Japan's decision to drastically scale back its target for reducing CO2 emissions is to be welcomed

Japan is joining Australia in the fight against the UN sponsored global warming madness:

Japan's decision to drastically scale back its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions could hurt efforts to craft a global deal to fight climate change, delegates at U.N. talks said Friday.
The new target approved by the Japanese Cabinet calls for reducing emissions by 3.8 percent from their 2005 level by 2020.
The revision was necessary because the earlier goal of a 25 percent reduction from the 1990 level was unrealistic, the chief government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, told reporters in Tokyo.
The new target represents a 3 percent increase over 1990 emissions.
Given Japan's status as the world's third largest economy and fifth largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, the decision to back away from the more ambitious target could be a significant setback for efforts to reach a new global climate agreement in 2015.
The European Union's delegates at the climate talks in Warsaw "expressed disappointment," while U.N. climate chief Christian Figueres summed up the mood by saying there's "regret" over Japan's decision.

It is more and more looking like the European Union is the only "empire" that intends to keep its greenhouse gas reduction targets. Good luck!

Toyota scraps all-electric cars

Japan´s Toyota has learnt the lesson: There is no room for all-electric cars in the foreseeable future: 

Toyota Motor Corp has scrapped plans for widespread sales of a new all-electric minicar, saying it had misread the market and the ability of still-emerging battery technology to meet consumer demands.

Toyota, which had already taken a more conservative view of the market for battery-powered cars than rivals General Motors Co and Nissan Motor Co, said it would only sell about 100 battery-powered eQ vehicles in the United States and Japan in an extremely limited release.

The automaker had announced plans to sell several thousand of the vehicles per year when it unveiled the eQ as an pure-electric variant of its iQ minicar in 2010.

"Two years later, there are many difficulties," Takeshi Uchiyamada, Toyota's vice chairman and the engineer who oversees vehicle development, told reporters on Monday.

By dropping plans for a second electric vehicle in its line-up, Toyota cast more doubt on an alternative to the combustion engine that has been both lauded for its oil-saving potential and criticized for its heavy reliance on government subsidies in key markets like the United States.

"The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge," said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota's development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s.

Read the entire article here

The sooner "Government Motors" (GM) learns the same lesson, the better. Instead both GM, Toyota and other manufacturers should concentrate on developing the only realistic option - cars running on natural gas. 

Fukushima nuclear plant company caught lying in 2002

This report about Fukushima nuclear plant owner TEPCO´s earlier dishonest practices makes sad reading:

THE Japanese owner of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant falsified safety data and "dishonestly" tried to cover up problems there.

Tokyo Electric Power Co injected air into the containment vessel of Fukushima reactor No 1 to artificially “lower the leak rate”. When caught, the company expressed its “sincere apologies for conducting dishonest practices”.
The misconduct came to light in 2002 after whistleblowers working for General Electric, which designed the reactor, complained to the Japanese government. Another GE employee later confessed that he had falsified records of inspections of reactor No1 in 1989 - at the request of TEPCO officials. He also admitted to falsifying other inspection reports, also on request of the client. After that incident TEPCO was forced to shut down 17 reactors, albeit temporarily.

Dale Bridenbaugh, a GE employee who was not the whistleblower, resigned 35 years ago after becoming convinced that the design of the Mark 1 reactor used at Fukushima was seriously flawed. Five of the six reactors were built to that design.
Mr Bridenbaugh told ABC News: “The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant.”
In a document entitled Lessons Learned from the TEPCO Nuclear Power Scandal, released by the company and seen by The Times, TEPCO blamed its “misconduct” in 2002 on its “engineers' overconfidence of their nuclear knowledge”. Their “conservative mentality” had led them to fail to report problems, the company said, resulting in an “inadequate safety culture”.

Japan - solidarity and altruism in adversity

This blog post in The Telegraph has more than 2500 comments:

Why is there no looting in Japan?
The landscape of parts of Japan looks like the aftermath of World War Two; no industrialised country since then has suffered such a death toll. The one tiny, tiny consolation is the extent to which it shows how humanity can rally round in times of adversity, with heroic British rescue teams joining colleagues from the US and elsewhere to fly out.
And solidarity seems especially strong in Japan itself. Perhaps even more impressive than Japan’s technological power is its social strength, with supermarkets cutting prices and vending machine owners giving out free drinks as people work together to survive. Most noticeably of all, there has been no looting, and I’m not the only one curious about this.
This is quite unusual among human cultures, and it’s unlikely it would be the case in Britain. During the 2007 floods in the West Country abandoned cars were broken into and free packs of bottled water were stolen. There was looting in Chile after the earthquake last year – so much so that troops were sent in; in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina saw looting on a shocking scale.
Why do some cultures react to disaster by reverting to everyone for himself, but others – especially the Japanese – display altruism even in adversity?

The end of nuclear power?

At this stage it is, of course, impossible to know what the consequenses of the damaged Japanese nuclear reactors will be. Hopefully there will be no serious radioactive leaks.

However, one consequence, seems likely: there will probably be no nuclear power renaissance in the world - or at least not in Europe.

Japan earthquake - Reuters live coverage

Reuters has a good live coverage page from Japan:

http://live.reuters.com/Event/Japan_earthquake2

Russia plans to send new French built warships to Kuril islands

Russia has announced that it plans to send its soon to be delivered French Mistral helicopter carriers to  the Kuril Islands - the Japanese Northern Territories - which Russia occupies since the end of the Word War II:
Russia announced Friday that it may send one or even two of the high-tech warships it is buying from France to help protect a chain of islands that are being bitterly claimed by Japan.
The statement from Russia's top general is likely to infuriate the Japanese government and further escalate a simmering row that flared during an unprecedented November visit to the Kurils by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Read the entire AFP news article here.

Former Japanese ambassador to France, Kazuo Ogoura, now political science professor at Aoyama Gakuin University questions whether Russia can be a real partner for Japan and the West:

Russia is in danger of becoming an element of concern or a potential source of instability in East Asia.

Nationalism-oriented and authoritarianism-tilted Russian politics is likely to discourage movement in China toward democracy and may even encourage continuation of the dictatorial regime in North Korea. In any event, the latest political developments in Russia make people wonder once again whether Russia can be a real politico-economic partner to Japan, Europe, the United States and other like-minded countries in Asia and the Pacific.

The Russian stance and actions with regard to the Northern Territories is not, in essence, a bilateral issue between Japan and Russia; it is a litmus test of the Russian image and position as recognized by the international community.

Read the entire article in the Japan Times here.

PS
It would be very sad indeed if French arms technology would be used against the interests of a key NATO partner country.

China flexes its muscles despite of talk about peaceful intentions

Chinese leaders visiting Western countries always emphasize the country´s purported peaceful intentions. This article in the Taipei Times shows that China´s recent actions tell a quite different story:

In the year just passed, China loudly, if not rudely, declared its supremacy over the Asia-Pacific region. In March, for instance, it asserted its sovereignty over the South China Sea by declaring it an area of “core national interest” on par with Tibet and Taiwan.
In this way, Beijing simply brushed aside the claims of other regional countries to islands in these waters.
Indeed, a Chinese scientific submarine planted a Chinese flag on the floor of the ocean to announce to all and sundry that it was Chinese waters.
“It [planting the flag] might provoke some countries, but we’ll be all right,” according to Zhao Junhai (趙俊海), a key designer of the submarine.
In any case, he said, “The South China Sea belongs to China. Let’s see who dares to challenge that.”
China, therefore, overrode its own commitment to resolve the sovereignty issue peacefully and through diplomacy with its neighbors. To emphasize Beijing’s seriousness, Chinese ships reportedly seized dozens of Vietnamese fishing boats and arrested their crews.
Months later, in September, China threatened Japan with reprisals when the Japanese coast guard arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing trawler after it collided with two Japanese patrol boats around the Senkaku Islands, administered by Tokyo but also claimed by Beijing and Taipei as the Diaoyutai (釣魚台) Islands.
It halted exports of rare earth metals to Japan, crucial for high-end electronics products, and it demanded an apology and compensation that Tokyo refused. However, Japan caved in by releasing the Chinese captain when it had earlier announced that he would be put on trial.
The point is that through these pronouncements, China was announcing to the world that it was the new boss around the region.
China was also furious with the US-South Korean naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, regarding it as an unwarranted intrusion into what it, more or less, regards as its own waters or regional sphere of influence.
In other words, through its actions and words, China is proclaiming its own version of the Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century.

Read the entire article here.

(map by antiqueprints.com - China 1841)