Japan’s most powerful government ministry doesn’t have one of the world’s biggest problems on its radar screen, according to a former top official at the ministry.
"Climate change is a problem that will change the economic system itself,” said Rintaro Tamaki, a former top bureaucrat at the Finance Ministry, which is in charge of the country’s budget and its tax rules. "But no one at the Finance Ministry is really paying attention to it.”
That will have to change if Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s ambitious goals for making the country carbon-neutral by mid-century have any chance of succeeding. Environmentalists have criticized Japan for its low use of renewable energy, along with its financing and building of coal power plants at home and abroad.