Nikkei just reported briefly (in Japanese) about talks between Japanese Environment minister Nagahama and Mongolian environment minister Sanjaasuren Oyun on the idea of concluding an agreement on green credits. According to the article, the basic idea is for Japan to deliver technology to Mongolia, in exchange for credits on the CO2 emissions avoided by deploying that technology.
A large part of Germany’s CO2 emission reductions comes from the low hanging fruit of bringing the former Eastern Germany industry up to shape. Maybe Japan can do something similar with this kind of agreement.
They want to sign a formal agreement already in December and start operations some time next April. It will be interesting to see if that gets done before the election in Japan scheduled for December 16th.
Any such agreement will of course be welcome news for a large scale renewable project in the Gobi desert.
Related post: Bloomberg Article on Japan-Mongolia Agreement
Update: Here is a picture of the politicians shaking hands.
Lenz Blog 
But in the case of east Germany, that industry existed beforehand, and the result was real CO2 reduction.
Here Japan gives money to Mongolia to help it not increase it’s future CO2 emission, and gets the reward of not having to reduce it’s own anymore !
At the end we pretend to have done something, but we’re back to square one with a level of global CO2 emission that’s still the same, but with Japan claiming to have done it’s part.
The case of the cheap carbon credit that allowed this years most of Europe electricity producers to run coal instead of gas already demonstrated something is not working right in this scheme.
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I still need to look at the details of this scheme, so I can’t at this point say if it is only about reduction of future emissions. I am also not sure if it would be a bad thing to reduce future emissions.
I agree that the European system could work better (it is not ambitious enough), but it does beat having no price on carbon at all.
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