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Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.
The fields outside Kotawaringin village in Central Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, looked as if they had just been cleared by armies. None of the old growth remained — only charred stumps poking up from murky, dark pools of water. In places, smoke still curled from land that days ago had been covered with lush jungle. Villagers had burned it all down, clearing the way for a lucrative crop whose cultivation now dominates the entire island: the oil-palm tree.
The dirt road was ruler straight, but deep holes and errant boulders tossed our tiny Toyota back and forth. Trucks coughed out black smoke, their beds brimming over with seven-ton loads of palm fruit rocking back and forth on tires as tall as people. Clear-cut expanses soon gave way to a uniform crop of oil-palm groves: orderly trees, a sign that we had crossed into an industrial palm plantation. Oil-palm trees look like the coconut-palm trees you see on postcards from Florida — they grow to more than 60 feet tall and flourish on the peaty wetland soil common in lowland tropics. But they are significantly more valuable. Every two weeks or so, each tree produces a 50-pound bunch of walnut-size fruit, bursting with a red, viscous oil that is more versatile than almost any other plant-based oil of its kind. Indonesia is rich in timber and coal, but palm oil is its biggest export. Around the world, the oil from its meat and seeds has long been an indispensable ingredient in everything from soap to ice cream. But it has now become a key ingredient of something else: biodiesel, fuel for diesel engines that has been wholly or partly made from vegetable oil.
Finally we emerged, and as we crested a hill, the plantations fell into an endless repetition of tidy bunches stretching for miles, looking almost like the rag of a Berber carpet. Occasionally, a shard of an old ironwood tree shot into the air, a remnant of the primordial canopy of dense rain forest that dominated the land until very recently.
[...] Most of the plantations around us were new, their rise a direct consequence of policy decisions made half a world away. In the mid-2000s, Western nations, led by the United States, began drafting environmental laws that encouraged the use of vegetable oil in fuels — an ambitious move to reduce carbon dioxide and curb global warming. But these laws were drawn up based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs. Despite warnings that the policies could have the opposite of their intended effect, they were implemented anyway, producing what now appears to be a calamity with global consequences.
The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe. The unprecedented palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has enriched and emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which have begun using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.
[...] The central problem, of course, is that the goals of Paris — slowing planetary warming just enough to allow humans time to adapt to excruciating and inevitable changes, including flooding coastlines, stronger hurricanes and perpetual famine and drought — are unlikely to ever be achieved without stopping deforestation. The planet’s forests have the potential to sequester as much as a third of the carbon in the air. Right now deforestation globally contributes 15 percent of the planet’s total emissions, the same as all the cars and trucks and trains across the globe. On paper, biodiesel is a way to make all those modes of transportation produce less carbon. But in the world as it is, that calculation is far more likely to lead to catastrophe.
[Ed note: The original article is on the long side (8,000+ words), but well worth the read. One of the key problems is that in order to quickly clear the land for a palm plantation, growers log the existing trees and then burn everything that remains — most importantly, the peat lands on which the jungle forests had grown. Peat is a huge carbon sink; burning it releases tremendous amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere. So much so that it would take decades if not centuries of reduced pollution from using biofuels to even come close to balancing out all the carbon released by burning the peat.
tl;dr Removing the USA's biofuel mandate would greatly reduce global CO2 emissions.]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @03:53AM (30 children)
I thought the neat way to make biodiesel was from used cooking oil (think about all the deep fryers at fast food restaurants.) But I suppose that isn't enough to meet the eventual demand. Maybe there ought to be a law that everyone has to eat an order of deep fried food everyday<sarcasm>...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Saturday December 01 2018, @08:27AM (27 children)
Even though the comment is meant as a joke, this hits the nail on the head.
The real problem is that we cannot have the current rate of consumption for all 7e9+ human inhabitants of this rock rotating around the sun. As the world's countries converge in economics, the demand rises. Reducing one place is compensated with increase another. Maybe it is too late already. Eventually, nature will cause a reduction in population, if the rock cannot support it. That might be the strategy of the "not my problem" attitude.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by deimtee on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:05AM (23 children)
The planet could easily support 40 billion in comfort with plenty of food and shelter for all.
What it can't support is 7 billion who squabble over resources, piss away those same resources in conflicts and wars and stupid shit, inefficiencies induced by stupid incentives, and a 0.01% class who get a million times more than everybody else by screwing over the environment.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @04:48PM (17 children)
Consumption is a lot more than food though. We'd have to give up personal automobiles, and the lifestyles that demand them. Or at least shift to carbon-neutral energy sources for them.
We couldn't use concrete or asphalt at anything like current per-capita levels. Nor eat much meat.
It would be doable, we could even live in great comfort, but it would require considerable technological and/or lifestyle changes from today.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:02PM (2 children)
Arcologies!!!!! [wikipedia.org]
For meat, consider cultured meat:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-shapiro-meat-commentary/commentary-science-fiction-no-more-can-lab-grown-meat-feed-and-save-the-world-idUSKCN1GA25H [reuters.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:21PM
Indeed. Though I would argue those all count as drastic technology and/or lifestyle changes from the current status quo. Just as moving to predominantly non-fossil power will be, despite many of the requisite technologies already being in widespread use.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday December 02 2018, @07:27PM
"Arcologies!!!!!"
Hmm, they didn't work out so well for Mega-City 1.
At least we get flying motorcycles!
Kidding aside however, what a horrid way to live.
I rather like the mountains, streams, lakes, rivers and forests that are only less than a thirty minute drive from my front door. I don't think I would enjoy living sardine can close.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:45PM (10 children)
Why? Not everyone has lifestyles that need automobiles. And we already have carbon-neutral energy sources, when we'll need to shift to those technologies.
Unless, of course, we could easily afford those things.
And it might turn out completely unnecessary to do so.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @08:12PM (9 children)
It's not about wealth, it's about fossil CO2 production - we need to virtually eliminate virtually all of our usage if we want to slow down the damage already done to something that's not outrageously expensive to deal with. Concrete is already one of the major contributors, independent of the energy consumed to produce it.
We could maintain our current standard of living if we got enormously serious about switching to renewable energy - but we're only finally starting to drag our feet on that project, 50 years after we should have gotten serious if we didn't want the transition to be enormously expensive.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @08:29PM (8 children)
Or we can just not do that. After all, where's the evidence again that global warming is serious enough that we have to virtually stop all CO2 emissions? Protip: it's not there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:15PM (5 children)
Thank you!!! We had so many people saying, "oh, what about the Global Warming, what about the Climate Change"? So I had my smartest guys look into that one very closely. They call it National Climate Assessment, we spent a lot of money looking into it. And I believe there's NOTHING to worry about. nca2018.globalchange.gov [globalchange.gov]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:21PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday December 02 2018, @07:40PM (3 children)
Just because you're unable to understand it, doesn't make it wrong. If it were wrong there would be no reason to try and bury it by releasing it on Black Friday.
It doesn't matter anyway. The only reason you don't care is you'll be dead before the worst happens, so, fuck the grand-kids and their families, fuck anyone born late enough to live through it.
Shallow Khallow strikes again.
Go stick your head back in the sand.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @04:10AM (2 children)
This is argument from obfuscation. I get that the report is required to be padded with all sorts of stuff mandated by Congress. But it's junk for making a persuasive argument. I'm not going to assume evidence is in the report merely because the report is there.
Various bodies have released these reports at more opportune times. It doesn't matter when the reports don't provide the evidence or reasoning to back the calls for action on AGW. I grant that there is global warming caused by humans. But I don't grant that the matter is urgent enough that we have to take a massive economic hit and hastily restructure our energy infrastructure.
Nonsense. There are many legitimate things to consider here. First, there are huge, usually unacknowledged costs to global warming mitigation (both the stuff that has actually been implemented and the stuff that is proposed), especially of the "slam on the brakes" variety currently advocated by most climatology and environmentalist authorities. My view is that that makes those mitigation strategies nonviable.
Second, your "do it for the kids" argument ignores that the status quo is doing amazing things for those kids right now. We are in the midst of the biggest improvement in the human condition ever. It would be a folly discussed for generations to abort that because of Chicken Little concerns about AGW.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @02:46AM (1 child)
Anyone else think that maybe khallow is super old and out of touch? Intelligent guy that just isn't relevant anymore?
Yes technology has improved humanity drastically, but the wealth divide as usual is something you don't care to address and the environmental costs you apparently just think are no big deal! Thankfully most of humanity disagrees with your status quo attitude.
Because that part bears extra scrutiny, there is no reason we have to toss out humanity's progress for oil, coal, and gas. We can update our infrastructure to be more in harmony with the planet instead of destroying it, how is that point lost on you?
What kind of twisted Devil's Bargain are you trying to push here?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:11PM
You're damn right I don't care about the wealth divide. There are four obvious reasons why. First, the measure is absurd. The least wealthy people are debtors in the developed world. Because of them, a person without a penny to their name is wealthier than the combined wealth of the 30% least wealthy.
Second, it's not even a problem. You're not more or less poor just because someone is worth a billion dollars instead of a million dollars. What matters is your income versus costs of living. Here, a lot of the people claiming to give a shit about wealth inequality and the like have been making things more unequal, such as minimum wage; entitlement spending; and obstructing employment, and business creation and growth.
Third, it's quite evident that to most people, building up wealth is not important. Sure, if you gave them a billion dollars, they would happily squander it. But it's bad enough that a near majority (49%) of people in the US won't even bother [theatlantic.com] to save a few hundred dollars for an emergency. Well, my take on that is that if it isn't important enough for them to try, it's certainly not important enough for me to care.
Fourth, we're ignoring both that income inequality is getting better worldwide, and that wealth is not that valuable. How much is a credit default swap really worth to you, for example?
What isn't lost on me is the absence of evidence to justify your concern. Sure, we could update our infrastructure at significant cost and drive people into poverty. Or we could milk the fossil fuel machine for a few more decades until sources start running low enough to justify that switch economically. As I have already noted, there are substantial costs to switching to a renewable infrastructure arbitrarily.
Back at you on that. How many people are you willing to starve and kill for your ideology?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @05:51PM (1 child)
Just wait another 50 years, there will be plenty of evidence by then.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 03 2018, @04:16AM
That's my plan, though I don't believe we'll have to wait 50 years to rule out the more extreme bits of alarmism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @07:32PM
yeah, decentralization is all. quit driving through traffic everyday so that you can go sit in a cubicle like a drone. stay home and work. we don't need all of these stupid ass buildings anyways. we don't need these huge prisoner training facilites called schools either. rtake some fucking repsonsibility for your own goddamn children and quit sending your pigs to steal from the low percent of people who know what fucking century they are living in. it's not complicated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @06:50PM (1 child)
The real rub is that those vehicles either need to be converted to electric, or quantity of driving has to be reduced.
The vehicles themselves are already a sunk expense environmentally and resource-wise. While there are ongoing maintenance costs, with less driving is less wear, and most of the parts that age rapidly do not require that large of quantities of material to replace except in harsher northern environments, or areas where something biological can eat away at them.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:26PM
As I said.
However, it's only the vehicles currently on the road that are a sunk cost - every new car built is a new cost added, and so long as they're designed to burn fossil fuel they add to that long-term cost for their entire operating life.
Personally, I'd love to see simple series hybrids take off. Frack all this computerized "high-tech" silliness - just a straight-forward electric motor, enough batteries storage for regenerative breaking and maybe "around-town" plug-in use, and a small, high-efficiency flex-fuel generator that can put out a nice steady 20 or 30kW to allow recharging while driving. Gets the ball rolling for charging infrastructure and mass-production of the drive system components, and makes it easy for aftermarket conversions to other energy storage mediums down the line when they make sense.
And for the love of humanity, put an F'ing thermal cutoff on the motors so that they can't overheat. It's practically impossible these days to make a $50 CPU get hot enough to actually damage itself, why is it still possible to overheat an expensive motor enough to do so (or and ICE engine for that matter)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:10PM (1 child)
Problem is that when 40b are living in comfort, they will be fucking like crazy until the limits of sustainability are met again.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:47PM
We already have a billion plus living in comfort and they're fucking like crazy. Yet we have negative population growth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:58PM (2 children)
No. You are a stupid imbecile, who has utopian ideals totally devoid of reality. Though your ambitions are only are dangerous when there is a surplus of morons of equal impetude as yourself, so for now we can ignore you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Saturday December 01 2018, @07:38PM
Hey, they never said those ideals are attainable, and human nature being what it is, I bet they aren't. Anyway, what's with all the aggressive ad hominems?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @02:50AM
I will grant the 40billion number is extreme and unlikely, daily life would suck with humans packed in everywhere.
Aside from that high number there is no problem with the ideas, but it would require some mass psychological evolution so that humans stop treating each other like competitors.
You sound like one of the imbeciles (stupid is redundant) that sees how the world currently is and can't comprehend a better future.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Thanos on Saturday December 01 2018, @01:58PM (1 child)
I thought I already took care of this problem with a snap of my gloved fingers...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:32PM
What you did was like merely wiping out half the bacteria on food and doing nothing else.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @03:31PM
Even if that were true, we don't need to maintain the current rate of consumption in order to have a better standard of living for those seven billion people than we currently do for the developed world.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday December 01 2018, @02:28PM (1 child)
takes more than a gallon of diesel to make a gallon of veg oil to make a gallon of biodiesel so its short term small scale profitable and not useful at all on a large scale. Like most greenwashing scams. Nothing wrong with making a small profit utilizing waste better than dumping it in a pit; but it doesn't mean it'll "save the earth" when scaled to billions of people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:25PM
> Like most greenwashing scams.
OK, as well as cooking oil-->fuel, I can think of corn ethanol-->fuel in the same category.
What are some other greenwashing scams in this category? I'm thinking specifically about higher energy input compared to energy output -- over the full system and life-cycle?