Japan, US pledge ‘new era’ in fight against climate change

US President Barack Obama and Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama yesterday agreed to work together in combating climate change, at a meeting ahead of a key UN summit in Copenhagen next month.
Obama and Hatoyama said they “aspire to reduce” each nation’s greenhouse emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and to seek a global cut of 50 percent by then, matching a goal set by the Group of Eight rich nations.
As Obama visited Japan on his Asia tour, the leaders in a joint statement “strongly affirmed their commitment to continuing to work together to usher in a new era in the global fight against climate change.”
“The two leaders also reaffirmed that shifting to low-carbon growth is indispensable to the health of our planet and will play a central role in reviewing the global economy,” the statement says.
In a separate joint statement, they said they would expand cooperation in several areas of “clean energy technologies,” including the underground storage of carbon dioxide and in nuclear energy.
“It is vital that we achieve a successful outcome” at the Copenhagen summit, they say in the statement on climate change. “The United States and Japan are determined to engage themselves at all levels to secure this goal.”
Hatoyama, who took power in September, has pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s number two economy by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.
He will present the target at talks in Copenhagen next month aimed at agreeing a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.
The new target is far more ambitious than the eight-percent reduction advocated by the former conservative and pro-business government of prime minister Taro Aso, which was ousted in a landslide in August.
Hatoyama has said Tokyo would ask other major greenhouse gas emitters to also set tough targets on emissions blamed for raising global temperatures.