NHK reports here (in Japanese) that the Japanese government expects to achieve the Kyoto target of reducing emissions in relation to 1990 by 6% until the end of this year. Thanks to this tweet by Hiro Matsubara for the link.
The government reductions in the last four years have been at a level of 9.2% a year on average, which sounds very good.
However, that looks good only because Japan is paying money for reductions elsewhere to be included in Japan’s target. The actual emissions in the country have gone up as a consequence of shutting down almost the whole nuclear fleet after the Fukushima accident. Emissions have gone up 3.9% last year because of that, reaching 1.37 billion tons.
Clearly, there is a need for a very fast deployment of renewable energy in Japan to turn those numbers around.
