Japan’s new prime minister Yoshihide Suga is talking tough on climate change. Suga has promised that Japan will become carbon neutral by 2050, a step up from the previous commitment of an 80 per cent cut in emissions. But is this all a load of bluster?

While a certain opacity is expected in formal Japanese (a famous anecdote has a journalist having his copy returned with the instruction ‘Could you make it a little more vague?’) Suga was exceptionally unspecific in his so-called climate commitment.