surely one of the most interesting items about Japan is that its opinion polls routinely show much stronger support for spending on climate adaptation versus mitigation via renewables. This support for disaster resilience has apparently helped policymakers at all levels implement measures that promote adaptation and mitigation simultaneously, something the IPCC stressed long ago.

Japan's melding of adaptation and mitigation is evident, for example, in Kakegawa City (Shizuoka Prefecture), whose local National Resilience plan's FY 2019 spend, continuing from previous years, is roughly 57% green infrastructure (eg, forestry for tsunami/storm-surge resilience).

And Kakegawa is not an isolated case: Japan's MLIT, the Society of Civil Engineers, the Federation of Construction Contractors, and other actors recently produced major reports on green infrastructure's multiple adaptation-mitigation synergies and how those decarbonizing, biodiversity-enhancing, cost-cutting, etc synergies are being realized in Japan.

Another metric worth exploring is Japan's integration of disaster-resilience, decarbonizing transport, energy-efficient infrastructure integration (eg, water systems), and other public goods in compact city planning. Shrinking the spatial footprint of communities helps reduce the community's per-capita material density, cutting energy, fiscal and other costs in addition to alleviating the need to deploy vast quantities of cobalt, nickel, copper, lithium, vanadium, rare earths and the many other environmentally damaging critical materials required for large-scale green energy (whose critical-material densities are far greater, per unit energy output/storage, than for dirty fossil energy, hydro, and nuclear).

Against the backdrop of rapidly diffusing renewable energy and electric vehicles, the near-term outlook for supply/demand balances in these energy-intensive critical materials is so fraught that Japan, the EU, the US and etc have all started large-scale industrial policies to secure them.

Of course, Chinese firms and the state are leagues ahead, as the FT details at length in its July 7 piece on "Congo, child labor and your electric car": https://www.ft.com/content/c6909812-9ce4-11e9-9c06-a4640c9feebb

This is not to say that Japan is doing anywhere near enough. But perhaps Japan's broader initiatives on green deserve more attention for their potential to afford materially-efficient, effective, disaster-resilient and equitable solutions to multiple crises.

Andrew