Rising Palm Oil Demand Destroying Rainforests

November 20, 2007

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FuturePundit

A new Greenpeace report Cooking The Climate highlights the huge amount of carbon dioxide getting released into the atmosphere as a result of rainforest destruction. Destruction of rain forests for palm oil plantation production is a major cause of carbon dioxide emissions.

Greenpeace investigations centred on the tiny Indonesian
province of Riau on the island of Sumatra which contains 25 per cent of
Indonesia’s palm oil plantations. Its peat swamps and forests are among
the world’s most concentrated carbon stores.

They contain an estimated 14.6bn tonnes of carbon and their
destruction would release the equivalent of total global greenhouse gas
emissions for a year.

Greenpeace claims the burning of Indonesia’s peatlands and forests
releases 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gases annually - equal to four per
cent of the global total - even though it occupies 0.1 per cent of the
land on Earth.

Note that the push for biomass energy from Brazil and other
equatorial countries is leading to huge CO2 emissions as forests get
ripped down and burned. A lot of this is happening to feed a growing
population of humans. Also, Asian industrialization is increasing the
amount of spending money people have for food and so Chinese, Indians,
and others are spending more on types of foods (e.g. meats) that
require more land usage to produce. This increases food imports by
these countries and forest destruction by food exporters.

Making a bad trend even worse, some Westerners who pose as environmentalists are promoting biomass energy usage. Well, because of the CO2 released by rainforest clearing equatorial region biomass production expansion causes a net boost in CO2 emissions.
So people who worry about global warming and therefore advocate biodiesel are not just wiping out species (and I’m not trying to belittle the importance of this problem). They are increasing atmospheric concentrations of a gas whose rise they view as a big problem.

Fossil fuels burning attracts a lot of attention for its effect on global temperatures. But Greenpeace says that forest destruction is also very important for global climate warming.

About three million hectares (7.5 million acres) of
these peatland forests are earmarked for conversion to palm oil
plantations over the next decade, Greenpeace said.
This “climate bomb” is ticking loudly in the run-up to December’s
United Nations’ climate change meeting in Bali, which is expected to
debate forests’ role in accelerating — and slowing — climate change,
said Sue Connor, Greenpeace International Forests Campaigner.

“(If the Riau peatlands are cleared) it would wipe out any chance we
have of keeping the temperature increase below two degrees Celsius,”
she said, referring to a threshold given by the UN’s climate panel.
Palm oil is used in anything from body lotions and toothpaste to
chocolate bars, crisps and as a component of biofuels, such as
biodiesel.

I am more concerned about the destruction of habitats and species.
My guess is that CO2 emissions will peak some time in the next 20 years
and then decline as fossil fuels reserves depletion causes fossil fuels
extraction to decline. This will happen first for oil, then natural
gas, and eventually even coal.

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Posted in Rain Forest Destruction