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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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The nineteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-19) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change begins in Warsaw, Poland, on Monday, 11th November.  After the failure to agree on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol at COP-15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the 195 parties to the UNFCCC at COP-18 in Doha, Qatar last year extended Kyoto while a new treaty is negotiated.  COP-19 is supposed to be the beginning of those negotiations.  A complete draft is due to be released at COP-20 in Lima, Peru in 2014, and the final version is due to be signed at COP-21 in Paris in December 2015.  The UNFCCC aims to have the “Paris Protocol” ratified and in effect by 2020.

That’s the schedule that has been agreed upon, but so far there is little sign that much progress will be made in Warsaw over the next two weeks.  One obstacle to making substantive progress is an ongoing dispute over procedural issues.  The UNFCCC makes decisions by consensus of the 195 member countries, but Russia objected last year at COP-18 in Doha that the chairman had ruled that a consensus had been reached to extend the Kyoto Protocol even though Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus strongly objected.  At the annual meetings of the subsidiary bodies in Bonn last summer, Russia successfully blocked proceeding with the agenda until the issue of decision making was considered.

Now, Russia has sent a letter to the UNFCCC Secretariat asking that defining consensus be placed on the agenda for Warsaw. On the other side, Mexico and Papua New Guinea in 2011 proposed that when a consensus cannot be achieved, decisions can be agreed by a majority of at least three-quarters.  India and China strongly objected to that proposal.

Assuming that these procedural squabbles don’t take up the whole two weeks, three of the main issues that could be considered are flexibility, inclusivity, and payoffs.  The Kyoto Protocol is a set of mandatory emissions reductions targets and timetables that were initially applied to 37 developed countries.  The United States never ratified Kyoto, and Canada withdrew last year.  United States senior climate negotiator Todd Stern in a speech in London last month said that the successor to Kyoto must be much more flexible. This flexibility could go so far as to allow each country to devise its own plan to lower emissions.  The European Union, on the other hand, supports continuing with legally binding targets.

Inclusivity is a key issue because of the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions in China and India.  China is now the world’s largest emitter by a wide margin over the United States, and India’s emissions have also increased fairly rapidly.  Thus, most developed countries naturally think that China (and India and Brazil) should undertake economically-damaging emissions reductions just as they have.  India, in particular, strongly disagrees.  India argues that the West caused the problem and so must solve the problem.  India recognizes that their continuing economic progress depends on inexpensive fossil-fuel energy.

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Yesterday, the EPA held an all-day “listening session” at its Washington, D.C. headquarters, ostensibly to gather ideas and information from the public about how best to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) from existing power plants. The event was one of eleven listening sessions the agency hosted over the past three weeks. I was one of many people who “testified” at EPA HQ. We each had three minutes to speak.

I was there about an hour, and during that time none of the other witnesses presented ideas or information about how to reduce CO2 emissions from existing power plants. Rather, they deplored the climate “crisis” and implored the EPA to do everything in its power to replace “dirty coal” with “clean, renewable energy.”

In September, the EPA proposed its “carbon pollution” rule for new power plants. The listening sessions are on the agency’s planned follow-up measure in 2014 — guidelines instructing States how to reduce CO2 emissions from existing power plants. About 40% of U.S. electric generation comes from existing coal-fired power plants.

Here is more or less what I said when my turn came to speak:

I am Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I have come to offer you a word of caution: Don’t try to get cute with your guidelines. Don’t use the guidelines either to shut down existing coal plants, or to enact a national clean energy standard through the regulatory back door.

This caution is in order because of something I call the “bait-and-fuel-switch.”

Back in March 2011, the EPA published PSD and Title V permitting guidelines for greenhouse gases. The document stated that best available control technology (BACT) standards for CO2 would not require utilities planning to build new coal-fired power plants to “fuel switch” and build natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants instead.

But only one year later, in March 2012, the EPA proposed a “carbon pollution” rule establishing new source performance standards (NSPS) for CO2 that nearly all NGCC plants already meet but exactly zero commercial coal power plants can meet. The proposal was transparently a fuel-switching mandate. And it was that even though NSPS is less stringent than BACT, and the agency had assured stakeholders that BACT for CO2 would not require fuel switching. [click to continue…]