Is Japan’s green transformation investing in the past or future?

Though the onslaught of climate change is worrying, what can we do? People’s day-to-day choices are important, but the scale of the crisis is too large.

We cannot stop global warming with small, incremental actions unless we also change the economic systems that lead to large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. All existing infrastructure that emits carbon dioxide must be decarbonized through a fundamental shift.

Two years ago, the Japanese government put forward the concept of “green transformation,” or GX — mirroring the term digital transformation, or DX, which describes another sweeping state-led program. As detailed by the government’s basic policy, GX is a strategy to “transform our entire industrial and social structures centering around fossil energy sources … into ones based on clean energy.”