November 2013

Today marks the conclusion of the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw, Poland.

For the uninitiated, COPs are the preeminent global climate confab for the green glitterati. The purpose of COPs is to facilitate negotiations for a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Each annual COP is a two week affair that follows a similar pattern. During the first week, participant nations send only lower level negotiators. As the second week progresses, ever-more important diplomats and dignitaries arrive, as the discussions ratchet up. On the final Friday, the parties will deliberate through the night, so that they might produce some sort of agreement, no matter how watered down, before they leave.

[N.B. I’m not being cheeky by describing COPs thusly. Consider: I wrote the paragraph above for a newsletter that we sent out last Friday, at the end of the first week of COP-19. [Sign up for the weekly, free Cooler Heads Digest newsletter on the top right of this webpage!]. That is, the above paragraph is a week old. Today is the final Friday of COP 19. Below, I’ve pasted a headline from this morning Energy & Environment News ClimateWire (subscription required):

I was able to predict, a week ago, that today’s negotiations would last all night, yet I’m not clairvoyant. I was able to do so for a simple reason: This is what happens every year! ]

It’s been a bumpy two weeks in Warsaw. First, the coal-dependent host country held a pro-coal summit the same week as COP-19. Then, developing countries walked out. Finally, environmentalists walked out. Needless to say, agreement has been few and far between.

Nonetheless, Nature, one of the top science journals, wrote a hopeful editorial this week about the prospects for success in Warsaw. Despite the discord to date, the editorial board took solace in the low expectations that had been set for COP-19. They note that, “The goal for Warsaw this week is not an agreement, but a viable roadmap to an agreement,” and conclude, “Surely that much can be achieved.”

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Editor’s note: CEI’s Myron Ebell is at the 19^th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw, Poland. Below is his first report.

Tuesday was one of the special theme days at COP-19 in Warsaw. It was Gender Day. I couldn’t go to many of the gender-related events because there were several important sessions that were part of the official negotiating process that I wanted to attend, but I was able to attend the high-level event organized by the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The UNFCCC has adopted several resolutions on gender equality and women’s participation beginning in 2001. Last year at COP-18 in Doha, Qatar, they committed to gender balance in the Secretariat and member delegations.

The gender event on Tuesday was moderated by the executive director of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres. She began by saying that we should keep our feet on the ground but raise our eyes to the stars. She asked the speakers to tell the audience (of several hundred people) what their dreams were and to talk from their hearts and souls rather than their minds.

Bianca Jagger’s remarks were low key and modest. She said that her dream was ending violence against women. Lakshmi Puri, deputy director of UN Women, said that women were more adversely affected by climate change, but could do more to stop it than men.  Helen Clark, the head of the UN Development Programme and former prime minister of New Zealand, seconded that and said that the climate justice agenda included universal access to sustainable energy.

Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and former UN high commissioner on human rights, noted that there were more than a billion people without access to electricity and more than two billion whose meals were cooked, usually by women, on open fires. She somehow thought that “doing the right thing on climate” will somehow relieve this widespread energy poverty by creating a more just world with less inequality. She added that fossil fuels are a stranded asset as people have come to realize that, “like asbestos, they are too dangerous to use.”

Tara Holonen, the former president of Finland, introduced the new Environment and Gender Index. It ranks 72 nations according to six performance categories. The gender equality measurements don’t seem to have any connection to the environmental quality measurements, so the index makes little sense. The index was produced by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which was once a respectable science and conservation group. The IUCN now describes itself as “a leader on gender issues in the environmental arena.” (www.EnvironmentGenderIndex.org)

A young Australian climate activist was invited from the audience to join the panel when one of the speakers was unable to attend. She said that the sole reason she fights for climate justice is to improve the lot of poor women in the developing world.

The highlight of this gender event, which was only one among many held on this special Gender Day, was the singing of a song composed especially for the event. It was sung magnificently by Elizabeth Njorge, who heads a foundation in Kenya that is dedicated to bringing art and music education to some of the poorest children in Kenya. Titled Vision 50/50, the song’s chorus reads: “We have a dream, a dream of hopes to turn a page that marks a golden age, A greener course, a greener course for planet Earth.” Note that the lyricist refrained from calling it Mother Earth, although the word “sustainable” is used in one of the verses.

An extensive investigation by the Associated Press (AP) confirms what many critics of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program have been saying for years — the ethanol mandate does more environmental harm than good.

The AP article begins with an overview of key findings:

But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today. 

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found. 

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation – more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined – have vanished on Mr. Obama’s watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive.

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All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things. [click to continue…]

“Obama’s green energy drive comes with an unadvertised environmental cost,” notes the Associated Press, in a story focusing on President Obama’s environmentally-destructive support for ethanol mandates:

The hills of southern Iowa bear the scars of America’s push for green energy: The brown gashes where rain has washed away the soil. The polluted streams that dump fertilizer into the water supply. . .It wasn’t supposed to be this way. With the Iowa political caucuses on the horizon in 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama made homegrown corn a centerpiece of his plan to slow global warming. . .But the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama’s watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact. Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa. The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.

“They’re raping the land,” said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County.

The Obama Administration forced up the ethanol content of gasoline.  In doing so it, it made gasoline costlier and dirtier, increased ozone pollution, and raised the death toll from smog and air pollution. Ethanol mandates also have caused widespread deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution.  By driving up food prices, they fueled Islamic extremism in Egypt and the Middle East.  Ethanol mandates also increase world hunger and mortality.  The Obama Administration’s ethanol mandates have drawn intense criticism from experts across the political spectrum.

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