Japanese government is aiming to eliminate gasoline-powered vehicles in the next 15 years, it said yesterday, as it delayed an almost two decades-old target to have at least 30 percent of leadership positions occupied by women by the end of this year.
The “green growth strategy” is meant as an action plan to achieve Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s October pledge to eliminate carbon emissions on a net basis and generate nearly US$2 trillion a year in “green” growth by 2050.
Suga has made environmentally friendly investment a top priority to help revive an economy hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and to bring Japan into line with the EU, China and other economies setting ambitious emissions targets.
The Japanese government is to offer tax incentives and other financial support to companies, targeting ¥90 trillion (US$869 billion) a year in additional economic growth through “green” investment and sales by 2030, and ¥190 trillion by 2050.
A ¥2 trillion fund is to support corporate investment in environmentally friendly technology.
The plan seeks to replace the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles with electric vehicles, including hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles, by the mid-2030s.
To accelerate the spread of electric vehicles, the government is targeting cutting the cost of vehicle batteries by more than half to ¥10,000 or less per kilowatt-hour by 2030.
Separately yesterday, the Japanese government reported that it was “extremely behind” in promoting gender equality.
Lawmakers approved a new five-year plan on gender equality, which says it would make efforts to meet the 30 percent target “at the earliest possible time” during the next decade.
While Japan ranks highly on a range of international indicators, it persistently trails on promoting gender equality, ranking 121 out of 153 nations surveyed in this year’s global gender gap report by the World Economic Forum.
Just 14.8 percent of Japanese leadership positions in politics and business are occupied by women, “lagging extremely behind internationally,” the Japanese Cabinet Office said in the new five-year plan.
The target was set in 2003 by the Cabinet of then-Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi
The Cabinet Office blamed social acceptance of traditional gender roles for the slow progress.
“Overall, society as a whole still leans toward stereotypical gender roles and has unconscious bias,” the office said.
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