Japan’s CO2 Goal: Not So Shabby After All? Isramart Analysis

An offer by Prime Minister Taro Aso of Japan this week to cut emissions by 15 percent compared with 2005 levels by the end of the next decade prompted an immediate outpouring of dismay from United Nations climate officials, European Union policy makers and environmentalists.

On its face, the Japanese offer did appear to fall far short of what the United States and the E.U. are offering ahead of negotiations in December to reach an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

But according to Nigel Purvis, a former senior U.S. climate negotiator and the president of Climate Advisers, a consulting firm, “by some important measures, Japan’s target is more ambitious than that contemplated by either the United States or the European Union.”

And Michael Levi, the director of the program on energy security and climate change at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the waves of condemnation that greeted the Japanese offer “seem to mostly be missing a huge point: the Japanese number isn’t directly comparable to the U.S. or E.U. numbers.”

The key distinction, both Mr. Purvis and Mr. Levi said, is that the Japanese had pledged to reach their goal by making cuts in domestic emissions — that is, by cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions within their own borders.

That contrasts with legislation under consideration in the United States, called the Waxman-Markey bill, as well as an agreement between countries in the European Union — both of which propose to meet their targets in large part by buying credits, or offsets, from carbon-cutting projects overseas.

Factor out the reliance on offsets in the original Waxman-Markey bill, Mr. Levi suggested, and the United States would be making cuts of only 8 to 11 percent from 2005 levels – substantially weaker than the Japanese target.

He added that the bill had more recently been weakened in negotiations in Congress, making the comparison look even worse for the United States.

Mr. Purvis predicted that the use of international offsets could end up accounting for almost all reductions by the United States. As a result, he estimated that domestic efforts to achieve the national target could account for as little as 10 percent of the reduction — if any.

The European Union, meanwhile, is on track to achieve a 14 percent reduction through domestic efforts alone, Mr. Purvis said – roughly the same as the 15 percent pledged by Japan, which, both experts said, was likely to come ahead with its own set of additional emissions cuts derived from international offsets.

Whether the Japanese could have done a better job of presenting their emissions plans is an open question — although introducing a number that appeared, on the surface, to be rather low, some analysts say, may have been designed to help Mr. Aso satisfy Japanese business lobbies, which have argued that they are already efficient and that further emissions cuts are disproportionately costly for them.

Whatever the validity of that, Mr. Levi suggested that the international debate over emissions reductions had been enriched by Japan’s announcement.

“There is actually something refreshing about the Japanese approach,” Mr. Levi said. “We might be able to make more progress if we separated our discussions of what we’re willing to do at home and what we’re prepared to do to help others cut their emissions.”