Below is a link to Thursday’s Guardian of an article warning that Indonesia’s rush to cultivate palm oil as a fuel substitute could release billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in one go. This is because deep peat bogs that contain massive amounts of carbon would need to be cleared to make way for palm oil cultivation.
The article is written by John Vidal and he aims it at UK supermarkets because they use a lot of palm oil but the context is our hope that palm oil could be an oil subsitute.
Its a pretty stark article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/08/climatechange.biofuels
Jeremy C
Comments 1
Rather worrying. I wrote a finals paper as an undergraduate analysing why the Suharto regime collapsed in the mid-90’s. One of the main reasons was a scarcity of cooking oil (Palm Oil) that led to unrest amongst the populace. Considering demand for cooking oil is now growing I don’t see how TPTB could stop this even if they wanted.
Posted 10 Nov 2007 at 8:46 pm ¶