1. Call it Tom Friedman’s Worst Nightmare: Asia’s already outpacing the United States in clean technology investment by hundreds of billions of dollars — which will mean the U.S. will be importing trillions of dollars in green tech down the road, says a new report. (Hat tip: CleanTechnica.)
2. Call it a Whale’s Worst Nightmare: Japan’s whaling fleet is off to the Southern Ocean for its annual hunt. Dot Earth quotes ocean explorer Sylvia Earle on why eating whale isn’t at all like eating a farm-raised cow, which is what Japanese whaling interests claim.
3. Call it Todd Stern’s Worst Nightmare: Pledges by individual countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions are multiplying like tribbles, reports The New York Times — and UN climate czar Yvo deBoer is now putting pressure on the Obama administration to release its own proposal.
4. Call it a Gearhead’s Worst Nightmare: Star driver Jeff Gordon has joined with the EPA to warn the public that auto painting causes air pollution and degrades human health, reports Ecopolitology.
5. Call it Ungreen Companies’ Worst Nightmare: GoodGuide releases an iPhone app that scans product barcodes and gives you ratings on the product’s healthy, environmental, and social impacts. (62,000 products in the database so far, says CNET’s Health Tech.)

1. The Conservancy’s very own Duncan Marsh was quoted in this Associated Press article about an unfortunate hold-up at the U.N. climate talks happening right now in Barcelona.  Marsh says that further delays could be “tragic,” preventing necessary discussion on emissions targets.
2. It might be toxic to your wallet, or to your emotional and physical well-being, but the city of Las Vegas is the least toxic of 40 major metropolitan areas, reports GreenBiz.  Based on its number of Superfund sites, facilities that release toxic chemicals and air quality ranking, it turns out it’s Atlanta we’ve got to be really worried about.
3. Strange bedfellows Glenn Beck and PETA (yes, really) are ganging up on climate warrior Al Gore, claiming the former VP’s a hypocrite for his meat-eating ways.  Huffington Post Green says new BFFs Beck and PETA prez Ingrid Newkirk called Gore a “baby” and “steakaholic” on Beck’s Fox News show last night.  BURN!
4. German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate, with the goal of encouraging the U.S. to “to fall in line with Europe” on climate change issues and legislation, according to Twilight Earth.  Hey, if Glenn Beck and PETA can team up for a cause, anything’s possible.
5. Treehugger reports that super-high-end fashion houses Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Balenciaga have pledged to significantly reduce their carbon footprints by December 2010 by reducing the amount of paper they use, avoiding fiber from high conservation value forests, and purchasing only recycled or FSC-certified products.  Let’s celebrate by you buying me a Balenciaga handbag!

Naturally we in the Cidade Maravilhosa are delighted to have beaten out the Windy City and snatched the 2016 Olympics from under the nose of the not-quite-glamorous-enough First Couple of the United States: even Obama can’t compete with Copacabana when it comes to wowing Olympic committees.

But now that the cheering has died down along with the hangovers, a sober consideration of what the Olympics will mean for the world’s most interesting and biodiverse urban environment is in order.

You don’t normally associate biodiversity and conservation with cities, but Rio de Janeiro is an exception. Its extraordinary topography means that steep hill slopes and mountainsides are still forested: not the least of the issues associated with the growth of favelas, Rio’s hillside slums, is that their expansion corrodes this green mantle.

Rio’s forests are a remnant of the Atlantic Forest that once covered most of coastal Brazil and stretched as far inland as Paraguay. Only 7 per cent is left, making it much more threatened than the Amazon and even more biodiverse, since the surviving fragments act as refuge areas for species that once had much wider ranges. This makes what survives of the Atlantic Forest extraordinarily important. One of Latin America’s oldest national parks, Tijuca National Forest, lies entirely within the city’s boundaries, a natural treasure greater than any of its beaches. What does the Olympics mean to all this? In short, a mixed bag.

There will be big environmental benefits. The thing that first strikes visitors arriving at Rio’s international airport, after the dilapidation of the airport itself, is the stench when you step outside the terminal. This toxic olfactory cocktail comes from the chemical plants and oil refineries that line Guanabara Bay, together with the sewage produced by the 5 million inhabitants of the Zona Norte, where tourists never go but half Rio’s population lives. Gagging on your way into town is an appropriate introduction to the contradictions produced by our glamorous international profile.

With the eyes – and, more to the point, the noses – of the world upon us, something will finally be done: serious sewage treatment and pollution control is coming. Maybe by 2016, for the first time in generations, it will even be possible to swim in the bay. One shudders to think what will happen to the yachting crews otherwise.

But beyond the bay, things are more ambiguous. The coming construction boom will provide alternative employment to the young men in the favelas who would otherwise move into our biggest growth industry after oil: narcotráfico. This boom will damp down violence from criminals and the police (there’s a big overlap between the two). The easy headlines about the risks posed by violence in Rio are misleading: nobody, from the drug lords down, has any interest in choking off the multidimensional bonanza the Olympics promises to be.

And therein lies a problem: after having been stable for 20 years, the city’s population is likely to jump again as the boom attracts migrants from all over Brazil, which means expanding favelas and more human pressure on that precious Atlantic Forest.

This will be most acute in the southern beachside neighbourhoods of Barra, Recreio and Vargem Grande, which were booming for years even before the Olympics. Many of the new sporting facilities in Rio’s bid, including the Olympic village, will be built here. As recently as the 1970s this area was still largely undeveloped, the stupendous beach of Barra fringing an unspoiled expanse of mangroves, coves and headlands ending in Barra da Sepetiba, a scalloped and shifting promontory of dunes and beaches pointing twelve miles into the Atlantic and the glorious (now rapidly overdeveloping) coastline south of Rio.

This oasis of nature so close to a megacity couldn’t last. From the late 1970s, a gigantic real estate boom saw Barra transformed into a depressingly Americanized complex of malls, highways, condominiums and apartment blocks. As the only reasonably flat area with land available anywhere in the city, it was inevitable this area would be earmarked for Olympic development, but the key issue is what impact this will have on the coast’s surprisingly strong zoning and development controls.

Rio’s governments, appalling as they often are, occasionally get some things spectacularly right – the 40% drop in driving deaths since a well-enforced ban on alcohol and driving began last year is a current example. In the late 1990s, in the nick of time, a municipal park called Prainha put the coast immediately south of the real estate boom off limits to developers, preserving the two stunning beaches of Prainha and Grumarí and linking them up to the still pristine coastline around and including Barra da Sepetiba, long preserved by the Brazilian Navy, to whom the promontory belongs. Ironically, a few months before the success of the Olympic bid, the developers had managed to get the zoning laws in Prainha relaxed. Now, with blood already in the water, the level of development is about to spiral. It could well spiral out of control — and if it does, the last piece of properly preserved coastline within the city’s boundaries will go.

Those of us who know and love Rio feel torn. On the one hand, there’s no denying this is a great city with a great talent for spectacle, and it has all the potential to stage a great world event like the Olympics, perhaps more memorably than has ever been done before. But Rio is a memorable place in other, less positive ways. Many local politicians would shock even Tony Soprano, and their corruption and incompetence has mismanaged the city into the ground. Many of its well-known problems are directly traceable to the city’s dreadful politics. With Brazil’s international image on the line, the federal government may have to step in.

The stakes for Rio’s environment are even higher. An image taking a hit is, in the final analysis, a trivial thing –  but once a coast or a forest goes, it almost never comes back. Fingers crossed.

(Image: Prainha, Rio de Janerio, Brazil. Credit: Rodrigo_Soldon/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

What’s more frightening than more Americans getting their news from Jon Stewart than a newspaper? When Jon Stewart says putting giant reflective mirrors into space will slow climate change…and he means it! It’s real scary stuff, kids, so we put it last in this morning’s Coolness to give you a good fright for the weekend! (Like you needed one.)

1. Wind turbines get bad press for killing migrating birds, bats…anything that flies. But a new study reported in CleanTechnica says cats and buildings kill far more…and that climate change poses the biggest threat of extinction to bird species. (Those darn outdoor cats…)
2. Were expectations too high for Copenhagen to begin with? A new study in Nature Reports Climate Change says researchers who study cooperation think “trying to get an effective multi-faceted treaty agreed between 192 nations is a waste of time,” reports Climate Feedback. Ouch! (But bilateral deals are a much more effective first step, says the report…and it seems U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern might now agree, reports The Guardian.)
3. Could reducing air pollution speed up global warming? A new report in Science magazine says some aerosols actually have an atmospheric cooling effect…perhaps akin to a giant antiperspirant. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
4. Nothing is ever easy, is it? Solar farms, it turns out, demand a lot of water for cooling — pitting them smack against water conservation in the perpetually H2O-challenged state of California, says EcoGeek.
5. Jon Stewart endorses geoengineering (you know, like placing reflective mirrors in Earth orbit or seeding clouds) as the most viable solution to climate change, prompted by the arguments of Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner. Problem is, Levitt and Dubner are wrong, say a growing number of people. Treehugger reviews the debate.

(Image credit: jpstanley/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Yes, global warming is a big deal and a big challenge. But sometimes I get so frustrated by conservation and environmental NGO’s for not being able to chew gum and walk at the same time — in other words, for failing to appreciate the real lesson of greenhouse gas emissions.

The real lesson is there is no such thing as succeeding at local conservation (and no such thing as protecting your backyard or local community’s natural heritage) without paying attention to global pollution as a whole – of which greenhouse gases are but a few of many.

The National Academy of Sciences has just released a study of global sources of local pollution that is revealing and compelling in its analysis of the long-range transport of pollutants into and out of the United States.

Do you know what’s landing in your backyard? Try ozone, particulate matter, mercury and persistent organic pollutants that have all traveled halfway around the globe from Asia and North Africa, according to the study.

We also give what we receive — the pollution we produce travels to Europe and Canada. There is haze in the Arctic because of particulate matter “imported” from thousands of miles away, and the western United States has experienced several episodes of dust being dumped on it from Asia.

These pollutants are not a vanity or aesthetic issue — they take a huge toll in human health, affecting especially children and other vulnerable portions of our population:

• Ozone is linked to the rate of child admissions to hospitals for asthma.
• The health impacts of particulate matter may account for millions of deaths worldwide per year.
• Organic pollutants impair hormonal, nervous, immune and reproductive systems.
• And perhaps most insidious of all is mercury — which interferes with the developing nervous systems of human fetuses and young infants.

Meanwhile, mercury and organic pollutants can also wreak havoc on wildlife, with well-documented impacts on fish and birds.

What does conservation have to do with this? Simply put, air pollution is the quintessential issue that links ecosystem health and human health and global land use and conservation. For instance:

• Dust storms can result from poorly managed arid lands.
• Organic pollutants are products of unsustainable agriculture.
• The Nature Conservancy’s own analysis of mercury found it to be a major threat to our conservation goals in northeastern United States.

Conservation has historically and consistently neglected pollution. Look at most conservation science textbooks and you will find long sections on invasive species, on deforestation, on greenhouse gas emissions…but almost nothing on pollution. Of course greenhouse gases are now categorized by the EPA as a pollutant — but that was only recently, and most of the public would not think of greenhouse gas as pollution in the same way mercury is.

The Nature Conservancy did publish last year a report on air pollution and wildlife in the eastern United States. But I do not understand the lack of uproar about pollution on the part of the Conservancy and other conservation NGOs. Pollution is the threat to biodiversity and people that can tie us all together in a common cause. If we purchased 90 percent of all the private land in the United States and set it aside for conservation but did not address these global sources of pollution, it would all be for naught.

I am all for focus — with Copenhagen coming up, it is natural that we talk and talk about emissions reductions. But climate change is simply one symptom of a general failure to think clearly about the costs and benefits of our actions in terms of general human well-being and ecosystem health. And climate change is but one of many threats to conservation that can only be dealt with by international agreements.

Let’s hope that negotiations at Copenhagen and beyond that are aimed at reducing greenhouse gases pave the way for future international cooperation regarding a wide variety of global pollutants.

(Image: Air pollution and power lines in China. Credit: AdamCohn/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. Do you run a company that pollutes, or do you love someone who does? CleanTechnica has 10 ways polluters can benefit from the climate/energy bill’s requirements to cut CO2 emissions. (I like #5: Form a Symbiotic Relationship with Your Opposite.)
2. EcoWorldly is doing a photo tour of the 10 Great Bicycle Cities of the World. Today’s stop: Berlin, where less than one-half of the residents own a car and the city just invested $3.7 in improving its bicycle infrastructure.
3. So sorry to have missed this on Friday — an Ohio University researcher might have found a cheap way to renewably produce hydrogen from fuel for cars…using urine, says The Vine.
4. Will cap-and-trade create lots of green jobs, as its proponents claim? No, says economist John Whitehead at Environmental Economics (who’s a proponent of cap-and-trade, BTW) — while jobs will be created in certain industries, others will be lost as a result of regulation.
5. The greenest city in the United States? How about Gotham, The Big Apple, The City So Nice They Named It Twice? David Owen at Yale Environment 360 says it’s New York — ya wanna make somethin’ of it?

1. The Financial Times (via Treehugger) claims that a new climate treaty is probably not going to happen in Copenhagen at this December’s COP 15, at least according to a top UN climate negotiator.  Well, that’s discouraging, but what does this guy know anyway?  Oh…right.
2. The world’s first underwater cabinet meeting was held in the Maldives last week, during which government officials signed a document calling on all nations to reduce carbon emissions, reports Bright Green Blog.  If the world keeps getting warmer, in a few years, ALL cabinet meetings in the Maldives might be held underwater, which is not nearly as awesome as it sounds.
3. Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, announced that his company’s forecasts suggest that fossil fuels will still fulfill about 80 percent of the world’s energy needs 20 years from now, explaining that “the carbon price could never be set high enough to change some aspects of consumer behavior,” says Green Inc.  Hayward’s not feeling too confident about Copenhagen either, calling it “just one step on what will be a long journey to a lower carbon world.”
4. A National Academies of Science report estimates that each year, the U.S. spends $120 billion a year in health costs as a result of pollution associated with burning fossil fuels.  According to the study, 20,000 Americans die prematurely just from the effects of these pollutants–that’s not even factoring in the impacts of climate change.  (Hat tip:  Yale e360, New York Times.)
5. Finally, some good news!  The 10 sustainable cities and counties behind Green Cities California just launched a website that will teach other communities how to go green, reports GreenBiz.  *insert relieved sigh here*  I love ending on a positive note.

1. What does your beloved pet kitty cat have in common with Florida’s Burmese pythons?  More than you’d think:  The New York Times reports that, according to some wildlife researchers, an urban housecat on the loose could be considered an invasive species.  (Hat tip:  The Vine.)
2. Although it won’t be available for another year, the battle for control over “dot-eco” is heating up, says Green Inc.  Whoever controls the .eco web suffix could make millions in registration fees from groups hoping to do business under the domain.
3. Tailgating:  It’s not just damaging to your liver.  Check out the aftermath of a recent University of Georgia tailgate– bottles, cans…human feces?  C’mon, people!  You’re in COLLEGE!  (Hat tip:  Treehugger.)
4. Grist’s Ask Umbra gives advice to Girl Scouts seeking to kick off an anti-idling campaign at their school.  Did you know that idling is almost always unnecessary, and contrary to popular belief, doesn’t damage your car’s starter?  Now you do…and you’re welcome.
5. Impress your friends with your cutting-edge knowledge of climate change issues!  The Daily Green delivers six new global warming facts.

The really strange cao vit gibbon (see video above) has received a new protective reserve in Vietnam — good thing, too, because there are just 110 left. Read all this morning’s hot green news below:

1. How do monarch butterflies migrate to the same location in Mexico every winter? Through a clock in their antennae, says a new study in Science. (Hat tip: Wired Science.)
2. Can a film change a country’s attitude to climate change? The new movie “The Age of Stupid” (about a man in the future bemoaning why humans didn’t address climate change) has spawned a new movement to cut carbon emissions in the UK that’s really gaining traction in the British government, reports Triple Pundit. (Read more about the 10:10 Campaign.)
3. What’s the new Los Angeles when it comes to greenhouse gas pollution? Denver, says a new study in Environmental Science and Technology, reports The Daily Green. (L.A. came in second. Barcelona, my favorite city, came in last — because everyone there walks everywhere…when they’re not running you down with a scooter.)
4. Two of the strangest (and most endangered) primates around have received new protective reserves in China and Vietnam, reports Mongabay.
5. How can we keep Earth sustainable? Don’t cross nine planetary “boundaries” (such as ocean phosphorus on levels and species extinction rates), says a new study in Nature. Bad news: We’ve crossed three already. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)

1. Adapting to climate change will cost the world at least $100 billion per year by 2030, according to a new estimate by former IPCC co-chair Martin Parry and colleagues, reports Climate Feedback. (That’s twice the estimate the United Nations calculated in 2007.)
2. Check out this camera-trap image of a snow leopard in Afghanistan, courtesy of DotEarth.
3. Good news for sea turtles — the Bahamas has extended full protection to all turtle species in its waters, where five of the world’s seven sea turtle species live, says EcoWorldly.
4. Is that LEED building really green? The New York Times reports that while LEED certifies design and construction, the designation doesn’t extend to the energy-efficient performance of that building. The Vine explains why that’s important.
5. How can burning a gallon of gas in your car result in nearly 20 pounds of CO2 emissions? Treehugger’s Ask Pablo does the math and finds…it adds up.