Al Gore's palm oil train wreck gets worse

This article points out only the food based uses of palm oil. Much of the oil is destined for use a fuel in Europe under mandates that are leading to replacement of 20% of Europe’s transportation fuel with biomass derived fuels. This was done with no regard of the carbon intensity of the fuel source in the past, but a slight enlightenment of the European Commission has put pressure on palm derived fuels. Thus only “green” palm plantations, those that were established long ago and cannot be burdened with huge iLUC carbon emissions are used for fuel. This leaves the rest of the palm oil for used for food and other human consumption applications. And then Greenpeace steps in and criticizes Pizza Hut and KFC for using this palm oil in processes. One example of this campaign can be seen at: http://www.fastcompany.com/1648744/greenpeace-social-media-campaign-forces-nestl%C3%A9-stop-using-unsustainable-palm-oil
But the true issue is the massive use of palm oil for fuel. Dr. Jim Hileman, now of FAA Environmental programs, formery at MIT, conducted a detailed study of the life cycle emissions of jet fuel derived from palm oil and found the Carbon Intensity of palm derived fuels can be 8X that of fossil fuel. Another failure of the Green Agenda, and Algore’s investments in alternative fuels.
http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blog/index.php/2011/05/11/biofuel-use-in-aviation-could-be-less-green-study-shows/
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/green-jet-fuels-0511.html
As typical of NGO’s, they focus on what draws attention and not on reality. If they wanted to do something useful about the explosive growth of palm plantations, they could start be pointing attention on the European biofuels mandates such as Directive 2003-30-3c and 2009-28-EC.

Looking at the picture, it seems to me that the amount of CO2-absorbing leaf area in the palm oil plantation must be vastly less than that of the closely-packed, and bigger, rain forest trees they have replaced. So, yes, oil palms DO take in CO2 but relatively little compared to the rain forest trees. Just suggesting …
Anthea

This is a very simple issue, made complex by eco warriors. They are caught in a blind, Globull Warmists but with eco values.
They dont mix.
Notice from the posts above, nothing, or very little about Soy.
Yes a lot of social injustice but it applies equally to rice paddy, copper mines, tin mines, soy plantations. The poor will be branded as squatters and evicted to profit corrupt administrators.
No mention of the destroyed forests of Europe
No mention of the fact that good forest management restores forests, restores diversity. No mention of maximum use of land for all uses. No mention of EU set aside rules, farmers paid not to farm land.
No mention of the alternative uses of scrubland/swamp so poor it will not support even jungle growth.
no mention of corrupt officials that “sell reserve land and primate protected areas. Of course there is no records, no paper trails, no money trails. Just blame the deadly palm oil.

Trees absorb CO2.
And then they release it back when they burn or decompose.
If you want to use trees to sequester carbon, you must preserve them at end-of-life.
But if you do that, you’ll have to replace rotting plantlife with some other fertilizer.

Indonesia does not care about playing the AGW game, right? I’m guessing they have figured out which way the wind is blowing with respect to things like soybeans, the first choice for a source of biofuels. Today, on this page:
http://www.agweb.com/article/high_prices_offset_some_crop_yield_loss/
I found this comment:
“Soybeans yields are the smallest since 1995.”
Since American agriculture has taken many hits from weather lately (check out the current prices for grains and soybeans, and compare them to 20 years ago), and the cooling of the planet will likely lead to more trouble for farmers, and since you have to plant trees years before you expect to reap a harvest from them, I think they’re just acting on the basis of enlightened self-interest.
Plus, contrary to what so-called “health experts” say in the US, palm oil and palm kernel oil are better for your diet than soybean oil. Large parts of the world depend on palm oil as their primary cooking oil, and they are healthier – if you can take as proof their lower expenditures on health care and the ease with which they are able to produce healthy children.

I’m surprised it’s taken so long for the greenies to wake up to rainforest destruction in the name of “saving the planet”. In 1997 I anchored my boat in the Morova Lagoon in the Soloman Islands just off Vanunu Island. That evening a local fellow visited us in his dug-out canoe and soon the deck was covered with things he had brought to trade (money being of limited value in this part of the world). After our trading session concluded, we asked him if there were any churches in the area and he offered to take us the following Sunday morning if we would provide the gas for his outboard engine. He told us he was taking us to a small village church, but to get there we would need to pass through a “logging camp” and the Malaysian Chinese that ran the place might not take well to white people being there. “They don’t like foreigners who take pictures of their work, ” he told us. We left the cameras on the boat.
When we landed at the pier of the logging camp we were told by the Chinese guard that we could not pass through the camp. Several Soloman Islanders, who were also on their way to church, objected and we were eventually allowed to go with them to the church. Later, our guide, who went by the name “Feral Philip”, told us about the origins and operations of the Malay loggers. In short, it went something like this: Government officials in Honaria formed a “natural resources development company”. They were given at no or nominal cost rights to “rainforest development”. The local company sold the logging rights on Philip’s island to a Malay company who promised to clear the rainforest so palm oil plantations could be planted. The foreign company then began clear cutting the virgin rainforest, and selling the teak and other hardwoods abroad. They then planted palm oil seedings in the place of giant teak trees. As you might guess, the clear cutting was progressing much faster than the planting of the plantation. This “development” was justifed by government officials as “social progress”, Feral Philip told us, because it promised jobs to local islanders (which were few and paid poorly) and it was supposed to provide a renewable source of oils when the plam trees matured several years hence.
Philip was not happy with the scheme — from experience he knew the government officials were corupt, but he also knew his island would not be helped by the “development” of the rainforest. He said, and this is a direct quote translated from the pidgin English of a semi-literate, totally “off the grid” Soloman island villager: “They spoil the environment (yes, he used that word). They are killing the lagoon. The trees they plant do not hold the soil and when it rains the mud flows into the lagoon and kills the coral. The fish go away and we have less to eat. We told them what would happen, but they didn’t listen.”
I don’t know what happened to the palm oil plantation under development in 1997, but if you go to Google Earth at 8 deg. 42 min. 29 sec. North and 158 deg. 03 min. 48 sec. East you can still see the scar on the hill side left by this undertaking. Today it looks like the Malays left as soon as the rainforest had been cleared. Something tells me Feral Philip got screwed in the name of socially progressive sustainable development and the pursuit of environmental friendly bio-feul.

The past ten years have seen dramatic reductions in pollution from fossil fuels and even a huge reduction in carbon dioxide creation. This has been due to the more and more extensive availability and affordability of domestic natural gas. According to the US Enegy Department there is a 350 year minimum worldwide supply. The US has over one trillion barrels of shale oil in the now off-limits Green River Formation alone. We have hundreds of years of coal supply that can be cleaned cleanly and converted to gas, oil or gasoline fuel. Natural gas, if used in cars and trucks alone would eliminate the need for every drop of imported oil.
We have an abundence of energy wealth and a president intent on restricting this energy in any way he possibly can. He is ignoring available affordable means of cleaning the air and demanding fantasy “solutions’ that are neither affordable or workable. In fact they are a fantasy that are causing a $400 billion a year oil trade deficit, unnecessary tensions and conflicts due to oil and is ignoring a resource that, coupled with other countries, could make the despots, dictators and terrorists that profit from oil irrelevant. .

Rob Potter says:
October 8, 2012 at 7:01 am
Sorry, but this is a poor analysis. The new palm oil plantations will fix massive amounts of CO2 – probably more than the old-growth forest was doing. You may not want to clear old-growth forest for other reasons, but CO2 emissions are not one of them.
Do you have any data to back up that assertion? Here’s what Meine van Noordwijk, Regional Coordinator for Southeast Asia and Principal Ecologist for the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF) says: “”This is the classical debate on flows versus stocks, of plant physiology versus systems ecology — currently the pulpwood as well as the oil palm plantation sector are fighting the battle with claims that they improve the C sequestration rates from something like 0.5 t C/ha/yr for maturing forest to values of 3-5 t C/ha/yr for fast growing plantations — while the world should care about the release of about 250 t C/ha of existing stocks before this increase in rates can be realized,” van Noordwijk told mongabay.com. “It will take 50-100 years before [carbon storage at this sequestration rate] equals 250. Meanwhile the average life on an oil palm plantation is less than 25 years.”

Palm oil is an excellent cooking oil, rich source of vitamin e and has so many practical uses. They make sweetened condensed milk from it here. Much better than Soy stuff. The growth sector is Organic cold processed and very high value.
The global catering trade depends upon it. The soy Industry with fellow travellers the Conola guys hate it.

Zeke said
Quote
Did a project comparing lifecycle carbon emissions from palm oil biodiesel to that of normal diesel; the former is about 4-12 times worse.
Unquote
Not a very well done project then, Perhaps three days in Borneo was too much time.

This is a world scale human idiocy, the Indonesians do not give a flying **** about diversity and the rainforest, still less do they care about mmCO2.
They illegally allow [turn a blind eye] loggers into the virgin forest, who cut the trees down, the tree boles are roughly dressed, sent to Thailand for sawing to size and then on to China to end up in as furniture in a living room somewhere in Europe etc.
i. the wood smoke from the clearance burning after the logging is completed: is a global catastrophe, it is so bad, that it can be observed by remote sensing.
ii. Someone said [above], the forest can grow back – well that’s debatable, the soils are leached the flora and fauna, the diversity is gone, the soil will take eons to regenerate, secondary forest is poor to thin the eco-system is obliterated…but who would clear the oil palms in the unlikely event the owners would want to return the forest back to it’s original state?
iii. Indonesia makes billions from the oil palm, Indonesia works only via corrupt practice and bribes – that’s how business is done: they are far from eco-warrior altruists.
iv. Western governments [especially the UK] are always praising Indonesian efforts to ‘combat global warming’ – I dunno who is more stupid………….or should I say duplicitous?
v. Until the West weans itself off the AGW mania [plants for fuel] and until the West halts using oil palm products – period [no chance], there will be no change in Indonesian Oil palm exploitation of virgin rainforest.
Any ‘green’ shill who advocates palm oil substitutes as a means for vehicular transportation, ‘is a full hamper short of a picnic’.
And, anyone who despairs about the plight of the Orang [pongo pygmaeus], will want to kick Al Gore back to his ancestry.

It’s another own goal scored by Al Gore and the International Gang of Idiots. Hopefully they will soon lose interest in the scam, production will cease and in a few years of neglect it will revert to Jungle. Destroying rainforest to grow a crops for fuel is stupid when there is coal, oil, gas and nuclear power available. It results in loss of diversity, wildlife and wildlife habitat.