Japan is not seeking an exemption from its Kyoto Protocol pledges to cut greenhouse gases despite the effect on power supplies of last month’s earthquake and tsunami, a government official said yesterday.
Japan remains committed to its pledge to cut emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels over the 2008 to 2012 period, said Takehiro Kano, director of the Climate Change Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He dismissed as “groundless” a report in the Nikkei Shimbun that Tokyo had decided to seek an exemption from its Kyoto obligations and had asked for agreement from other signatories to the protocol.
“We have neither made such a decision nor started negotiations with overseas participants,” Kano said, adding that Japan sufficiently met its emission-cut obligations in the first two years of the five-year Kyoto period.
Penalties for failure by developed countries to meet their Kyoto pledges include requirements to deepen emission cut targets in the future.
“We, Japan as a whole or both private and public sectors, maintain our efforts to achieve the goal,” Kano said in a phone interview.
The earthquake and tsunami on March 11 devastated coastal areas of northeast Japan and knocked out Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant 240km north of Tokyo, triggering radiation leaks and prompting the government to impose new safety measures against a similar disaster.
Other nuclear and thermal power plants also closed because of the quake and tsunami, and TEPCO lost 23 percent of its generating capacity, although some thermal plants have restarted operations. At least four of Dai-ichi’s six reactors will be scrapped.
Japan’s protracted nuclear safety crisis has also cast doubts over its pledge to make ambitious cuts in carbon emissions by the end of the decade, which relied heavily on plans to boost nuclear power generation.
Tokyo has not said explicitly that it will consider backing away from its longer-term target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. However, the government’s revision of energy policy in light of the Fukushima crisis could pave the way for a review of its 2020 emission reduction target.
Underlining the likelihood that Japan was on course to meet the Kyoto emission cut goal on average over the five years to March 2013, the government curbed buying of UN-backed emission offsets from abroad in the past year to one-tenth of the volume it bought a year earlier.
Data on greenhouse gas emissions in the third Kyoto year for Japan between April last year and March this year are to be announced later this year.
The areas covered by TEPCO and the utility in the region worst-hit by the tsunami, Tohoku Electric Power Co, account for 40 percent of the nation’s power consumption.
Tohoku Electric is expected to restart its quake-affected nuclear plant in Miyagi after safety checks, while TEPCO will rely more on power stations using oil and gas, increasing its carbon-dioxide emissions for years to come unless there is a change in the country’s energy policy and related infrastructure for electricity supply.
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