1. What’s more important than reaching a global agreement in Copenhagen?  Scientific American thinks a U.S.-China deal on energy and climate could be just as big.
2. America’s oil capital is trying to green up its image, says Green Inc.  The city of Houston, home to densely packed highways and headquarters of a number of oil companies, plans to roll out an effort to convert 10 city Priuses (Prii?) into plug-in hybrids, and install vehicle charging stations around the metropolitan area.
3. Coca-Cola, the most recognized consumer brand on the planet, will soon start distributing plastic bottles made with up to 30% plant-based material, reports Triple Pundit.  I’m feeling a little less terrible about my Diet Coke addiction today.
4. At this point, the U.S. climate bill could probably use some divine intervention.  Maybe the Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative, a partnership between evangelical leaders and environmental scientists, can convince the Senate to get moving on climate legislation, says the Guardian’s Environment Blog.
5. If that doesn’t work, maybe this new study will change a few minds– the findings indicate that a “robust” climate bill could boost the U.S. economy by about $111 billion by 2020 and could create nearly two million jobs, according to GreenBiz.

What will a successful global climate change agreement look like? That question is only more important to ask in the wake of this weekend’s agreement by President Obama to a plan that will ask world leaders to reach a political agreement at this December’s UN climate talks in Copenhagen, ahead of a more binding agreement some time in 2010.

From a purely scientific perspective, the solution to climate change is straightforward. Burning fossil fuels and clearing forests over the last century have sharply increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to climate change. So, burn less fossil fuel and protect more forests in order to cap and eventually reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to a safer level.

The politics of that solution are much more complicated. Developed countries like the United States need to cut emissions dramatically, since their high emissions are responsible for getting us to this point. Developing countries like India and China need to take some responsibility for the future as their emissions rise and their forests continue to be cleared. For the former, that means breaking bad carbon-intensive habits. For the latter, it means establishing good low-carbon habits from the start.

A successful climate treaty will hinge on agreeing to how much developed and developing countries will reduce their respective greenhouse gas emissions, and also on agreeing how rich countries will help poor countries finance it all. At the same time, those emissions reduction commitments need to add up to enough global reductions to actually keep temperature change under 2 degrees C, the level beyond which impacts are likely to be irreversible and potentially catastrophic.

One reason countries are struggling to agree on emissions reductions going forward is that they have each had very different emission histories and so think they should have different responsibilities for containing future emissions. According to an interactive feature in the Washington Post, the United States has always been and remains a giant emitter of greenhouse gases. China’s surging coal-fired economy is now the single biggest emitter of all.

But China also has a population more than three times that of the United States, meaning that its per capita emissions are still a fraction of those from gluttonous Americans. Meanwhile, some European countries like Germany have already begun a steady but shallow decline in their total and per capita emissions. Missing from these statistics, though, are emissions from deforestation that catapult Indonesia and Brazil into the third and fourth ranks globally.

At the same time that negotiators work to agree on differential emissions commitments and the associated financing, they also need to make sure the emissions reductions add up to successfully stop climate change. According to Climate Interactive’s scoreboard, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by more than 80% by the end of the century to keep temperature change under 2 degrees C. Current pledges would reduce annual global greenhouse gas emissions by about 33%. Additional reductions being suggested could save another 33%. But more will be needed to turn the world onto a safer climate trajectory.

So what could a successful climate change agreement look like? What mix of emissions reductions would be fair for developed and developing countries, and will it be enough to stop climate change? Reductions of 25%-40% by 2020 are frequently suggested, but likely insufficient. Negotiators headed to Copenhagen have a hard job to do. But it is still possible for them to succeed.

You can explore some of these challenges and possibilities for a successful global climate change agreement using Climate Interactive’s C-Learn simulator. It lets you set emissions reduction targets for developed countries like the United States, fast-growing developing countries like China and India, and small developing countries like many in Africa. You can also set goals for reducing emissions from deforestation and sequestering emissions through reforestation. The simulator will then tell you how those targets add up in terms of overall emissions and predicted temperature change.

It may look and feel a bit complicated, but that’s how the real-world challenge is. Give it a try and see what ideas you come up with for how a successful global agreement could keep climate change under 2 degrees C. And then share your ideas here and at Planet Change.

(Image: Traffic at a stoplight in Bangkok. Credit: seasidebear/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.)

Editor’s note: Charles Bedford, the state director for The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, is living and working in China for the next year and will be writing about conservation issues there. Read all his posts.

Who’s going to lead the way for conservation in China? Local grass-roots groups? International NGOs? The government?

Here’s another thought: What about Chinese capitalists?

Wang Zhi speaks softly into the microphone and wears the traditional uniform of the Chinese worker — blue collarless jacket with large buttons, matching pants. He introduces the evening with a history of the organization which he chairs — Society-Entrepreneurs-Ecology (SEE). It is hard to discern in his manner, words or style that he is one of the wealthiest men in China. Over the last 20 years he amassed a fortune through savvy real estate dealings. Three years ago, concerned with China’s environmental conditions and the limits that the country’s polluted air and water, degraded soils and dammed rivers will place on its economy, he joined with over 100 other Chinese tycoons to take action on the environment here.

They created SEE, an unprecedented new form of civil society organization in China. Wang and his friends created this organization in a country in which civil society had been virtually subsumed in government for the last 50 years, where “membership” has long been a concept reserved jealously for the Communist Party. In three years, SEE has forged a new power movement, with non-profit/NGO rules and a personality unique to China.

SEE, quite simply, is a club of like-minded entrepreneurs with a commitment to support the government’s environmental agenda by funding local NGO’s that also embrace that agenda and that are committed to principles of “cooperation” and “win-win” solutions. They have raised and spent millions of dollars. They have grant cycles and annually give out over 70 prestigious (and monetary) awards for good works in the field that meet their criteria. SEE acts like a cross between a foundation and a country club — members pony up a certain amount every year and participate in the grant-making and awards decisions in what can only be describe as a very garrulous democracy.

Tonight, I’m in attendance at this year’s awards meeting, along with China Central Television and reporters from all the national papers — who will later describe the event in glowing terms. Deeper into the evening, Wang Zhi is questioning one of the finalists for this year’s awards when an argument erupts about whether the ballots should be anonymous and who should be in charge of the vote tallying. The room explodes in spirited but smiling argument. After 20 minutes and seven voice- and hand-raising votes and recounts, unanimity appears to have broken out that the ballots will not be counted unless they have the judge’s name and phone number — proto-democracy at work in civil society.

Wang resumes his questioning, which becomes a debate between he and the finalist about whether the methods they used can be characterized as “cooperative” or should be thought of as “independent.” The unspoken subtext is — what should be the appropriate level of engagement with the powers-that-be…namely, the government.

Some of the questioning takes on the character of a venture philanthropy audition. The next contestant gets grilled by the sharp finance minds in the room about the cost/benefits of pollution control equipment in a monosodium glutamate (MSG) factory on the Huai River. After asserting that the benefits of this water-quality-monitoring project far exceed the costs, the potential awardee also claims that his project had only a one-year payback, reduced emissions to 10% of the previous year’s levels, and also literally “saved” the MSG industry in the country by driving the technology changes necessary to bring the industry into compliance.

The claim is verified by a SEE entrepreneur who has visited the site and gotten involved intellectually and financially with the local organization. The entrepreneurs erupt in shouts of approval mixed with disbelief. Mr. Wu, whose diversified holdings include provincial vineyards, leads the questioning about the organization’s financial backing and structure. You can almost hear the checkbooks being pulled out.

SEE has evolved over the years from trying to implement its own projects — such as planting trees in the desert — toward acting as a foundation and discussion group for grassroots conservation. Its governance has evolved as well, from a “vote your amount of contribution” model to more stable processes of decision-making. The group also reached out to The Nature Conservancy to bolster its engagement and fundraising systems as well as partnering to create this extraordinary media event, highlighting the power of grassroots organizing on the environment.

Contrast all this with the way that the Chinese government deals and has dealt with issues such as Falun Gong, Uighur or Tibetan separatist groups or the 1989 student movements and the impression you get is of a set of party elders working behind the scenes on the massive hot water boiler that is modern China, making adjustments to this valve or to that pipe, directing pressure towards social goals and away from disharmonious activities. The management of the economic system seems to happen in this way as well, having allowed the wealthy young entrepreneurs in the room to, as Deng Xiaoping said, “get rich is glorious.”

The evening continues to roll along, changing from pep rally to venture capital pitch-meeting and back to discussions of scoring. The prevailing attitudes are hope, optimism and humour, which serves these entrepreneurs well in this incredible Chinese context — a country with the worst pollution on earth, the world’s most-populated country, its wealthiest country, its poorest country, its fastest-developing country, and mega-biodiverse on top of all that.

The view in the room is of the future, the future of the world, which is happening fast. And these are the new leaders of this world, perhaps the only ones that can save the rest of us.

(Image: First-place award winner at the 2009 SEE Awards ceremony. Credit: Society-Entrepreneurs-Ecology.)

We are headed into Week Two of international climate negotiations here in Bangkok. Progress is slow…but there is some progress. I asked Andrew Deutz, The Nature Conservancy’s director of international government relations, to provide some context on what’s going on…and what it means for a climate-change agreement in Copenhagen this December:

Q: What progress has been made in the first week of these discussions?

Deutz: While the week started out with optimistic and hopeful speeches, buoyed by the international momentum coming out of the UN Climate Week in New York, it’s been challenging to bring that high-level momentum into these negotiations to really break through the major political sticking points.

While there has been some progress on certain aspects of the text, for example reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), the pace is not nearly fast enough to get where we need to be by Copenhagen.

There has also been a lot of talk about the “elephants in the room” – such as what overall emissions reductions targets and financing will come from developed countries, how much common responsibility developing countries should share, and whether the Kyoto Protocol will continue independently or be merged with a new agreement. These political issues are also getting more clearly defined and out on the table, which helps the negotiations move forward in other areas.

Q: What needs to happen in the next week in these negotiations?

Deutz: We are going into Week Two with some consolidated texts and hopefully some energy to find the key areas of convergence that will make up an agreement in Copenhagen. But the elephants in the room could rear their heads at any point and prevent further progress. Parties must continue to look for areas of agreement, move towards reduced texts, and provide a vote of confidence that the elephants will start moving by Copenhagen.

At the same time, it’s important is that everything that has been agreed to date is not lost as parties work to shorten the text. We don’t want to through the baby out with the bathwater. Guiding principles and annexes that capture what has been learned should be retained to support a political agreement — and to facilitate implementation once an agreement is reached.

We should come out of Bangkok with a single consolidated negotiating text or a clear mandate to the chairs to put such a text on the table before we get to Barcelona [the next stop for the negotiations]. If negotiators can get a series of elements in place by Copenhagen – around REDD, adaptation, technology transfer and other areas – it will create a foundation for a political deal to be struck in Copenhagen.

Q: Looking outside the negotiations, what needs to happen in the next months to reach an agreement in Copenhagen?

Deutz: Getting a solid foundation in place for Copenhagen will push ministers and heads of state to focus on the overall level of ambition of the whole agreement, and keep them from blaming the negotiations for not paving the way for a decision.

In particular, leaders need to deliver on a strong emissions reductions targets and a clear commitment for public financing from developed countries. The G20 did not provide substantial guidance on finance, so leaders must quickly find a forum where they can pull a solution together.

And progress in the United States is crucial. The prevailing opinion here is that momentum is slowing for comprehensive climate legislation in the United States being adopted before Copenhagen. Without that, the U.S. will not be able to bring emissions reductions targets or billions of new dollars to the negotiating and those are the twin keys to unlocking the negotiations.

So much of the first week was characterized by delegates reassessing the perspectives of U.S. leadership and recalibrating their expectations for Copenhagen. The best possible adrenaline shot for these negotiations would be for the U.S. Congress to adopt the climate bill.

Q: What can negotiators here do to facilitate an agreement in Copenhagen?

Deutz: Resolving the legal structure and how to merge the two negotiating tracks (one for the Kyoto Protocol and one for Long-term Cooperative Action) is also a crucial step to bring clarity around the level of overall emissions targets:

• Developing countries want to keep the Kyoto Protocol alive because it defines the world into two simple camps — developed and developing countries — with developed countries carrying all the responsibility for emissions reductions.
• Developed countries are keen on the agreement on Long-term Cooperative Action because it opens the door for counting developing countries actions to reduce emissions as part of an overall agreement.

Finding a structure that brings together the commitments from the Kyoto Protocol with efforts undertaken by the U.S., China, India and others would create a global framework that captures efforts from all of the major emitting countries.

(Image: Elephants at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (LWC) in the Laikipia District of Northern Kenya in East Africa. The Conservancy is partnering with LWC to help protect the grasslands and savannas of Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Credit: Josh Knights/TNC)

Editor’s note: Charles Bedford, the state director for The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, is living and working in China for the next year and will be writing about conservation issues there. Read all his posts.

How are U.S. perceptions of China sadly out of date? One example lies in how China’s first national park was created.

China has over 2,500 nature reserves, but had no national parks until a few years ago. So The Nature Conservancy worked with the Yunnan provincial government and the Diqing county governor to create China’s first national park — Potatso (Pudacuo) National Park, a Rocky-Mountain-National-Park-sized swath of land in the north part of the state where the government has invested heavily in a classic U.S. national park infrastructure — roads, tour buses, boardwalks, interpretive programs.

It was a bit of a head scratcher — the landscape looked like Yellowstone and so did the roads, lodges, tour buses, stops and signs. But those in charge spent (borrowed) something north of $100m U.S. on the infrastructure and are generating a very large income stream to pay off the loan. The Conservancy worked with them on the signage, design of infrastructure, land plan, etc. Oh yeah, they designated, designed, constructed, and implemented this new national park from what was basically lightly used high-country grazing land in a little over three years.

Here’s the really interesting thing, though: The Diqing county governor — not the central government — was the driving force behind all of this. He set aside the land, he borrowed the money and oversaw the design of the project, he pushed the idea with the Yunnan provincial authorities, and he made the park happen.

He did it so fast that two government ministries in Beijing are still arguing about to whom the park belongs (even though it is administered and managed by the Diqing county government, others want “credit”) and whether it can really be called a national park. Legend has it that the Diqing governor (akin to a county commissioner in the United States) visited Yellowstone and said something like “this is the place” — then came back to Yunnan and made it happen.

Recently, I and officials for The Nature Conservancy in China were in a room with a lot of Chinese government officials — Yunnan parks and wildlife deputies and secretaries, government think-tank directors, and governors’ advisors. They had convened with the Conservancy to talk about how to advance the idea of national parks throughout China.

The group in the room was trying to figure out how to get the national government to embrace their concept of national parks to promote tourism, nature education, conservation and local economic development. It’s a bit like in the late 1990s in Colorado, when Alamosa County commissioners petitioned then-U.S. Senators Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard to champion a new national park at the Great Sand Dunes.

All this is an interesting illustration about how wrong most of our perceptions of China are. We tend to think this is a place with one authoritarian government where all rules flow from the center, Beijing. Nothing could be further from the truth. And in that mistake lies a lesson for conservation in China.

(Image: Potatso National Park, China. Credit: nOr/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Editor’s note: Charles Bedford, the state director for The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, is living and working in China for the next year and will be writing about conservation issues there for Cool Green Science. Read all his posts.

Everywhere I’ve been outside of the United States in the last few years has a property system that looks like the classic regulated “commons,”or resources that are collectively owned. For example:

• Mongolia’s lands are owned by the “people” (try doing a title search for that).
• China’s land is owned by a variety of government agencies with conflicting mandates, and they are in the midst of their third or fourth land reform, heading toward privatization of some of the “bundles of sticks,” or rights, that make up each parcel of property.
• The forests and seas of Indonesia are owned by the government and sold off to resource extraction companies to raise funds for government’s general operating budgets.

These shared resources, like all commons, begin to fail when too much pressure is placed on them. But what to do about that?

Garrett Hardin’s influential 1968 Science magazine article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” seems more prescient now than ever as I witness the mining of the oceans’ protein, overgrazing of the world’s last great grassland to produce wool for the fashion industry, the degradation of clean air and water, and the destruction of forests that harbor enormous biodiversity, protect the watersheds of people and store more carbon than any of the most wildest sci-fi fantasies about carbon capture.

What resource will we have left to leave our children? The bumper sticker cry of the anti-environmentalist backlash of the 1980s (”Earth first, we’ll mine the other planets later”) is beginning to sound like the collective official policy of the governments of the world — most of whom are not thinking about what they leave future generations, but merely how to get re-elected in four years.

China’s land reform steps have each been toward a more vested property rights system. I am now taking a crash course in this movement, since it will truly determine what the country looks like, what wild nature remains, what ecological systems will stay intact, etc over the next 70 years — which is the length of the leasehold interest being offered in many cases for rural land.

One of the great things about the United States is that we have done a reasonably good job of maintaining biodiversity in a strong private property rights system through tools such as:

• The Endangered Species Act and other regulatory tools,
• Local planning and zoning,
• Government purchase of sensitive lands or conservation easements, and
• Other financial incentives for landowners to maintain the ecological attributes of their land such as wildlife, soils, wetlands, etc, incentives, public land management for species.

We evolved these tools from a base of pure private property rights that relied on tort law (or the ability to sue your neighbor for damages that s/he caused your land) as a way to protect the common good.

In China, the evolution is happening the other way around: Since 1949, land has been held by the government for the common good, and government is now tacking on attributes of private ownership to specific parcels of land. It would be easy to layer on the old English private property system and have the common good fade away — allowing one’s neighbor to build a hog slaughter facility next to the preschool.

Many of us, especially in the western United States, believe in a strong private property system, but we also have the luxury of living in a region of low population density and great natural resources. Given the massive population of China and the demand here for natural resources, such unfettered deregulation and privatization would cause further degradation of the air and water resources, of soil stability and of wildlife habitat.

China’s government, in search of what they call “ecological civilization,” seems to be headed down a different path. The country is unclear at the moment what that path will produce — but it certainly knows it’s unable to stay where it is now.

(Image: Thousand Turtles on Laojun Mountain in China. Credit: Deng Jia.)

“Coywolves” in the neighborhood? Death panels for pandas? Monarchs in need of a women’s lib movement? It’s all in a day’s news here at Cool Green Morning.

1. BBC wildlife expert Chris Packham makes a statement that could send shivers down your spine: Giant pandas should be allowed to die out. His argument? The money put toward breeding them in captivity could be better spent, like on protecting their habitat. He later says “sorry”, but most people are still outraged. Read The Vine’s comments.
2. Climate Week continues, and Treehugger asks the big question: are China and the United States headed for a deadlock over Copenhagen?
3. Talk about inequality of the sexes — a new report finds that female monarch butterfly populations in North America have been declining for the past 30 years. Researchers speculate that the females are more susceptible to a parasite that’s become more widespread since the ’70s.
4. Reports of coyotes or wolves across the Northeastern U.S. have grown in recent years, and now it turns out that in fact, the animal people are seeing is actually the “coywolf” – a cross between a wolf and coyote.
5. What’s been going on in Pittsburgh this week? A lot of speech-making and meetings, of course. But one group isn’t into all the talk: Greenpeace activists staged a protest from the West End bridge displaying a massive banner warning of the climate destruction that lies ahead.

(Image: Giant panda at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China’s Sichuan Province. Source: ironmanixs via a Creative Commons license.)

1. That story about a Nepalese student making a solar panel from human hair? Turns out it’s bogus, reports Bright Green Blog — although much of the green blogosphere was taken in by the fable.
2. We missed this on Friday: Uganda will now track gorillas online in an effort to attract additional conservation funds, reports Green Inc. (You’ll also be able to friend gorillas by Facebook and Twitter, too. No word on whether they’ll spam you back.)
3. RIP Dr. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that revolutionized high-yield agriculture for the developing world — Sustainablog says he likely “saved more human lives than any other person in history.”
4. The loss of rainfall and vegetation in subtropical parts of the world because of global warming could set the stage for increased desertification, reports a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
5. India and China are usually said to have low per-capita greenhouse gas emissions compared with Western countries — but Environmental Capital reports that Lord Nichols Stern (of the famous Stern Report on climate change) says parts of China have per-capital emissions levels similar to some richer countries in Europe.

1. From the Sounds Like a Perpetual Motion Machine Department: CleanTechnica reports that Amerigon Incorporated is working on a car that recaptures waste energy from its exhaust and recycles it into electricity.
2. Dot Earth’s Andy Revkin goes fishing with a biologist and master angler who says you must always throw the big fish back — to keep being able to fish.
3. The rare earth metals that are essential to hybrid motors are starting to run low, says EcoGeek’s Hank Green — and that could spell trouble for green tech innovation. Environmental Leader says China — which has 70% of such metals — is considering a ban on their export.
4. “Precycling” — buying products that have recyclable packaging or components that are easy to recycle — is a hot green trend. But Heidi Tolliver-Nigro at The Inspired Economist says it’s getting oversold and might work against real sustainability.
5. Summer sea ice will disappear from the Arctic by 2015, according to research presented reported in Mongabay. In other cheery news, Greenland is melting.