Japanese

"The Kyoto Protocol"

The Kyoto Protocol will go into effect on February 16, 2005 by having been adopted the ratification by the Russia government on November 4. First of all, the Kyoto Protocol is an international framework which imposes a duty of discharge curtailment of the greenhouse gas (substantially CO2) by 2010 upon advanced nations for global warming prevention, which requires ratification of 55 or more nations in advanced nations, and the sum total of the carbon-dioxide emission in 1990 of those nations exceeds 55% of the whole advanced nations. However, since above protocol has not imposed discharge curtailment duty to developing countries, the U.S., which is the greatest discharge country, which occupies 36.2 % of the carbon-dioxide emissions of advanced nations, expressed un-supporting noting that a substantial effect would not be expectable. Therefore it took 7 years to entry into force after adopting an international treaty in 1997. Although Japan is given to being criticized for sucking around the U.S., the fact that Japan has played the leading role in the worldwide measure of the environmental problem, which is the global, outstanding issue, has important implications. Though the amount of discharge of the greenhouse gas to be required to cut down between 2008 and 2012 is 6% of 1990, since the amount of discharge has already increased about 8% in Japan since then, it will be pressed for no less than 14% of curtailment. Although Japanese government is considering of introducing an environmental tax to urge industrial world to take measures, since China, which is the greatest competition partner of Japanese economy, has not assumed discharge curtailment duty, Japanese industry objected that it could disturb competitive power of Japan. However, considering the fact that Japanese companies has shifted the production bases from Japan to developing countries in quest of cheap labor force, and it has become one of the factors to increase CO2 emissions of those countries, it probably be a natural thing that the Japanese industry to take appropriate social responsibility for that. In that sense, for the industries which discharge a lot of CO2, such as the electric power industry and the petrochemical industry, to utilizing "clean development mechanism" which enable those companies to acquire emissions rights as an reward of transferring technologies of cutting down the CO2 emission to developing countries is realistic countermeasure. As each industry has already advanced the measure of adopting the low production process of environmental load, the logistic industry which occupies about 20% of the CO2 emissions of whole Japan, has forwarded the transformation of logistic measure from truck which accounts for the 90% of CO2 emission of whole logistic industry to the mass transportation such as RO/RO ship and railroad to minimize environmental loads, which is called "modal shift". It is certain that the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol serves as a cause, and the relative merits of the measure for an environmental problem will develop into the change and realignment of the industrial structure. (end)