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 Daily Green asks, Is everything you know about being green wrong? Here’s the scoop: it’s not about what car you drive or whether you eat meat, but the stuff you buy.
2. Marine sponges are getting a better image, no thanks to that Sponge Bob Square Pants guy. A new study shows that sponges gulp huge quantities of ocean carbon and transform it into food for corals, making them integral to the survival of reefs in these warming times.
3. Is an apple that won’t rot for 4 months somehow better for the planet than traditional apples? The Australian scientists behind the new RS103-130 think so. Only in Oz.
4. On the other side of the equator, the Dutch have cooked up their own crazy scheme: a driving tax designed to cut traffic and transportation emissions. The tax would be imposed on a per-mile basis, although steeper fees apply to driving during rush hour and driving a big car.
5. Rising seas, warmer temperatures, increased rainfall… now here’s a new effect of climate change: more wind. Scientists have observed increased wind over Lake Superior as a result of changing water and air temperatures caused by less winter ice.

Good news about cow poop. Good news (?) about Copenhagen. Good news for those of you who’ve always dreamed of a dress made of LED lights. Happiness is the smell of a new Cool Green Morning, to paraphrase Don Draper…

1. The rehabilitation of poop continues: The Netherlands has opened its second cow-dung power plant, reports CleanTechnica — to make biogas that will heat more than 1,000 homes.
2. In case you missed it yesterday, President Obama has endorsed a plan to push an ultimate climate change agreement sometime beyond December’s UN meeting in Copenhagen, reports The New York Times. Grist’s Dave Roberts says that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
3. Charlie the Tuna muzzled? Dot Earth says last week’s meeting among fishing countries to reach an agreement on restoring depleted numbers of tuna, shark, turtles and other marine life was missing one thing — a basis in science.
4. Count on Inhabitat to render us speechless — with a dress made of 24,000 LED lights (plus “4,000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals and 40-layers of pleated silk organza crinoline.” When’s it going to hit the shelves at Target?!)
5. Always like to end on good news — this time from the Brazilian Amazon, where deforestation dropped nearly 46 percent from August 2008 to July 2009, says AP. But the “why” is a chicken and egg problem — is it because of the Brazilian government’s promotion of sustainable livelihoods in the region (coupled with enforcement of laws against deforestation), or just a drop in ag commodity prices worldwide?

Feeling unlucky this Friday the 13th? Fortify yourself with the latest in green news — recycled diapers, undersea gliders, a historic comeback and a new way to shut up those global warming skeptics close to you (speaking of superstitious…)

1. So you’re at a family gathering, arguing with Uncle Climate Denier over the reality of climate change — what’s your trump card? How about the huge increase in the ratio of record high temps to record low temps across the United States in the last six decades? Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth says the findings are accepted by scientists across the political spectrum. (I bet Uncle Climate Denier remembers those frozen winter mornings just fine…)
2. Also from Dot Earth — two U.S. senators have proposed giving a prize to anybody with a way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it permanently. (Isn’t that called “a forest”? Just asking…)
3. Martha Stewart, eat your heart out — two UK companies are building a plant to recycle diapers into, among other things, wallpaper — and the plant will run on the organic matter in the diapers themselves. Eeewww… (Hat tip: Triple Pundit.)
4. Cool Green Science Alert! A new undersea glider (huh?) is tracking the rare beaked whale off the coast of Hawaii…using only a listening device. (It’s the best way, because the whales are shy and live far off shore. Hat tip: Wired Science.)
5. Score one for the good guys — the brown pelican, once on the endangered species list because DDT weakened its eggs, has been declared “fully recovered” by the U.S. Department of the Interior, reports the LA Times. (Hat tip: Yale Environment 360.)

(Image: Brown pelicans off Morro Bay, California. Credit: mikebaird/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. We’re getting closer to regulating U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — yesterday the EPA took one more step through the obstacle course of government process, inspiring much optimism.
2. Is it too late to save the vaquita porpoise from extinction? Scientists are hoping not. Only 150 remain, threatened by fishing practices, but there’s new hope: the Mexican government has passed a resolution to ban trawling in the vaquita’s only habitat, in the Gulf of California. 
3. Melting glaciers often seem purely symbolic of the climate change problem, but they have real consequences: a new report says the melting of India’s Kashmir glaciers will threaten the water supply of millions of people in the Himalayas, where 90 percent of glaciers are receding.
4. The situation for the koala is nowhere near as dire as the vaquita dolphin, but cute and cuddly can get you a lot of publicity. New estimates indicate Australia’s koala population is getting smaller due to habitat loss, prompting an all-out media campaign by the Australia Koala Foundation.
5. Botanists are in a debate over whether assisted migration of plants — helping them relocate in the face of climate change — is a wise endeavor. Opponents worry that the science isn’t accurate enough to predict if a plant species will become invasive once moved. 

1. Seems fishy, but overall U.S. water consumption has declined in the past 25 years — despite a growing population and increasing water use. Huh? Tina Casey at CleanTechnica says it’s because of more efficient ag irrigation systems and better cooling schemes for power plants (which still amount to 50% of U.S. water use).
2. Barcelona climate talks update: Jeff Tollefson at Climate Feedback says the E.U. might accept a political agreement on climate at Copenhagen rather than a binding legal treaty. (Trust me: You need to know what that means.) Grist reports that European climate negotiators say success at Copenhagen is up to President Obama.
3. In case you missed it, a U.S. Senate committee passed a climate bill yesterday, with all Republican committee members boycotting the vote.  The Vine yawns, saying the real action on the bill will be separate negotiations between Senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham.
4. Where could coastal wetlands go when sea level rises? Um…nowhere, says a new report in Environmental Research Letters — more than 50% of the land along the U.S. Atlantic coast that could have been used for inland wetlands migration is developed or soon will be. (Hat tip: Journal Watch Online.)
5. Speaking of on the move, half of 36 Atlantic Ocean fish stocks have moved north as ocean temps have warmed, says a new study by NOAA researchers. Some species have left U.S. waters altogether! Just wait until Glenn Beck gets wind of these treasonous climate-change dodgers!! (Hat tip: Yale Environment 360.)

As UN negotiators from around the world gather in Barcelona this week to continue hammering out a global climate deal, the question of emissions reduction targets has grabbed center stage in the press.

But even if all countries stopped emitting greenhouse gas pollution today, the impacts of climate change will be felt for years to come.

We must reduce emissions to minimize any future impacts. But negotiators must also develop policies and financial mechanisms that will help communities – and the natural resources they rely upon for survival – adapt to and overcome the climate impacts we are already seeing today.

The Nature Conservancy hosted an event here in Barcelona (webcast) last night highlighting adaptation actions we and others are launching around the world. The actions presented are the types that UN negotiators should include in a global agreement to ensure it provides the support needed to protect people and nature from the ravages of climate change.

Mike Beck, senior scientist with the Conservancy’s Global Marine Team, spoke of how sea levels are rising faster than anyone had previously projected, and how coastal communities are struggling to survive.

Mike unveiled an innovate new web tool called Coastal Resilience that shows in detail how sea level rise is hitting Long Island, NY. Users can look up how different sea-level rise scenarios will impact specific areas according to development type (commercial or residential areas); demographics (such as age or economic status); habitat types; and other specific social, economic and environmental classifications.

Residents can even look up their home addresses in Long Island and see how sea-level rise will impact their property.

The tool also allows government agencies to see where hospitals, fire stations and other emergency response organizations are located in connection to the areas that will be worst hit by sea-level rise.

“Most emergency responses to storms and flooding are made at the local level. But most localities don’t have access to this kind of information,” Mike said during the presentation.

Engaging communities in dealing with climate change impacts is crucial in places like Long Island, and even more so in developing countries where vulnerable communities are likely to face some of the greatest impacts. Several countries are now building upon the Coastal Resilience work to develop similar tools for their regions. The Conservancy is working with partners in the Caribbean to develop a similar tool.

“[In the Caribbean] most hotels and the tourist industry are based around these coastlines,” Mike said. “They’re socially and economically critical.”

Also joining the event was Rence Sore, the Solomon Islands‘ permanent secretary of environment, conservation and meteorology, who spoke of how his country is combating rising sea levels. Sore described how many of the islands in his nation are just one meter above sea level and are already dealing with coastal erosion and salt water contamination of crop lands.

“We depend on natural resources,” Sore said. “Climate change is impacting our food and water security.”

He said his government is incorporating the impacts of climate change in their development plans and are focusing on protecting their natural resources, from mangroves and coral reefs and more, to ensure they can continue to provide food and water to local communities.

The Conservancy is working in the Choiseul province of the Solomon Islands, in partnership with the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities, to help plan local coastal land and resource management in response to climate impacts

These examples show how, in developed and developing countries alike, providing information and engaging communities are essential components to dealing with the impacts of climate change.

In Barcelona, our team is advocating that a global climate agreement draw on and strengthen the capacity of indigenous peoples and local communities to monitor, understand, and respond to climate change through effective adaptation measures. Protecting and restoring natural resources are some of the most effective measures for strengthening the resilience of both people and nature.

To learn more and spread the word about a global climate agreement, visit Planet Change.

(Image: Researchers in the Solomon Islands. Credit: David Wachenfeld © 2004 Triggerfish Images.)

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.)

My husband returns to the same reefs every year in the Bahamas, where he has been teaching a coral reef ecology class for the last 14 years. On his 2008 trip, he noticed that the reef fish were missing. The culprits were quickly identified — and during his 2009 course, he and his students were eating them.

Lionfish.

Lionfish do not belong in the Caribbean. They are native to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean and made their way into the Caribbean through the release (the exact event is unknown) of aquarium fish. Some say they were in a tank that was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Others say it was a release of just 3 or 6 specimens. Whatever the case, lionfish are now spotted as far north as Rhode Island, and are popping up all over the Caribbean, from Colombia to the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas.

The Bahamas‘ marine ecosystem has already been hard hit. The people that know these reefs well are witnessing a rapid decline in reef fish thanks to these voracious predators, which have an appetite for juvenile reef fish. Their method of attack is particularly unique. Instead of an ambush attack or high-speed chase, lionfish make their presence known and confuse their prey by displaying their beautiful fins like a peacock, slowly dancing towards their prey and then rapidly sucking the prey into their mouths like a vacuum. This technique is so effective because no other predator in the Caribbean uses it — so prey are not adapted to avoid it.

Lionfish have no natural predators in Caribbean waters and are thriving on the tasty but already dwindling choice of baby reef fish. Some think that native grouper might have preyed on lionfish — but because grouper are overfished in the Caribbean (and in most parts of the world), the options beyond human predators are few.

As the distribution of lionfish in the Caribbean expands and the severity of this invasion is becoming more apparent, managers are trying to figure out what to do before the adult populations of reef fish are seriously affected. In the Bahamas, they have issued a “kill on sight” directive. The Caribbean Fisheries Management Council has even developed a Most Wanted Poster to encourage removal of these fish.

The best way to get rid of them? Put them on the menu! In Asia, lionfish are a popular menu item. That’s not yet the case in the Caribbean, so folks are working to change the culture of fear that surrounds lionfish (they have toxic spines that really hurt when they touch you) into a culture of desire for a delightful bite of this light and tasty fish. There are even websites that are collecting lionfish recipes — everything from sushi to Bahamian style fritters to smoked lionfish dip (yum!).

The hope is that people will be motivated to hunt and remove these fish, taking advantage of the existing tradition of artisanal fishing in the Caribbean and turning fishers toward this undesirable species and perhaps away from dwindling populations of grouper and snapper.

An additional approach to this problem — and one that would benefit the reef in multiple ways as well — would be to beef up protection of large predators such as grouper and sharks so that they can work to keep this ecosystem in balance and potentially keep the lionfish population in check.

My husband’s students decided to do a small research project to examine the gut contents (i.e., what is in the bellies) of lionfish they found on the Bahamian reefs, and discovered that their bellies were quite full of baby reef fish. The reward for their efforts was a yummy dinner of fried lionfish…and my husband assures me that in terms of flavor and texture, they compete with any flakey white fish you can think of or catch in the Caribbean. So…

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me advocating for people to eat fish. If you want to eat fish, I’d usually refer you to Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch — a guide that helps diners make decisions about the most sustainable and healthy options for seafood. However, when it comes to lionfish in the Caribbean, I say chow down to your heart’s content!

Good morning, Cool Green News addicts! We know you missed us yesterday, but we’re back with some hot links to get your day started. Dams are coming down, a literary classic offers lessons in the climate change debate and a note of hope emerges around the U.S. climate change bill currently stalled in the Senate. Read on!

1. Some call it a stunt, others a protest — the Maldives government will be holding its next session of Parliament underwater to call attention to the watery future the country faces if sea level rise due to climate change isn’t slowed. (See the Associated Press video above.)
2. The destruction of a massive and long-standing dam in Oregon is a sign that the United States’ era of dam building is giving way to a new era of dam breaching, reports the Los Angeles Times.
3. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Indonesia and the United States aren’t quite London and Paris circa the French Revolution, but they do present some interesting parallels in the global climate change debate – read The Nature Conservancy’s piece comparing the two countries in The Jakarta Post.
4. A new study finds that community-owned forests provide better benefits in terms of carbon storage and human well-being than government-owned forests. The authors argue that this information could help countries design the most effective forest carbon programs. (Hat-tip: Conservation Magazine.)
5. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic Senator John Kerry published a joint op-ed in the New York Times this weekend with the optimistic title “Yes We Can (Pass Climate Change Legislation),”  giving many reason to hope that passage of a bill is still possible.