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posted by martyb on Saturday December 01 2018, @03:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the smoke-gets-in-your-eyes dept.

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.]


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:22PM (4 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:22PM (#768733)

    I'm sure it would change - if given the opportunity. However, if we dangle incentives much larger than were available to the US 150 years ago, then in 50-100 years there might not be much left worth saving.

    The fact is, the global demand for resources today is many times greater than the demand 150 years ago, and so the damage is done many times faster. Furthermore, the demand largely originates in nations that have already severely restricted the legal potential to strip-mine their own resources in such a destructive manner, but prefer to export that destruction to other nations rather than pay what it costs to attain those resources more responsibly.

    More to the point - and I repeat, the rules that are continuing to create these incentives were put in place specifically to reduce *global* carbon emissions, and are instead having the opposite effect. If we fail to repeal the rules, then we're actively working against our own interests, since we don't really care where the emissions are coming from, we all share the same atmosphere.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:32PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:32PM (#768736) Journal

    I'm sure it would change - if given the opportunity. However, if we dangle incentives much larger than were available to the US 150 years ago, then in 50-100 years there might not be much left worth saving.

    Not much point to speculating on how bad things would happen if we do things that we're not going to do. I'm sure bad things would happen, if you were ramming oncoming traffic, but doesn't sound to me like you plan on starting. Those incentives don't exist anymore nor does that US.

    The fact is, the global demand for resources today is many times greater than the demand 150 years ago, and so the damage is done many times faster. Furthermore, the demand largely originates in nations that have already severely restricted the legal potential to strip-mine their own resources in such a destructive manner, but prefer to export that destruction to other nations rather than pay what it costs to attain those resources more responsibly.

    And there are many times more resources than what is demanded today. The "export the pollution" shtick is undermined by the fact that the places which are having the problems today, would have those problems anyway. What is ignored here is that everyone in the developed world has had to pass through this phase of harshness and poverty. And we still haven't figured out how to avoid it. But we already knows what lies at the end of this tunnel.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 02 2018, @02:22AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 02 2018, @02:22AM (#768792) Journal

    I'm sure it would change - if given the opportunity. However, if we dangle incentives much larger than were available to the US 150 years ago, then in 50-100 years there might not be much left worth saving.

    I didn't realize that you were referring to Indonesia. I have to disagree strongly here. The US had massive incentives to hunt every large mammal, mine for many things, and chop down massive amounts of forest. Europe had similar incentives. There is nothing different about the palm oil situation. It's not going to be a perfect destroyer of jungle environments because there will always be places unsuitable for it. These can down the road reseed the areas that were converted to palm oil plantations.

    More to the point - and I repeat, the rules that are continuing to create these incentives were put in place specifically to reduce *global* carbon emissions, and are instead having the opposite effect. If we fail to repeal the rules, then we're actively working against our own interests, since we don't really care where the emissions are coming from, we all share the same atmosphere.

    That's no surprise to me. But merely ending the biofuel mandate won't help, if it is truly needed. The problem here ultimately, is that Indonesia is poor and will continue to make such short horizon decisions until they aren't poor.

    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday December 02 2018, @04:17AM (1 child)

      by Immerman (3985) on Sunday December 02 2018, @04:17AM (#768813)

      Let me put it this way - when the U.S. was big on strip-mining, who were the major foreign powers purchasing the vast majority of the production? Who were the major foreign corporations with budgets larger than the government funding and operating the strip mining programs?

      THAT is the difference. We mostly did it to ourselves, to slake our own hunger for resources. They're doing it at our behest, under the heavy influence of our much proportionally wealthier scummy business tycoons.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 02 2018, @04:30AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 02 2018, @04:30AM (#768815) Journal

        Let me put it this way - when the U.S. was big on strip-mining, who were the major foreign powers purchasing the vast majority of the production? Who were the major foreign corporations with budgets larger than the government funding and operating the strip mining programs?

        Europe and the US with large businesses from those countries doing most of the mining and purchasing. US government funding of such things was almost nonexistent till the Second World War.

        THAT is the difference. We mostly did it to ourselves, to slake our own hunger for resources. They're doing it at our behest, under the heavy influence of our much proportionally wealthier scummy business tycoons.

        Not much of a difference. Sorry, having foreign cooties just isn't a big deal any more. Indonesia isn't some primitive tribe that you can overawe with a few guns and trinkets.