From NASA, while we wring our hands over coal fired power plants in the west, the rest of the world seems oblivious to creating even far worse air pollution. Hi-res sat image follows.
Illegal Fires Set in Indonesia Cause Smog Problem
Widespread wildfires are lighting up Indonesia, but these fires were not started accidentally. These fires were set deliberately to clear land for palm oil companies. This type of “slash-and-burn” agricultural has been used for centuries to clear land for new planting, however, the setting of such fires is now illegal in Indonesia. That doesn’t seem to be stopping plantation owners from continuing this practice. The Huffington Post reports that Laurel Sutherlin of the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco-based environmental organization sent the paper an email stating, “Widespread, illegal burning to clear rainforests and peatlands for palm oil and pulp and paper plantation expansion is unfortunately a well-established yearly ritual in Sumatra.”
The worst by-product of this practice is the deliterious smog produced by the fires. Smog so lethal that a record high of 401 pollution index was recorded in the city-state at noon on Friday (Aug. 16), according to UK’s The Independent. A measurement over 400 is said to be life-threatening to sick and elderly people, the paper notes. Of course, deforestation is also a negative by-product of this practice as well.
A staple for cooking throughout Southeast Asia and elsewhere, palm oil is the single largest traded vegetable oil commodity in the world, and global demand is rising rapidly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says. The oil is increasingly used in the manufacture of cosmetics, soaps, pharmaceuticals and industrial products. It is also used to make biodiesel fuel.
Image: NASA’s Terra satellite collected this natural-color image with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, instrument on August 27, 2013. Actively burning areas, detected by MODIS’s thermal bands, are outlined in red. NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC. Caption by Lynn Jenner with information from the Huffington Post and The Independent
Download Links
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Check the headline. ‘on’ = ‘of’?
I havenn’t bought a product even suspected of containing Palm Oil in over 20 years .. surely the rest of the world has noticed the devastation caused by the development of this monster ?
Environmentalism has created this monster, killing the forests, birds and Orangutans.
I’m sure it’s the West’s fault.
But it’s renewable, sustainable and possibly even organic.
Those satellite cameras must have caught them on a quiet day – earlier this year the smoke was so bad in Singapore (200 Km NE of those fires) that we could barely see buildings 1 km away, and it was very irritating to nose and eyes (this is the first time is has ever irritated me like that).
I believe all the Riau archipelago to the north east would have been shrouded in smoke throughout that time period.
And this lasted about two or three weeks – with one week being very serious.
This is enhanced Google-Earth image of an area in Sumatra showing systematic destruction of the native jungle
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Sumatra.htm
But – having noted the seriousness of the fires:
Some good points about palm oil.
Its a tree – plant it once, start harvest in 5 or 6 years (modern strains down to 4 yrs) – keep harvesting until it is 20 to 25 years of age. No further plowing needed.
Yield is impressive – about 6 tonnes of oil per Ha per year – compared to canola: 0.7 tonnes of oil per Ha per year – and then you have to re cultivate and replant every year.
It is a pretty good crop – if only they could enforce the no burning rules.
And for those bemoaning the loss of someone else’s rainforests – simple – plow in your low yielding canola, and replant your own bl**dy forests.
Palm oil price: Currently about US$740/tonne. So you can see the attraction – 20 Ha of palm can give a very good income (oil value is 6 x $740 = $4,440/Ha).
20 Ha returns US$89,000 per year (growers don’t get all that, but are well paid).
Unfortunately almost all the palm is in the hands of a very few big companies – locals don’t get much.
But what about the devastation of the Amazon bought about by Soy?
It seems “they cannot answer a simple question, If Palm Oil is so evil, so bad, so demonized, why is clear cutting for firewood, so good, so wonderful that all the Greenpeace mob not only think that it is wonderful but must be encouraged. An example of this is clear cutting North Carolina to provide Drax U.K. with 7.5 million tonnes per year of wood pellets.
Re the Pollution, they know who is doing it, they know its illegal. Their response, arrest two dirt poor farmers for burning rubbish as they have done for thousands of years. I asked the Local Paper, why, seeing they themselves know the law, why the law is not enforced and the culprits jailed and forced to pay the costs of putting the fires out. They of course could not answer.
I object to the title. It is clearly not Palm Oil (and pulp and paper plantation expansion) which is the cause of the aerosols, but the method of land clearance. Regulations in individual nations, and their enforcement, or lack of same, is the issue. Palm oil, pulp and paper are valuable commodities and there is little reason to object to their production and sale. Blaming the economic development of world wide traded and valuable commodity products for the pollution, instead of the land clearance technique, is inverting cause and effect.
The yield on a well managed estate is much more than six tonnes. Trees can fruit in less than 3 years. Life is about 25 years after which they too tall to harvest. Also each tree produces one bunch per month, no season really, so cropping is rotational.
They use little fertiliser and insecticide. Indeed they use weevils to pollinate the trees, barn owls to control rats and snakes, plants to control insects and diseases. They are now using swifts to control the weevils, which provide birds nests and a good secondary income.
They also use no fuel, once up and running. biomass fuels their processes and they use home made biodiesel. Very green and self sufficient.
That looks like an effective way to locally cool a part of the planet.
$740/tonne? one tonne (if the internet is correct as far as I could get it) is just over 300 gallons, so a little over $2/gallon or just over $100 a barrel.
Biodiesel!
On a good estate, the locals live in villages, with water and power supplied. A clubhouse and other socail facilities. Indeed like a tropical version of Cadbury. Yes it is abused, yes their are bad planters but the bulk, look after their workers and plantations well.
They laugh at Greenpeace and those that boycott palm products. Let them, just the demand growth from China and India dwarfs their petty purchases. Yes they fully aware they the target on unprincipled attacks
Grey Lensman,
It seems “they cannot answer a simple question, If Palm Oil is so evil, so bad, so demonized, why is clear cutting for firewood, so good, so wonderful that all the Greenpeace mob not only think that it is wonderful but must be encouraged. An example of this is clear cutting North Carolina to provide Drax U.K. with 7.5 million tonnes per year of wood pellets.
It is not the clear cutting that is bad but what replaces it. In the case of NC, most forests are replanted in similar ot original trees in order to produce the next “crop” – sustainable farming. In the rain forest the natural timber is typically being replaced by higher cash crops which provide a much poorer environment than the original state.
You know, I am actually convinced that Palm Oil is a huge problem, because both Wattsupwiththat and Skepticalscience, who disagree about almost everything beyond the number of corners in a circle, actually speak in unison on this. I agree that palm oil is a monster. This sort of monster will grow on the fertile soil of our rising energy demand, whenever the energy industry finds an environmental argument to hijack. It is obvious that palm oil is not a viable alternative to coal, oil and gas. Nevertheless, I believe we need a viable alternative.
Tom
They are not planting teak as firewood but some fast growing softwood. FYI, Prime jungle is not good for Oil Palm, wet scrub is best. Most of that is now used, so they looking at better yields. They can easily get up to 20 tonnes per hectare.
Most Springs in south Texas we get the same effect from the burning of fields in Mexico.
Yes palm oil is much better as a food and a food/cosmetic/industrial feedstock Shall we tell Europe to plough out their wheat fields and turn them back to forest?
What little human-lit burning is allowed on Earth these days is nothing compared to what nature used to do year in and year out before settlements and fire suppression kept Mother Nature at bay. This kind of sensationalized micro-issue is similar to CO2. Much ado about very, very little.
Thomas, So you are convinced that Palm Oil is a very big problem. Care to tell us why? How much Palm Oil is used to make bio diesel? How does it compare with firewood or Soy or Canola? Lush green well covered lands with well managed soils, or barren scrub land and acidic swamps.
Or how about the millions of acres of chemically induced wheat and corn in the USA?
Well said, Pamela Gray. It’s similar to the fires in 2011 in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Had the naturally started fires been allowed to burn, we’d have a much different landscape today. The same goes for the western USA. Where once there were open forests with less than 10 trees per hectare, we now have thousands which lead to devastating crown fires, rather than cool grass burns that allowed for rapid herbaceous regrowth.
Patrick B. – it’s not uncommon for the smoke of those fires to reach us up here in the Ark-La-Tex giving a strange red hue to the sunlight.
Markx suggests: “… plow in your low yielding canola, and replant your own bl**dy forests.”
Canola is generally grown where no actual forests have stood for centuries, namely prairie grasslands.
The palm oil tree would not, of course, survive through the first autumn in Saskatchewan, much less make it through the winter.
These oil palm trees also cause ozone pollution.
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/44/18447.short