Twelve years ago, on this day, June 1, 2011, the Japanese Government
“marked the start of the Ministry of the Environment’s Super Cool Biz campaign, with “full-page newspaper ads and photos of ministry workers smiling rather self-consciously at their desks wearing polo shirts and colorful Okinawa kariyushi shirts.” “ [Wikipedia]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 392.3ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Japan, after the 1973 oil shock, had already eaten lots of the low hanging fruit with regards to energy efficiency. Therefore, further reducing carbon emissions was simply not that easy to do. So these sorts of behavioral efforts – I don’t want to call them gimmicks – became more attractive to policymakers. And my (pitifully inadequate) understanding of Japanese culture is that it’s quite interested in public displays of conformity and dressing the part. So wearing short sleeves had been a social faux pas. And, therefore, government campaigns to make it less of a faux pas were kind of necessary.
What I think we can learn from this is that cultures change slowly, usually. And we needed a lot more cultural change to reduce our emissions. We didn’t do that. We are not doing that. We won’t do it. And therefore our culture will change. But not in ways that we are particularly going to like, but those are the consequences of our actions.
What happened next
The Japanese are still wearing short sleeves in the office, I think. See this from 2020..
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.