All over the world, we are clamoring for alternative fuels to replace petroleum products, and this is a good thing. Well, except for the bad side, that is. Specifically ethanol and fuels made from grain, are rapidly forcing the price of foods to skyrocket, not so much in the developed West where we are not totally reliant on grains, but but many other countries are beginning to feel the additional cost and are suffering. This is because the world's largest producer and exporter of grain is trying to move its production towards the creation of fuels, therefore grain starts to have a price dominated by equivalence to oil...
The second part of this bad story relates to palm oil, which many have said can replace coal or carbon-fuels especially in the generation of electricity. I have excerpted some information on this issue which is proving dramatically counter-productive.
report late last year by a Netherlands-based research group claimed some plantations produce far more carbon dioxide than they save. Seeded on drained peat swamps, they unleash a warehouse of carbon from decomposed plants and animals that had been locked in the bogs for hundreds of million years, which one biologist described as "buried sunshine."
"As a biofuel, it's a failure," said Marcel Silvius, a climate change expert for Wetlands International, the institute that led the research team.
The palm oil debate is just one example of cold realism dampening enthusiasm for vegetable oils as substitutes for the fossil fuels that are widely blamed for the gradual warming of the Earth and potentially disastrous changes in climate.
In the United States, where farmers have diverted corn and sugar crops to ethanol production, food prices have soared. Environmentalists say the high energy cost of making ethanol, coupled with the degraded land and polluted water from heavily fertilized fields, have put a large question mark on its value as a biofuel.
Palm oil is an ingredient in cooking oil, cosmetics, soaps, bread, chocolate -- in fact, in about one in every 10 products on the supermarket shelf. It also is used as an industrial lubricant.
It is attractive for bioenergy because it is relatively abundant, cheap at about US$557 (euro419) per ton in mid-March, and more easily integrated into existing power stations than most other alternative fuels.
Unlike carbon-rich fossil fuels, production is considered carbon neutral, meaning the carbon emitted from burning palm oil is the same as that absorbed during growth.
But the surrounding environmental cost is becoming increasingly apparent.
The four-year study in Southeast Asia by a team from Wetlands, Delft Hydraulics and the Alterra Research Center of Wageningen University said 600 million tons of carbon dioxide seep every year into the air from drained peat swamps. Another 1.4 billion tons go up in smoke from rain forest fires deliberately set to clear new land for plantations, shrouding much of Singapore and Malaysia in an impenetrable haze for weeks at a time.
Together, those 2 billion tons of CO2 amount to 8 percent of the globe's fossil fuel emissions, the report said.
Deforestation is the No. 2 cause of greenhouse gas emissions after the burning of fossil fuels, said Jeffrey Dukes, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts, and clearing peat swamps for plantations is "a double whammy."
It not only releases carbon trapped over many millennia, Dukes said, but destroys the most efficient ecosystem on the planet for sucking carbon from the atmosphere and storing it underground.
"By converting these forests, we are essentially taking that buried sunshine and wasting it," he said. "It's a terrible decision. Whether or not it's consciously made, it's society going in reverse."
Despite pressure to replace coal, oil and gas with cleaner fuels, major power companies in Britain and the Netherlands have scrapped plans to partially convert electricity generation to palm oil.
So there are two major problems that the experts didn't predict even though they represent fules with great intentions. It's too often like that, and if we continue to do things only in reaction to disaster, this will not change: the problems will get worse. We must start to be proactive and think all the issues through before starting hugely expensive programs to help reverse global warming. It's pretty sad that if you want to see where the growth sectors are, you normally look at the job ads. So it's easy to see that healthcare is a huge issue, and anything to do with the elderly - there are thousands of jobs advertized. Sales of anything in our consumer societyL the same thing. Try doing a search to find jobs in real environmental protection issues: you'll probably find none! (On the other hand, if you do find some let me know as it's getting old being unemployed!)
Peace,
White Feather
