One of former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's notable achievements was when, as the chair of the Group of Eight summit this summer, he managed to get the G8 nations to broadly agree on efforts to fight global warming. Although the government has changed, Japan must strive with other countries to overcome individual national interests and create a pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

The G8 leaders agreed to consider and adopt, together with all parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the goal of achieving at least a 50 percent reduction of global emissions by 2050, but they did not mention specific medium-term national targets for 2020 or 2030.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that to minimize the effect of global warming it is indispensable for industrialized nations to slash their emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. It also calls for halving global emissions by 2050 from 2000 levels.

The G8 summiteers met with the leaders of eight other major economies — Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, South Korea and Australia. Although the 16 nations agreed that "deep cuts in global emissions" will be necessary to achieve the UNFCCC's objective, they failed to set any numerical target for emission cuts.

To overcome the differences, developed countries, which emitted a large amount of greenhouse gases in the past, should firmly commit themselves to deep cuts to induce developing countries to join reductions efforts. The UNFCCC parties are to produce a post-Kyoto Protocol pact in Copenhagen in December 2009. Instead of following other countries' initiative, Japan should set an ambitious goal for itself and start taking concrete actions.

Mr. Fukuda suggested that Japan increase its solar power generation capacity 10 times by 2020 and 40 times by 2030. But this should be a part of larger efforts to develop technologies to realize a low-carbon society. Serious efforts should be made to achieve a technological breakthrough that will greatly reduce emissions or eliminate emissions without producing hazardous wastes.