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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: 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.