Blog 10: Japan Shelves Plan to Slash Emissions, Citing Fukushima

Japan, among the world’s top polluters, has new goals to address the threats of a changing climate by reducing its current greenhouse gas emissions. However, it has taken major steps backwards from its pledges to reduce its pollution. An estimated 3 percent more greenhouse gases will be released by 2020 than its emissions in 1990. The country relies on nuclear power to provide about 30 percent of its electricity. Due to the 2011 disaster at Fukushima, the governing body shut down nuclear power plants to ease its citizen’s worry over safety. However, the government is now seeking economic growth and has plans to restart the reactors, despite the failure to stay within its emission targets. The leader of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change stated that Japan has made strides in efficiency and renewable power, hopefully making the new targets achievable. Backtracking on emission levels like Japan and Australia are doing could essentially reduce the global efforts previously made by other countries that agreed to reduce its industrial emissions.

Global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions cannot work with only a few of the leading countries that produce nearly 70 percent of emissions (United States, China, Japan, India and Russia) reducing its industrial emissions. It takes a consolidated effort to reduce the global levels of greenhouse gases. This brings up the topic of should there be a global governing body to hold each nation accountable? What does that mean for sovereignty? Also, the idea of developed vs. developing nations and their limitations on emissions. How can the developed nations determine the right and wrong type of industrialization when they are the ones most responsible for the current pollution levels?

Breanna Steinke

4:00PM
11/15/2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/world/asia/japan-shelves-plan-to-slash-emissions-citing-fukushima.html?ref=international-home&_r=0

Blog 4: Watchdog Scolds Operator of Fukushima Plant

            

            A Japanese nuclear power plant, Fukushima Daiichi, is criticized for radioactive pollution leaking into the Pacific Ocean. The Tokyo Electric Power Company was summoned to explain the accident that has interrupted clean up efforts from a meltdown two years ago. The 2011 meltdown, in the same plant, has been considered the second worst nuclear disaster in the world. The most recent leaks have been measured upwards of 80,000 gallons of water laced with radioactive strontium and cesium. Repeated problems could be a result of inefficient efforts from Tepco, whose own advisory group (in a related article, Japan Stepping In to Help Clean Up Atomic Plant by Martin Fackler) reported saying “it brings into question whether Tepco has a plan and is doing all it can to protect the environment and the people”.  Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has ordered the national government to take amore direct role in running the cleanup. This is the same prime minister whose economic revival plan rests on the restarting of many idled nuclear plants. Also, this is the same official that is blamed for insufficiently fortifying the plant before the earthquake and tsunami struck in 2011.

It is suspect that the same prime minister that has already been chastised for insufficient preparation for a natural disaster, that then was responsible for one of the world’s largest nuclear catastrophes, is also leading efforts for the clean up, but also wants to reopen these plants as a pillar for his economic revival. This issue reminded me of our in class discussion on October 3^rd. Professor Sills prompted the class on Interpol and how one of the barriers to having an international legislating body, was national sovereignty. Although I’m not referring to a unit on international crime, I am entertaining the idea of international environmental laws. Treaties have always come up against so much political and governmental debate that progress hardly begins, for example, Kyoto Protocol. I wonder if an environmentally based “Interpol” could overcome the barrier to sovereignty.

Breanna Steinke
Friday, October 4^th 2013
2:00PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/world/asia/fukushima-nuclear-plant-in-japan.html?ref=world&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/world/asia/fukushima-nuclear-plant-radiation-leaks.html