How can Japan’s CO2 emissions from electric plants be decreasing?

6 comments

1. I don’t know. Perhaps someone’s been “accidentally” twiddling the stats, like with those other cases.

   Or maybe the output filters have improved, and the emissions are just being kept in boxes until someone figures out what to do with them.

2. I saw the same program and it surprised me as well. But the difference from 2000 was only a few percent (3%? Can’t recall exactly) and from your final wikipedia link it does look like if you remove the renewables portion the remainder would be a few percent lower than the total year 2000 number.

   That plus stricter emissions controls (remember the smell of all the trucks back around 2000?), more efficient cars and hybrids, and overall population decline (there’s about 3million less people here today vs 2000) can probably account for that level of drop.

3. About 20% of Japan’s power is from geothermal, solar, and wind, which is a significant change from 2000. In addition, I think there are still one or two nuclear power plants online with plans to bring more back into service.

4. After 3/11 there was a major drive to cut power usage/increase efficiency. Also last year with the increase of energy, there were additional drives to curb power usage.

   While this is a good thing, with the world moving on from COVID lockdowns, I wonder if the figure will remain or decrease

5. Population decline, increase in renewable power, more efficient appliances and lighting, retrofitting of older fossil plants, a lot of small changes can add up.

   Also Japan didn’t shut down all nuclear power plants for ever, there are [10 plants still in operation accounting for ~7% of the total electrical generation.](https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/+-Japan-37-+.html)

   Edit: [This shows](https://www.fepc.or.jp/english/energy_electricity/history/sw_index_01/index.html) that most of the replacement for nuclear was Natural Gas not coal.

6. The answer is number fudging.

   Germany, for example, only counts Carbon produced by Coal plants when those plants are actively contributing to the grid, which automatically eliminates a good chunk of the emissions *actually* produced.

   Another tactic is saying, “we produced X ammount of Carbon, but we also gave money to the Congo so they’ll produce X ammount less of Carbon, therefore we actually only produced Y ammount of Carbon”. Doing that sort of number fudging is very common, given how it makes a much more favourable number while also needing literally no effort to do.

   ​

   Although, all this said and done, Japan has finally listened to science and experts, and recommitted to Nuclear power, so I’d imagine at least a portion of that Carbon reduction is coming from Nuclear plants starting to spin back up again.