Booming palm oil demand fuelling climate crisis

I'm not gonna link. Search for biofuels or bio-fuels (I'm not consistent) on the sidebar. I've many posts on this topic.

I know I'm beating this sucker to death, but when will the world wake up and realize the dangers of biofuels? They're dirty, steal food from people and hurt the climate.

Biofuels are about the nastiest things around and are embraced by most countries. They make people think they've found the magic bullet for petroleum dependency.

Booming world demand for palm oil from Indonesia for food and biofuels is posing multiple threats to the environment as forests are being cleared, peat wetlands exposed and carbon released, a report said on Thursday.

The massive forest clearance for palm plantations underway in Indonesia removes trees that capture carbon dioxide, and the draining and burning of the peat wetlands leads to massive release of the gas, said environment group Greenpeace in its report "Cooking the Climate".

On top of that, the booming demand for biofuels that include vegetable oils to replace mineral oil is in many cases actually generating more climate warming gases, the report said.

"Tropical deforestation accounts for about a fifth of all global emissions," said the report. "Indonesia now has the fastest deforestation rate of any major forested country, losing two percent of its remaining forest every year."

I hope it doesn't come to this, but when the world wakes up I'm gonna SCREAM I told you so!

Via Reuters.