Jul 24, 2020 (yahoo.com) - When Shinjiro Koizumi went to Madrid last December, the golden child of Japanese politics found himself cast as the world’s whipping boy for a collective failure to act on climate change.
Attending the COP25 round of climate talks as Japan’s environment minister, Mr Koizumi — the 39-year-old son of former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi — was met by protesters in Pikachu costumes calling on Japan to stop burning coal, and stop financing new coal plants in developing countries.
Twice during the conference, the Climate Action Network gave Japan its “Fossil of the Day†award. The distinction drew widespread attention back in Tokyo — not least because it clashed so vividly with Mr Koizumi’s reputation as a smooth, young moderniser.
Coal is one of the dirtiest fuels, with coal-fired electricity accounting for about 30 per cent of energy-related carbon emissions worldwide. Building new coal power stations fixes countries on a path of high emissions for decades to come. The COP25 meeting, however, has helped to trigger a rethink in Japan.
“Japan began to rely on coal after the oil shock [in the 1970s],†says Taishi Sugiyama, research director on energy and environment at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo. “Until then, oil was Japan’s main energy source. After that, Japan started to explore all other possibilities.â€
The most promising of those other possibilities was nuclear — until 2011, when a tsunami hit the coast of Tohoku and three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant went into meltdown. The subsequent trauma means most of Japan’s reactors are still switched off.
With nuclear power unavailable, Japan went back to fossil fuels: coal rose from 28 per cent of electricity supply in 2010 to 32 per cent in 2018, even as other countries went in the other direction. Japan’s planned energy mix calls for renewables to increase from 17 per cent of electricity to at least 22 per cent by 2030, allowing coal to fall back to 26 per cent, but even that relies on bringing a lot of nuclear plants back on line.
Mr Sugiyama sees little alternative to continued reliance on coal, because it is cheap and Japan has secure supplies from friendly Australia. Liquid natural gas, the obvious alternative, costs much more. Renewables are not only intermittent, but Japan’s dense population and rugged terrain make wind and solar difficult to deploy at sufficient scale.
