This paper discusses prescriptions addressing energy and global environmental problems, considering the three factors of policy, technology, and market.

This paper reviews my resent research on economic analysis of waste management, focusing on reduction of social costs. The paper clarifies that industrial waste taxation does not significantly decrease the amount of waste disposed of in landfills, while unit-based pricing system for solid waste services decreases the amount incinerated, dumped, and the generation of municipal solid waste. The paper examines public preferences when choosing a siting plan for a landfill and estimates the external costs of landfill siting. The results of this analysis clearly show that the residents evaluate accepting waste originating from outside their community quite negatively, especially industrial waste. In addition, the paper indicates that providing the residents with more information and augmenting communication between local officials and the residents can mitigate public anxiety while compensation does not necessarily mitigate it. Based on this review, I discuss the issue of economic approach concerning waste policy, and the applicability of environmental valuation methods to siting of waste disposal facilities.

Despite the possibility that problems concerning business administration and organization can be relevant to the effects of the environmental management system of an organization, few studies have investigated those managerial aspects in evaluating the desirability of a new management system, much less in empirical analyses. This study aims for the integration of organizational management with environmental management in order to fill this void in modeling the firm, and attempts to evaluate the real benefits achieved. Grouping corporate environmental policies for ISO 14001 into substantial strategy and symbolic strategy, this study found that only substantial adopters of ISO 14001 could elicit its real benefit.

Since the Fukushima I nuclear power plant accident in March 2011, many consumers have avoided buying vegetables produced in and around Fukushima prefecture, although government standards regarding radioactive contamination permit only “safe” vegetables to be traded. In this study, we estimated such indirect economic loss on the vegetable market at Tokyo based on past variance of quantity and prices of vegetables (excluding fresh shiitake mushrooms and taranome/aralia sprouts) shipped from six prefectures: Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Chiba, and Saitama. The estimates show that the expectation loss over one year from March 2011 to February 2012 was 20,067 million JPY, 14.1% of the total value of sales of vegetables from the six prefectures.

Feed in tariff (FIT) is one of the major instruments for promoting renewable electricity in power market. Electric utility companies are obligated to purchase electricity from renewable power sources for a certain period at a fixed price. Effectiveness of the policy has been intensively evaluated by many EU countries, and the Japanese government started to examine the potential of FIT systems in Japan in November 2009. In this paper, the regular FIT system for the Japanese environment is modeled and yearly optimal purchase prices, minimizing the social cost to achieve the installation target both for PV and wind power, are derived. In this multi-period optimization, dynamic marginal-cost curves for PV as well as wind power are used to estimate the additional quantity of electricity produced by renewable power sources that becomes available in the power market every year. The marginal-cost curves will be revised every year according to the learning effect of the power systems. The model is assumed to be a state transition process and dynamic programming has been adopted for optimization.

As the Earth has repeated natural selection in its 4.6 biilion-year-history, manufacturing industries and products are also filtered by environmental constraints. Environmental constraints affect not only companies and products but also affect people’s lifestyles.

As environmental constraints get increasingly severe, non-environmentally friendly products will no longer be able to exist, and quality of life will be damaged. In order to predict the “natural selection” of such products and to plan a technological strategy, we have developed a tool called ‘lifestyle hazard map’. The new tool is based on data from our questionnaire survey and existed data. We found the levels of priority about products, and plotted them on the “lifestyle hazard map” using LC-CO₂ data and data from our questionnaire survey. This tool can show, quantitatively and extensively, which products are at a risk of “natural selection” in terms of their environmental burden and market needs. In addition, we found the levels of priority of products for consumers who were conscious of environmental constraints and created another map under the assumption which environmental constraints were impacted significantly.

We compared the lifestyle hazard maps of present situation with the one assuming environmental constraints. As a result, there was no big difference in the shape of the maps between them. After this analysis, we found that consumers cannot change their lifestyles greatly even when they are aware of environmental constraints. Therefore, we cannot decrease the environmental burden greatly by being frugal and saving resources. In order to reduce the environmental burden on people’s lives, it is important that companies should think of new lifestyles and products together, and help people change their lifestyles environmental low burden.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of FIT and RPS at promoting renewable energy generation. It is shown that a higher fixed price under FIT always increases renewable energy generation, whereas under RPS a higher quota (proportion of renewable energy generation) does not necessarily increase renewable energy generation; further it may decrease renewable energy generation under a certain condition. When the same policy objective (proportion of renewable energy) is attained under each system, it turns out that FIT results in more renewable energy generation than RPS.

Environmental policy history studies is a newly launched research field that conducts historical analyses of the formulation and implementation of environmental policy. This paper serves as an introduction to this newly emerging area. First, the various currents of historical research on environmental policy are traced and the reasons why the development of environmental policy history as an area of academic inquiry is so necessary are substantiated. Second, the environmental policy history perspective is shown to be a useful tool for shaping the future of environmental policy because it provides a close examination of the realities influencing the environmental policy of the past, and it illuminates the transformation of environmental policy over time. Next, consideration is given to the potential for environmental policy history studies to serve as an intermediary between the rapidly emerging, yet increasingly fragmented, subdisciplines related to environmental policy studies, such as environmental economics, environmental politics, environmental law, and environmental sociology. In addition, the point is made that one aim of the field of environmental policy history in Japan is to revive “kogai” (pollution) research and encourage further development based on this body of work.