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US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
It’s The Year of Living Dangerously all over again.
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On Tuesday, two journalists were arrested in Sumatra while covering a politically sensitive topic – palm oil harvesting and the ensuing decimation of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, carbon-capturing rainforests, and the subsequent release of giant CO2 pockets that lie beneath the forests and their peat swamps.
More disturbing than the reporters’ deportation, though, is how little we consumers seem to realize that, not only are we what we eat, but when it comes to palm oil, we are eating our own lifeblood. We’re ‘eating’ our oxygen, we’re ‘eating’ our fellow species. We’re consuming our own future by driving up carbon emissions much faster than we can offset them. We are the snake eating its own tail.
Digging into the palm oil debate, an urgent issue to many environmental groups, our reporter Ashley Phillips found herself slipping into a swamp of material.
For years, there has been a volley of claims and counter claims about the environmental and humanitarian consequences related to palm oil production.
The UN Environment Programme has blamed the massive destruction of rainforest in Malaysia and Indonesia for producing such a volume of manmade greenhouse gas emissions that it ranks behind only the US and China. These gases are released as the native rainforest is cleared to install or expand palm plantations, and it is exacerbated by the slash-and-burn clearing that is a double whammy to the atmosphere — removing carbon-holding rainforest while spewing carbon from massive wood fires.
Seemingly the only thing happening faster than the destruction of the rainforest in Southeast Asia is the consumer demand for palm oil which turns up in every 10th product at the grocery by some estimations.
Palm Oil, an ingredient found in most processed food, has been the subject of much environmental debate in recent years over its role in deforestation. It is commonly found in cooking oil and as an ingredient in cosmetics, soaps, detergents, and some plastics. Palm oil also has been considered for use in the production of biodiesel.
There have been many attempts to make palm oil sustainable. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was even established in 2003 to do just that. Unfortunately, six years later, there is still no system that can effectively trace palm oil beyond the processor to the plantation level. Companies that manufacture products using palm oil have little way of knowing where the controversial substance originated — which leaves the question of whether and to what degree palm oil is sustainably farmed up in the air.
Don’t know if it’s the financial crisis, the change of seasons or just the usual grumpiness over the incessant despoiling of the mothership, but the green agitators seem especially edgy lately.
Reuters reported Monday that Greenpeace had blockaded palm oil ships leaving an Indonesian port bound for China and Europe. Their point: harvesting palm oil in that region is destroying rainforests and wildlife and contributing to greenhouse gases (remember those warm climate forests are especially valuable carbon sinks).
The activists were reportedly bobbing in rubber boats out in front of the palm oil ships and one Greenpeacer was seen jumping aboard the anchor of a ship, where he or she presumably clung for dear life.
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