Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Japan aims to put forward an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, after heavily criticizing the existing framework at the time of the Cancún climate summit. It considers that the Protocol is out of date, covering only 30 per cent of the world's emissions and not addressing the issue of how to limit emissions. Developing countries view the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol as a critical commitment by the industrialized nations.

"We are not at all looking backward. We now think we should come up with a Japan proposal," said Ikuro Sugawara of the trade ministry's Industrial Science and Technology Policy And Environment Bureau. We should draw a vision of what the globe should be, he continued, making use of Japan's wisdom on clean-energy technology. Domestic legislation is before the Diet. The goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, as long as other major countries also commit themselves to the target. Three principal measures are proposed to curb greenhouse gas emissions: domestic emissions trading; an environmental tax; and a system to buy electricity from renewable energy sources.

China is pushing ahead of the United States and Europe in the clean energy race, according to Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. "China is going to leave all of us in the dust," she said during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Ernst & Young recently placed China above the United States in its quarterly index of countries most attractive for renewable energy projects. The nation increased spending on low-carbon energy technology by 30 per cent in 2009, Bloomberg New Energy Finance has reported. "You can leapfrog - you don’t have to follow the model of the north," Figueres said. "China is showing this."

New solar energy production methods make it the cheapest and least hazardous energy source, cheaper and safer than nuclear power, according to energy developer mO₃ Power "The generation game has changed so much over the last decade that electricity generated from solar energy will be cheaper than electricity generated from nuclear plants, including the new ones planned to be set up in Britain," said mO₃'s Ken Moss.

Moss draws his conclusion from research published last year by analysts at Duke University in the United States. John Blackburn and Sam Cunningham showed that, in North Carolina, solar power costs had reached the point of "historic crossover" with the nuclear industry. "It can be predicted with some confidence that the same will be true in the United Kingdom by the time that the new nuclear reactors have been built," Moss said. "The cost of generating power from solar photovoltaic systems has steadily fallen over the last ten years while the projected costs of constructing the new nuclear plants have ballooned," he explained.