Tokyo, Japan: Japan is at risk of undermining its own recent commitments on carbon emissions reductions during a confused – and confusing – debate on forthcoming climate legislation, WWF said today.

WWF is calling on a high-level Cabinet Member Committee meeting regarding climate change on Thursday to stick with the already outlined absolute emissions reductions of 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 agreed under the Copenhagen Accord framework, and with the ‘cap and trade’ scheme outlined as a key mechanism for achieving the target.

The climate bill, to be presented to the full cabinet including Prime Minister Hatoyama on Friday, is being criticized by heavy industry labour unions for possible job loss while some government ministries are promoting a carbon intensity framework for emissions reductions.

Intensity-based emissions trading schemes however seriously undermines the environmental integrity of the bill - absolute emissions would increase with production even if intensity-based targets are achieved.

“If the bill includes "intensity-based" emissions trading schemes then it does not consider the emissions cap that the Japanese government has promised to the Japanese people during the elections and to the world following the Copenhagen Accord,” said Naoyuki Yamagishi, WWF-Japan's Head of Climate Change.

“It should have “absolute-based" emissions trading, which is crucial for the scheme to be called “cap and trade” scheme.”

Japanese civil groups are also calling on the government to drop the conditionality clauses in the new bill that threaten to tie Japanese action on climate change to a successful international agreement which includes all the major economies.

“Japan should not send wrong signals by making its action absolutely conditional to an international agreement,” said Yamagishi. “It will not only jeopardize the credibility of the Japanese target internationally but will also slow down domestic actions.”

“The current language in the bill could be interpreted as Japan doing nothing to reduce emissions if there is no comprehensive international agreement.”

Japan's pledge to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 is one of the most ambitious in the world.

Japanese civil society groups are also not wishing to see the climate bill being used as a vehicle for an expansion of nuclear power plants.

They would also like to see feed-tariffs for renewable energy that require power companies to buy all the energy produced from all kinds of sustainable renewable energies and not, as proposed, just surplus power from domestic solar installations.



www.panda.org/media for latest news and media resources

www.wwf.or.jp/activity/climate

About a year ago, nobody had even heard of Kseniya Simonova from the Ukrainian seaside town of Evpatoria. But then in April 2009, eight minutes would change the life of this pretty 24-year-old forever. Simonova entered “Ukraine’s Got Talent,” the franchise TV show also popular in the US, UK and...

This is just a brief summary, please visit Environmental Graffiti to see the full, formatted version of the article

A snail doesn’t really conjure up images of danger and death unless that snail happens to be the cone snail. This is a snail that is like a tank. In place of a gun turret, it has a giant (for its size) hypodermic needle that fires like a harpoon and can kill just about anything. That’s right,...

This is just a brief summary, please visit Environmental Graffiti to see the full, formatted version of the article

In an age when the death penalty has been abolished in most of the developed world, it might seem difficult to believe that barely a century ago executions were not only the norm but were put unashamedly on public display. In the American Old West, capital punishment was, by comparison with today,...

This is just a brief summary, please visit Environmental Graffiti to see the full, formatted version of the article

The Environmental Protection Agency chief fought back on Monday against Senate attempts to challenge the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, saying delaying action would be bad for the economy. President Barack Obama has long said the EPA would take steps to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress failed to pass climate legislation. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate amid opposition from fossil fuel-rich states.

A report in the journal Science says that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) is leaking methane to the atmosphere, in volumes "on par with previous estimates of methane venting from the entire world ocean", writes Nick Sundt in the WWF US climate blog.

The report warns that "remobilisation to the atmosphere of only a small fraction of the methane" held in the ESAS sediments "could trigger abrupt climate warming".

In the report, titled 'Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf', researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks say that the 2 million square kilometer ESAS is now releasing an estimated 7 teragrams of methane (1 teragram = 1.1 million tons) annually. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but is shorter lived.

The leakage is helping to drive average atmospheric methane concentrations in the Arctic up to 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years - with even higher concentrations in the atmosphere directly above the ESAS.

The permafrost of the ESAS has, in the past, served as a barrier impeding the release of methane held there. However, a press release from the National Science Foundation now says that "subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap" and is "showing signs of destabilisation".

Read the full blog post by Nick Sundt on the WWF US Climate Blog.

The Toba super eruption occurred between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago at Lake Toba (present day Indonesia), and it is recognized as one of Earth's largest known eruptions. The related catastrophe theory holds that this super volcanic event plunged the planet into a 6 to 10 year volcanic winter, which resulted in the world's human population being reduced to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution. Some researchers argue that the Toba eruption produced not only a catastrophic volcanic winter but also an additional 1,000 year cooling episode. Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago.

The hanging railway in the western central city of Wuppertal (pronounced Voopahtahl) is the oldest monorail system in the world. Built in 1900, the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn or "floating train" has been continuously operated since 1901, despite two world wars, various accidents and other turbulent...

This is just a brief summary, please visit Environmental Graffiti to see the full, formatted version of the article

The 'innovation gap' for neglected tropical diseases is rapidly growing, say Sandeep P. Kishore and colleagues, but research universities in the United States could help close the gap. Total research funding for diabetes is more than 15 times greater than that for malaria, and more than 100 times that of other diseases such as schistosomiasis. The authors suggest three key steps to making a meaningful impact on neglected disease research.

Salt is precious in poverty-stricken coastal West Africa, but conservation experts say efforts to extract it are laying waste to mangrove swamps, causing erosion and ravaging fish stocks. In Sierra Leone, one of Africa's poorest nations still recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war, lawmakers are preparing a bill to join a seven-nation charter to protect the region's mangrove forests. Conservation group Wetlands International says the initiative is essential for West Africa to save the 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of mangrove swamps it has left, less than a third of the 3 million hectares it started with.