This article highlights Japan’s continuing efforts to promote zero-emission cars, in this case by supplying a thus-far unsurpassed (if true) amount of subsidy per vehicle to the owners of Toyota Motor’s first hydrogen-powered car, a vehicle that does not release carbon-based pollutant exhaust from its fuel source.
One line in the passage summarizes the aspect of ‘green’ Japan is associated with here perfectly. Thanh Ha Pham notes that “fuel cells are one of the few frontiers where Japan can lead the market”, echoing the rest of the passages’ focus on Japan’s role as a country on the frontier of new technologies that promote the production of ‘green energy’.
The economic aspect looms large over this story, as might be expected. The article notes that the Japanese government had already unveiled plans to generate “1 trillion yen in revenue by 2030”, plans in which the spread of the cars is an important first step. Also, the subsidy is also slated to by far surpass any given so far, with China and California being quoted as examples. But as Moon (1997, in Kalland and Asquith) has noted, green needs to make money as well to catch on, and as Kirby (2011) observed the government often plays a role in affecting popular views on nature – if the subsidies help to sweeten the transition, it is at worst a necessary evil.
One might question if the ‘green’ car is truly so. As much as Waley (2008) and Aldritch (2011) have to say about water and dams, they also make the wider point that attempts to affect nature, whether to control or live with it, have wide-ranging side effects that are hard to track.
Similarly, one wonders if the processes required to create cost-efficient car parts and to make the money used for subsidies are themselves ‘green’ in the same sense, or indeed any sense of the word at all. However, the fact that they may not be may yet be another necessary evil. Un-green processes are still firmly entrenched in the world’s production infrastructure. Even supposedly green technologies like solar panels are implicated by the toxic by-products of their construction.
The zero-emission vehicle is not free of this problem, but it reduces it in the long term. Well regulated it is a step in the right direction, and the more steps taken that-a-ways, the better.
———-
Bibliography:
Aldrich, D. (2008). Site fights. 1st ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp.95-118.
Asquith, P. and Kalland, A. (1997). Japanese images of nature. 1st ed. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, pp.221-235.
Kirby, P. (2011). Troubled natures. 1st ed. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, pp.69-84.
Waley, P. and Aberg, E. (2011). Finding space for flowing water in Japan’s densely populated landscapes. Environment and Planning A: international journal of urban and regional research, 43(10), pp.2321–2336.