Michael Le Page in the pages of NewScientist (5 May 2018, paywall) reveals how best intentions are the paving stones down that merry old path:
Half of all the palm oil imported by Europe is turned into biodiesel and blended into conventional fuel to power cars and trucks. This misguided attempt to “green” fuels is actually tripling carbon emissions, not reducing them. What’s more, the practice is subsidised by the European Union. In other words, taxpayers are paying to destroy rainforests and accelerate climate change.
“People don’t know that they have palm oil in their fuel tanks,” says Laura Buffet of Transport & Environment in Brussels, Belgium, which campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe.
And yet, while palm oil has acquired a reputation as a villain, the plant itself, called oil palm, is something of a hero. It is up to nine times as productive per hectare as other sources of vegetable oils such as rapeseed (canola) and soybeans, meaning it requires less land (see Graph [omitted]).
The problem is that we are cutting down some of the most species-rich rainforests in the world to plant ever more oil palms. Growing demand is driving massive deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce 90 per cent of palm oil.
To halt this destruction, demand must be curbed. The obvious solution is to ditch palm oil from foods, but this approach is likely to fail.
Ever get the feeling that we’re going to see more of this sort of problem in the future? It may be a tragic thing to say, it may offend some people who believe life is somehow sacred, it may even enrage clever libertarians who think they see the hole in the reasoning, but, to me, the problem is just too much human life.
“Palm oil has a worse greenhouse-gas footprint than any other vegetable oil and causes habitat loss of endangered species,” says Stephanie Searle of the International Council on Clean Transportation in Washington DC. “It’s better to expand 5 hectares of rapeseed production onto abandoned cropland in Europe than to destroy 1 hectare of peat swamp forest in Indonesia.”
It feels like we’re on the poopdeck of the Titanic, frantically rearranging the lounge chairs while the ship’s cat goes sliding down the tilting deck.
But I must soldier on, I fear, because I may be wrong.
