Speaker:

• Richard Katz (Senior Fellow, Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs and Special Correspondent, Weekly Toyo Keizai)

Moderator:

• Robert Dujarric (ICAS Co-Director)

Overview

It’s easy to feel frustrated about Japan’s climate change policies. It often feels as if the country only makes progress kicking and screaming, that the fossil fuel lobby is in charge, and that the government sets low goals that Japan does not meet. This view, while having much merit, is too one-sided. It ignores all of the economic and political forces that have forced faster change than the fossil lobby desired: from the scrapping of planned new coal plants to the growth of solar power at a pace that the fossil lobby claimed was impossible. Loss of sales overseas has compelled Japan’s automakers to move to Electric Vehicles (EVs) faster than they intended, although too slowly. Big overseas customers say that they will stop buying from suppliers that don’t use renewable electricity by 2030 through 2040. Within a few years, Japan will join the countries where it is cheaper to build and run new solar and onshore wind facilities with storage capacity than it is to run existing coal and gas-fired power plants. When doing the right thing for the environment becomes the profitable thing, that’s a game-changer. Japan is not static; it’s a battleground.

Speaker:

Richard Katz

Senior Fellow, Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs and Special Correspondent, Weekly Toyo Keizai

Richard Katz is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs, as well as a Special Correspondent for Weekly Toyo Keizai. He publishes the Japan Economy Watch blog at https://richardkatz.substack.com/.

His forthcoming book The Contest for Japan’s Economic Future focuses on how to revive entrepreneurship in Japan. It will be published by Oxford University Press in English and will also be published in Japanese. His two previous books were Japan: The System That Soured--The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle (1998) and Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (2003), both of which were also published in Japanese. For 20 years he published a monthly newsletter on Japan called “The Oriental Economist Report.

His essays and opeds have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The International Economy. He’s testified several times to Congressional committees.

Rick taught about Japan’s economy as an adjunct lecturer at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and at New York University. He received his M.A. in Economics from New York University in 1996.