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.]
Related Stories
How a country suddenly went 'crazy rich'
Indonesia, the nation with the world's largest Muslim population, is home to a rapidly growing middle class. As Rebecca Henschke reports from Jakarta, this has given rise to a striking phenomenon - the so-called "Crazy Rich" Indonesians.
[...] The hashtag #crazyrichsurabayans started trending on social media after a local teacher at an elite school shared anecdotes about the family of one of her students - tales of them travelling to get their vaccinations done in Japan and of holidays in Europe. She is now writing a book about it and there is talk of a movie.
Recently, the luxurious lavish wedding of a couple from Surabaya was dubbed the ultimate Crazy Rich Surabayans event by local media. Hundreds of guests from Indonesia and abroad attended, it was reported, and all were said to have been entered into a prize draw for a Jaguar sports car. The groom, it's understood, had proposed with the assistance of a flash mob in front of hundreds of total strangers at the Venetian Macao resort. Many members of Indonesia's growing upper-middle class, concentrated solely in the west of the country, have money their parents would never have dreamed of - and most think it's normal, and perhaps even essential, to show it off.
Following a massive reduction in the country's poverty rate in the last two decades, one in every five Indonesians now belongs to the middle class. They're riding a commodities boom - the burning and churning-up of this vast archipelago's rich natural resources, including logging, palm oil, coal, gold and copper. This, combined with aggressive domestic spending, low taxes and little enforcement of labour laws, means that those who know how to play the system are raking it in.
"Surabaya is the capital of East Java province in Indonesia. Surabaya is the second-largest city in Indonesia with a population of over 3 million within the city proper and over 10 million in the Greater Surabaya metropolitan area, known as Gerbangkertosusila."
Indonesia is the world's 4th most populous country with over 261 million people as of 2016.
Recently:
Palm Oil was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead it Unleashed a Catastrophe
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Palm oil is often associated with tropical deforestation above all else. However, this is only one side of the story, as agricultural scientists from the University of Göttingen and the IPB University Bogor (Indonesia) show in a new study.
[...] For the study, the researchers evaluated results from over 30 years of research on the environmental, economic and social consequences of oil palm cultivation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They combined the results from the international literature with their own data from Indonesia, which they have been collecting since 2012 as part of an interdisciplinary German-Indonesian Collaborative Research Centre (CRC 990). Indonesia is the largest palm oil producer and exporter in the world. A large proportion of the palm oil produced in Indonesia is exported to Europe and the U.S., where it is used by the food, fuel and cosmetics industries.
The research data show that the expansion of oil palm in some regions of the world—especially Indonesia and Malaysia—contributes significantly to tropical deforestation and the loss of biodiversity. Clearing forestland also leads to substantial carbon emissions and other environmental problems. "However, banning palm oil production and trade would not be a sustainable solution," says Professor Matin Qaim, agricultural economist at the University of Göttingen and first author of the study. "The reason is that oil palm produces three times more oil per hectare than soybean, rapeseed, or sunflower. This means that if palm oil was replaced with alternative vegetable oils, much more land would be needed for cultivation, with additional loss of forests and other natural habitats."
Banning palm oil would also have negative economic and social consequences in the producing countries. "It is often assumed that oil palm is only grown on large industrial plantations," says Qaim. "In reality, however, around half of the world's palm oil is produced by smallholder farmers. Our data show that oil palm cultivation increases profits and incomes in the small farm sector, in addition to raising wages and creating additional employment for rural laborers. Although there are incidences of conflicts over land, overall the oil palm boom has significantly reduced rural poverty in Indonesia and other producing countries."
Journal Reference:
Matin Qaim, et al. Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom [open], (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-resource-110119-024922)
Previously:
(2018-12-18) Indonesia: A Country That Became "Crazy Rich"
(2018-12-01) Palm Oil was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead it Unleashed a Catastrophe.
(2017-03-15) A Makeover for the World's Most Hated Crop
(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?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:32AM (2 children)
The Jews are behind this.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @11:39AM (1 child)
Prove it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday December 02 2018, @04:04AM
Feeding Trolls - just don't do it!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday December 01 2018, @02:30PM (15 children)
I didn't see anything in the article explaining a problem with the plant, only with the people.
Give them fusion reactors and the same people in the same places (plus or minus migration) would have radioactive waste dumped everywhere, for example.
Much like anti-gun sentiment, the problem is the criminals living in a society with guns, removing guns just means they'll be murderous criminals and rapists with knives, like the UK immigrants.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @03:37PM (13 children)
Notice how the narrative of the story tries at numerous junctions to place the blame for this mess on the US.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @03:46PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:05PM (11 children)
Since the incentive for this behavior is directly created by the U.S. and Europe, who implemented the policies despite warnings of the probable results, I think that blame is justified.
There's plenty of scummy people in every country, and the scummiest usually rise to become the wealthiest and most powerful. A large percentage of the human species, of any race or nationality, feel perfectly justified in doing whatever they think they can get away with. And responsible government policy must be created with that in mind - and it should be easy since the politicians creating the policy all have extensive first-hand experience with the sort of scummy behavior people will engage in while pursuing wealth and power.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:18PM (10 children)
That's the problem. It's not. The narrative doesn't match reality. Indonesia wasn't a virtuous place. Those renewable energy mandates merely created incentive under the rules of that society to act in this way, but those people in that society would cause harm anyway. At least, this way wealth is being brought into the society which can transform it for the better.
No. Every one of us has the potential be scummy, mostly by choice. What keeps societies from drowning in it is our incentives. Notice we don't have the same stripping of resources in the developed world. It's been solved via us getting wealthy enough that we can afford to value relatively pristine nature.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @05:51PM (7 children)
It's easy to forget that a large part of what makes the developed world work so well, is the legal and political infrastructure.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @08:30PM (6 children)
I was going to say. If it weren't for the enforcement of rules we'd still be creating the same environmental catastrophes here in the U.S. as is going on elsewhere. And we're still doing so anyway in every sector that has had enough political clout to prevent the rules from being enacted, or applied to them. If coal plants were held to the same standards of allowable radioactive pollution as nuclear reactors they'd all go out of business.
And in countries where the business tycoons have even cozier relationships with the government than in the U.S.(which is most of the developing world), those rules never get put in place. We know that's the current situation, which means when we dangle a carrot in front of those tycoons giving them incentive to destroy the rainforest, we know that they will do so - because we would do so, if not for the rules our populace has laboriously managed to get put in place espite incredible resitance from our own tycoons.
When our politicians choose to dangle such a carrot in front of other tycoons in a proclaimed attempt to reduce global environmental damage, then either they're lying, or they're stupid. Either way they deserve to be called out. Because in trying to address a global problem we must consider the global consequences of our actions.
More importantly - now that the true cost of our actions has become readily apparent, it's clear that the current rules are actually working *against* their purported goal, and so they should be removed - WE are the ones choosing to keep them in place, and thus exacerbate the problem. Where's the upside to justify keeping them?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:03PM (5 children)
Like what?
Note that there is no compelling reason nuclear plants should have stronger standards than coal burning plants on this matter.
Keep in mind that this was the same state of affairs in the US about 150 years ago. It changed. My view is that Indonesia will change in the same way for the same reasons. With increasing wealth of a society comes increasing value of human life and enforced regulations to protect that life.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:22PM (4 children)
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.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:32PM
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.
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)
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Immerman on Saturday December 01 2018, @08:07PM (1 child)
You obviously haven't viewed any of the coal or tar-sand mining operations currently underway in the good old USA and Canada.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 01 2018, @08:42PM
Those mining operations have to meet environmental, labor, and safety regulations that no Indonesian business has to even dream about. I think it will change as Indonesia continues to increase the wealth of its populace and the value of human life increases.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:15AM
Hi Dummy,
thanks for posting again, it is a real treat to shoot you down!
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/nuclear-fusion-waste-products.121166/ [physicsforums.com]
While there may be some amount of radioactive by products they would be orders of magnitude less than fission reactions and possibly even 100% non-radioactive or containable.
As to your point about guns, there is a much higher chance of escaping someone with a knife than with a gun. Also, despite the conservative meme about a "good guy with a gun" it seems that being the good guy is more of a liability with getting shot by police.
Nice to see your racism creeping back in, I was starting to wonder if "the gays" got to you /s
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @06:31PM
Thanks to clear cutting forests in Indonesia, to farm palm oil.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @06:57PM
I don't see the problem here that's how capitalism works ... Wait a minute... Maybe capitalism IS the problem
(Score: 4, Interesting) by crafoo on Saturday December 01 2018, @11:13PM (2 children)
Slow your economic growth, keep your populace in poverty for another 100 years. While you're people live in simple mud hovels, our first world tourists will visit and marvel at your pristine and virgin natural resources. Thank you!
I suppose, in my mind, this is a clear motivation for the 1st world to be very careful about what they ask of the global economy, what incentives we put forth into the market, and an obvious illustration of good intentions implemented naively. Possibly, just possibly, scientists should play a larger role in government (real scientists, not "social scientists") and lawyers should play a lesser role?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 02 2018, @12:52AM
The only way to get lawyers out of government is via revolution [wikipedia.org] - they don't give up, it's not in their nature.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:51PM
Good intentions? What the US wants is higher soybean and soybean oil prices. So the narrative of palm oil being bad is to be encouraged. Especially when China is buying a lot fewer US soybeans.
It's not like there weren't forests where soybean farms are now today. And in Brazil they're clearing forests to plant soybeans. But that doesn't fit the narrative the western world wants.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46327634 [bbc.com]
http://imea.com.br/site/upload/pdf/arquivos/AgroMT_Outlook_2025_ENG.pdf [imea.com.br]
Also: https://theconversation.com/amp/palm-oil-boycott-could-actually-increase-deforestation-sustainable-products-are-the-solution-106733 [theconversation.com]
It's not like the rich countries are going to pay billions to the poor countries to take care of their forests and not chop them down.
By the way, many of the rich countries are more deforested than many of these supposedly poor countries "irresponsibly chopping down their forests to grow stuff": https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?year_high_desc=true [worldbank.org]
Look at how deforested the UK is for instance.