This amazing shot by Flickr user “Soggydan” Dan Bennett of a leaping coho salmon in Issaquah Creek, Washington state was taken with a 60mm lens — which basically means the photographer could have reached out and touched this fish. Like we said — amazing! Thanks for sharing it through The Nature Conservancy’s Flickr Group, Soggydan!

Check out all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images, submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you — at my.nature.org. And why not give the gift of clean water this holiday season to keep salmon spawning?

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.)

Here’s an all-too-frequent out-of-office autoreply from conservationists these days:

I am currently away from the office attending a UNDP meeting. Following this I am participating in a CBD working group, an IUCN advisory committee, an NGO roundtable, then presenting at a Millennium Declaration follow-up, and attending a regional conservation forum convened by aid agencies as part of a global initiative. I expect to be back in the office towards the middle of next year.

During this time I may be able to answer emails occasionally, but will definitely not be engaging in any local conservation action or helping implement recommendations arising from these meetings.

Apologies for the delay.

Kind regards,

[Signed] Director of Conservation, Conservation Project Manager and Global Conservation Focal Point

Republic of Forty Thousand Feet

OK, so I’m being facetious, but it’s really not that far from the truth.

There are simply so many global conservation initiatives and associated meetings that, for small developing nations with only a handful of government conservation staff, you can expect to get “out of office” replies from those staff for a substantial part of each year – which is all time these people are not in their countries, getting conservation done.

So what does this “out of office” status mean for real, on-the-ground conservation?

The problem is, this condition is something of a blameless crime. Every group organizing these meetings has only the best intentions of advancing conservation and being as inclusive as possible.

We want to include representatives from small and developing nations in global conservation initiatives because we believe their voices and experiences should be heard, they are guardians of much of the world’s biodiversity, and we often perceive that they have more to gain from participation than people from large, developed countries.

The more enthusiastic and engaged in conservation someone becomes in their own country, the more we desire their participation on global agreements, initiatives, working groups and forums.

To add to the perversity of this situation, an enormous proportion of the global conservation budget is spent transporting these motivated people away from where they are working — in effect, stripping both capacity and funds from actual, on-the-ground conservation action.

The problem is also exacerbated by short funding deadlines that require holding meetings annually, if not more frequently, and by pressure within global initiatives for rapid and easily reported outcomes – workshops are a safe bet for both. Unfortunately, the reporting often stops with the meeting. Too infrequently do we try and document if and how these global meetings are an effective way of advancing on-the-ground conservation success.

Taken as a whole, the global conservation community might be doing itself a great disservice by pursuing international meetings as the modus operandi.

So what are the solutions?

Erh, perhaps we need a meeting to find out…

(Image: Qantas Airways A380 taking off from LAX. Credit: Joits/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. There’ll be no more energy-sucking televisions in the state where TV was born, now that California has passed the nation’s first law requiring TV energy efficiency standards.
2. Sometimes, incentives just don’t work. The Responsible Travel company has canceled its carbon offsets program, saying it helps travelers appease their guilt over flying but doesn’t actually help reduce emissions — and may even encourage more traveling.
3. Climate change plays favorites apparently. A new report from the U.N. Population Fund says women suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate change – but they also might be in the best position to mitigate it as well.
4. A rare giraffe species was on the brink of extinction in 1996, with just 50 animals left in Niger. But regulations against poaching and other conservation efforts have made a huge difference – 13 years later there are now 200 animals.
5. Wondering which major companies are going green? Check out this list of 5 big corporate names that are trying out new, more sustainable practices, from The Daily Green. 

If you regularly drive to work, telecommuting can save thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere and save you a bundle of money to boot.

I only live 3.5 miles from my office. But I found that, with driving costs and a hefty parking fee, I’d have to pay more than $3,300 a year to drive to work. (Calculate your own commuting costs here.) On top of that, my little Toyota Corolla would release more than 1,350 pounds of carbon.

If someone who lives just 10 miles from their office and has free parking were to work from home just one day a week, she could save approximately $265 and 0.3 tons of carbon a year.

Think those are some pretty good reasons to give it a try? I do too, so I’ve asked for some advice from those who telecommute on a regular basis.

On Convincing Your Boss:

The first step in making telecommuting a reality is to make sure your employer is OK with it. And unless your company has a telework program, that may mean doing some convincing.

According to Quint Careers, one key strategy is to focus on the benefits telecommuting will have for your employer, not for you. You may love that telecommuting will allow you to be there when your kids get home from school, but focus on how it would be better for them: that you’d be more productive, spend more time on projects, etc.

On Creating a Workspace:

Designating a workspace is essential, according to Katie Kemple, communications manager for EconomyStory.org.

“My husband and I both work from home and even though our house is small (975 sq ft), we’ve still found spots to claim as our own,” she says. “Mine’s the corner of our den. To make it an ‘office,’ I purchased a rolling laptop table, wall pockets, magazine holders and a file box – all for about $100.”

On Blending Home and Work Life:

For Chrissy Schwinn, the Conservancy’s director of international policy and climate communications, telecommuting out of her house in Berkeley, Ca., isn’t much of a choice – the office she reports into is 3,000 miles away.

Having been a telecommuter for the last five years and working with two small kids in the house, she knows that telecommuting “blends home and work life in odd and sometimes entertaining/mortifying ways.”

Chrissy bravely shares a few of her most recent experiences, both good and bad:

• Had a 4-year-old show up on a video conference and ask me how to spell “love.”
• Started conference calls with Europe at 6:30 a.m. and worked through the day to end with calls to Asia Pacific at 6:30 p.m.
• Held a meeting with visiting work colleagues on the back deck in the sun.
• Cut out in the middle of the day to catch my son’s Halloween parade, and finished my “workday” after he’d gone to bed
• Can often go until mid-afternoon without a single interruption — no water cooler, no “drop bys” at my desk.
• Started a conference call in pajamas and finished it fully dressed.

Her advice? “Learning to live in this fuzzy area between work and home life is crucial to succeeding as a telecommuter.”

On Other Benefits

Misty Herrin, associate director of strategic communications at the Conservancy and a longtime telecommuter, has a laundry list of other benefits of working from home:

• Eating better and saving money by eating at home;
• Spending a lot less money on work attire and having it last longer;
• Being able to gain momentum on big projects by ignoring the phone and email;
• No water cooler gossip!
• Fewer days out sick; it’s a lot easier to brave a work day when you don’t have to deal with a commute or risk spreading germs to others.

Not Just for Your Daily Routine

Telecommuting can also be a huge money, time and carbon saver when it comes to conferences. Many organizations are using video conferencing technology in lieu of having people fly to one central location.

Since May, Jonathan Hoekstra, managing director of the Conservancy’s climate change team, has used video technology in place of making about 10 cross-country trips and one trip to Australia. By attending remotely, Jonathan estimates about $10,000 in savings in just six months.

While I enjoy biking to the office and some of the perks of working here (free coffee, printer access and a landline phone), I have a feeling staying in my house is going to look pretty tempting when winter sets in.

(Image credit: Paladin27/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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.

I recently returned from my near annual pilgrimage to Veracruz, Mexico, to see the fall hawk migration at the biggest hawk migration site in the world.

The area on the Gulf Coast of Mexico near Veracruz City has become well known in recent years for its astounding hawk migration, a phenomenon that has become known as the “Veracruz River of Raptors.”

In a typical year, millions of raptors are counted at the two counting sites just outside of Veracruz City, with the top species being Turkey Vulture, Swainson’s Hawk, Broad-winged Hawk, and Mississippi Kite. In fact, if you are lucky, you can see hundreds of thousands of individual birds pass by in a single day–its hard to top that!

Although the hawk migration is worth a trip to Veracruz in and of itself, the area immediately surrounding Veracruz City has much to offer the visiting naturalist, which is another reason I keep going back:

• Within a few hours’ drive of the city are archaeological sites such as Cempoala and Quiahuiztlan, which provide a look into the historical past of other civilizations as well as good birding. Beaches with gulls, terns and shorebirds are nearby as well as an array of forested habitats.
• To the south, there are savannah habitats where the Double-striped Thick-knee and Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture can be found.
• As you go west and up into the mountains past the state capital of Xalapa, you quickly enter magnificent pine forests with numerous migrants such as Townsend’s Warbler and resident species such as Gray Silky-Flycatcher and Black-headed Siskin.  On our recent Conservancy member tour, we found 226 species of birds in just over a week!

Perhaps the best thing about visiting Veracruz on a tour, however, is that by doing this, you can support the excellent conservation efforts of the conservation group Pronatura Veracruz. In addition to running tours to see the River of Raptors and other great birding areas in the State of Veracruz, Pronatura has implemented a series of excellent conservation projects for wetlands and forests and is responsible for the hawk counting efforts. By taking a tour, you not only get your fill of hawks and other birds, but you directly support conservation efforts in this critically important migratory crossroads of the Americas. Maybe I’ll see you there next year!

(Image: Buteo Magniurostris – Roadside Hawk — taken in in Paso de San Juan, Veracruz-Llava, Mexico. Credit: Reaper Stinky/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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.

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.)

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?