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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
An important and little noted component of Abenomics, Japan's information and communications technology (ICT) growth strategy propounded on June 14 2013, ostensibly aims at the evolution of a new model of efficient, resilient and green urban and rural infrastructures. General Electric's leadership in applying ICT, or the “Industrial Internet,” to its power systems shows that what you can monitor, you can manage, and that it is possible to realize significant efficiencies as well as innovate other capacities such as predictivity. Together with domestic businesses, Japan's central agencies, big local governments, and the Abe regime's regulatory and fiscal initiatives have been working to deploy cutting- edge innovation in a swath of smart city initiatives as well as special zones. Although some observers deride these initiatives as comparable to failed technopolis policies of the 1980s, Japan's initiatives may help us address the very real 21st century challenges of expensive energy, climate change, and the sobering “death” of stationarity (wherein past hydrologic and other data can no longer be used to predict the future). This latter is of deep concern to planners of water, power and other crucial infrastructures, which represent trillions of dollars of investment annually. The issues take on added urgency in light of climate denial whose effect has been to conceal the scale of the crisis from the academic community and attentive public. The loss of stationarity means we are essentially in uncharted waters concerning the stressors that our water, power, transportation, and other urban infrastructures need to be resilient against now and over time. The question is whether Abenomics can deal with the death of stationarity and help answer our urgent collective need for sustainability.
1 On Japan's ICT strategy as well as GE's “Industrial Internet,” see Andrew DeWit “Data Will Change ICT,” But Will it Change the Abe Regime?, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 41, No. 4, October 14, 2013.
2 See P.C.D. Milly et al., “Stationarity is Dead: Whither Water Management?” Science, February 1, 2008.
3 A brief account of the tendentious claims of a “warming hiatus” is found in Douglas Fischer, “How climate scientists got Swift-boated,” The Daily Climate, September 27, 2013.
4 See Axel Bojanowski, Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter “Warming Plateau? Climatologists Face Inconvenient Truth,” Spiegel Online, September 23, 2013.
5 See, for example, Steven F Hayward, “Pay No Attention to the Bad Data: Behind the curtain at the IPCC,” The Weekly Standard, Vol 19, No 6, October 14, 2013.
6 See Joe Romm, “New York Times Widely Criticized for Dismantling Its Environmental Desk, Eliminating Editorial Positions,” Climate Progress, January 13, 2013.
7 “Global Climate Risk Index 2013,” German Watch, November 2012.
8 On the composition of Alliance Development Works, see their organizational overview here.
9 The United Nations University's Institute for Environment and Human Security has its own “Expert Working Group on Measuring Vulnerability”
10 The Nature Conservatory was founded in 1951, and is primarily a science-driven (employing 550 scientists) “conservation by design” programme that is active in all US states as well as 35 countries. They describe “conservation by design” as “a systematic approach that determines where to work, what to conserve, what strategies we should use and how effective we have been.”
11 Note that the Nature Conservancy was not a party to the 2013 Report. The English version of the Report is slated for publication in October of 2013. The German title is WeltRiskoBericht, 2013, and the report is available at the Alliance Development Works/ Bundnis Entwichlung Hilft's website.
12 See the SERDP's introduction here. On the, see Andrew DeWit, “The US Military, Green Energy, and the SPIDERS at Pearl Harbor,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 11, Issue 9, No. 5, March 4, 2013.
13 As of this writing, the US 2013 National Climate Assessment is in the revisions stage and slate for publication in early 2014.
14 The figure is from page 6 in “Global Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States National Climate Assessment,” NOAA Technical Report OAR CPO-1, December 6, 2012.
15 On this omission, see the UN Environmental Programme's (UNEP) call for the IPCC to “consider preparing a special assessment report on how CO2 and methane emissions from thawing permafrost would influence global climate to support climate change policy discussions and treaty negotiations. All climate projections in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, due for release in 2013-14, are likely to be biased on the low side relative to global temperature because the models did not include the permafrost carbon feedback.” The UNEP warn that the failure to include this source of greenhouse gas emissions may lead to overshoot of the globally agreed 2C limit on warming, and that nations with significant permafrost (especially Russia, Canada, China and the US) risk being unprepared for the effect of permafrost degradation on critical infrastructure. The report is “Policy Implications of Warming Permafrost,” (lead author: Kevin Schaefer) UNEP, November 2012.
16 On the IPCC reporting process and omitted feedback effects, see the concise article by Australian National University Earth and paleo- climate scientist Andrew Glikson, “IPCC climate trends: blueprints for tipping points in Earth's climate,” September 29, 2013.
17 The World Bank's 2010 study on “Climate Risks and Adaptation in Asian Coastal Megacities: A Synthesis Report” notes that 13 of the world's 20 largest cities lie of the oceanic coast, and nearly a third of the global population is within 160 kilometres of a coast. The report is available here.
18 On the estimates, see “Urban population growth,” World Health Organization, 2013.
19 From an e-mail communication with Brian Stone. Note also that Tokyo's heat island problem is so intense that specialists are already concerned about the health of athletes and spectators at the 2020 Olympics. See “Tokyo heat raises worries for athletes and spectators at 2020 Olympics,” Mainichi Shinbun, September 23, 2013.
20 See Brian Stone Jr. The City and the Coming Climate, Cambridge University Press, 2012: pp. 80-1.
21 See Camilo Mora, et al. “The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability,” Nature 502, October 10, 2013.
22 See “Ocean Stratification” in the excellent lecture notes on “The Climate System” by Columbia and Barnard university professors Peter Schlosser, Stephanie Pfirman, Mingfang Ting, and Jason Smerdon.
23 The calculation in terms of Hiroshima bombs is in John A Chruch, et al “Revisiting the Earth's sea-level and energy budgets from 1961 to 2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 38, L18601, 2011.
24 The orginal data are available at “Climate Change 2007: Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis,” IPCC, 2007.
25 See “Wave Energy,” Ocean Energy Council.
26 See Dana Nuccitelli, “In Hot Water: Global Warming Has Accelerated in the Past 15 Years, New Study of Oceans Confirms,” March 25, 2013.
27 One indicator of how urgent such assessments are is seen in the draft version of the US 2013 National Climate Assessment. The assessment's chapter 29 lists research goals, and prioritizes - as “Research Goal 1” - “understanding the role of feedbacks, thresholds, extreme events, and abrupt changes that may disrupt natural and socioeconomic systems, as well as the implications of more gradual changes and also the degree and effectiveness of response actions.” See p. 1035 NCADAC Draft.
28 See Pilita Clark, “Catastrophe models give insurers insight into disasters,” Financial Times, September 30, 2013.
29 See SERDP, “Climate Change and Impacts of Sea-Level Rise,” no date.
30 An overview of the study is at Bjorn Carey, “Climate change on pace to occur 10 times faster than any change recorded in past 65 million years, Stanford scientists say,” Stanford Report, August 1, 2013. For the research itself, see Noah S Diffenbaugh and Christopher B Field, “Changes in Ecologically Critical Terrestrial Climate Conditions,” Science, August 2013.
31 The best analysis of the denialist game plan and campaign is Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, London Bloomsbury, 2010.
32 On the role of cities, see the detailed and well-designed visual presentation from the C-40 cities “Global Leadership on Climate Change” group. The Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) is also focused on the threat to the Asian region.
33 PCD Milly, Julio Betancourt, Malin Falkenmark, Robert M. Hirsch, Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, Ronald J. Stouffer, “Stationarity Is Dead: Whither Water Management?” Science, February 1, 2008.
34 “Water and Climate Change Adaptation: Policies to Navigate Uncharted Waters,” OECD, September 2, 2013.
35 John Metcalfe, “Newly Unflooded New York Subway Still Looking Pretty Horrible,” The Atlantic Cities, November 12, 2012.
36 See Hrvoje Hranjski, “Floods cover 60 percent of Metro Manila,” PhilStar, August 20, 2013.
37 Skewed incentives in insurance regimes compound willful blindness about climate change, leading to such absurd and grossly irresponsible outcomes as rebuilding the Jersey Shore as it was prior to the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. See Scott Gurian, “In Rush to Restore the Shore, is NJ [New Jersey] Failing to Plan for Next Superstorm?” NJSpotlight, July 22, 2013.
38 Diego J Rodriguez, Anna Delgado, Pat DeLaquil and Antonio Sohns, “Thirst Energy,” Water Partnership Program, World Bank, June 2013.
39 Alex Morales, “Water Scarcity Threatens Energy Plans From US to China,” Bloomberg News, November 12, 2012.
40 General Electric has built 270 gas turbines, 70 steam turbines, 40 gasification turbines, and well over 1000 wind turbines in China. The company's “China Technology Center” in Shanghai is one of GE's four top global research centres. See “China,” General Electric, Energy, 2013.
41 Coco Liu, “Water Demands of Coal-Fired Power Drying Up Northern China,” Scientific American, March 25, 2013.
42 “U.S. Energy Sector Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and Extreme Weather,” US Department of Energy, July 16, 2013.
43 See Michael Kintner-Meyer and Ian Kraucunas, “The Growing Footprint of Climate Change,” Public Utilities Fortnightly, July 2013.
44 On Koizimi's fact-finding mission and subsequent interventions, see Suzuki Tsuyoshi “Koizumi's call for nuclear-free Japan raises speculation about his intent,” Asahi Shimbun, October 2, 2013.
45 On this, see (in Japanese) “Let's Go for New Nuclear Build: METI Holds Meeting on the Energy Basic Plan,” Nikkei Shimbun, October 16, 2013.
46 The countries are Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
47 On this and related matters, see Andrew DeWit, “Abenomics and Energy Efficiency in Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 6, No. 2, February 11, 2013.
48 These facts have even been recognized by the Financial Times. See Pilita Clark, “Ibderola chief sees coal losing out to gas and renewable energy,” Financial Times, October 9, 2013.
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