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Palm oil industry’s big carbon impact
By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now
It’s The Year of Living Dangerously all over again.
[caption id="attachment_6862" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Orangutan (Photo: Tom Theodore/Dreamstime)"]  [/caption]
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.
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Tags: · Carbon Emissions, carbon pollution, deforestation, Indonesian third largest carbon polluter, orangutans, packaged foods, palm oil, palm planatations, Rainforest Action Network, Rainforest Alliance, Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, RSPO, Southeast Asia, tropical rainforest
Disney donates to save forests
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
While the world scrambles to find clean energy solutions, somewhere, every minute of every day, saws buzz through a forest, cutting down one of nature’s antidotes to carbon pollution.
[caption id="attachment_6323" align="alignright" width="280" caption="Saving forests in the Congo will help save endangered gorillas (Photo: John Martin)"]  [/caption]
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Tags: · Amazon, Arkansas, Congo, Conservation Fund, Conservation International, deforestation, habitat restoration, Louisiana, Mississippi, Mississippi River Valley, Nature Conservancy, Northern California, rainforest, restoring forests, sustainable forests, The Walt Disney Company, tropical forests
Greenpeace reports progress on Amazon deforestation practices
By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now
In June, Greenpeace released “Slaughtering the Amazon,” a three-year investigation into deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Greenpeace found that people were taking over protected lands in order to expand their cattle ranches. This was not only illegal, but large quantities of greenhouse gases were being released into the atmosphere as a result of the rapidly depleting forests.
[caption id="attachment_6233" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Adidas, Nike and Timberland have committed to cancel supplier contracts unless their products were guaranteed to be free from Amazon destruction."]  [/caption]
Deforestation accounts for around one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world’s trains, planes and cars combined, and Greenpeace estimates that the cattle industry is responsible for 80 percent of all deforestation.
Now, just four months after the release of “Slaughtering the Amazon,” positive steps are being taken by some of the big companies implicated.
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Tags: · Adidas, Bertin, cattle ranches, deforestation, Greenpeace, JBS-Friboi, Marfrig, Minerva, Nike, Slaughtering the Amazon, Timberland
No forests were harmed for these chopsticks
September 25th, 2009 · No Comments
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
You’ve gotten rid of your plastic water bottle. You turn down polystyrene to-go containers. You ask for local fruit and you only drink Fair Trade coffee.
What’s left to help lower your dining-out carbon profile?
Reusable titanium chopsticks.
Alan Folts’ colorful and gracefully turned titanium “TiStix” chopsticks are made from surplus titanium; they’re [...]
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Tags: · Chopsticks, deforestation, disposable chopsticks, greener dining, recycled titanium, reusable chopsticks, TiStix
A parade of palm oil products
September 11th, 2009 · No Comments
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
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.
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Tags: · BarbaraKesslerBlog, Borneo, consumer goods, deforestation, Indonesia, Malaysia, palm oil, palm oil products, rainforest, The Problem with Palm Oil, the Rainforest Network
Sustainable palm oil? Not so fast…
September 11th, 2009 · No Comments
By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now
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.
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Tags: · Advertising Standards Authority, Borneo, Carbon Emissions, deforestation, Friends of the Earth, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Malaysia, Malaysian Palm Oil Council, orangutan, palm oil, palm tree plantations, Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil, Sumatra, tropical rainforest, United National Environment Programme, World Wildlife Fund
Amazon deforestation and your shoes
By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now
When we put our shoes on, we don’t really think about where they’ve been before they got to us.
Most likely, they were manufactured somewhere overseas, China or Vietnam perhaps, then shipped to the United States. But where did the material used to manufacture them come from? Are your shoes made of leather? If so, there’s a chance they’re contributing to climate change — and the illegal destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
 Greenpeace International says rainforests are being needlessly lost not just to the meat trade but to the leather industry, as cattle ranches expand illegally in Brazilian Amazon region.
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Tags: · Adidas/Reebok, Amazon rainforest, Brazil, cattle trade, Clarks, deforestation, Geox, Greenhouse Gases, leather, Nike, Prada, shoes, Timberland
Greenpeace warns that cattle trade has dangerous ecological impacts
From Green Right Now Reports
Greenpeace’s report “Slaughtering the Amazon” notes that Brazil’s thriving and expanding cattle trade, which has made it the world’s largest exporter of beef and the top producer (along with China) of leather, has out-sized environmental consequences.
 “The cattle sector in the Brazilian Amazon is responsible for 14% of the world’s annual deforestation. This makes it the world’s largest driver of deforestation, responsible for more forest loss than the total deforestation in any country outside Brazil except Indonesia,” according to the report, the result of a three-year investigation by Greenpeace International.
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Tags: · Amazon, beef, Brazil, cattle trade, deforestation, Greenhouse Gases, illegal deforestation, leather, rainforests, ranches, supply chains
Show some enthusiasm for recycled TP
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
There’s a funny scene in the Larry David show Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry, and the displaced New Orleans family encamped in his house, wink and smirk over the toilet paper that his wife has installed in the bathrooms.
Being an environmentalist – as is her real life counterpart Laurie David – Cheryl David had outfitted the water closets with recycled TP. The running joke was that everyone had noticed the difference. And they weren’t in love with the experience.
Such is the reputation of recycled TP. Although, it seems as though I have successfully slipped it by my family. Has it gotten better (I think it has)? Or are they smirking behind my back? Probably a bit of both. I don’t really know, and it doesn’t matter because we won’t be returning to conventional stuff.
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Tags: · 365, Angel Soft, BarbaraKesslerBlog, Charmin, deforestation, Earth Friendly, Fiesta Green, Green Forest, Greenpeace, Kleenex Cottonelle, Natural Value, Recycled Paper, Seventh Generation, toilet paper, Whole Foods Market
Don’t look to tropical rainforests for biofuels
By John DeFore
Building biofuel plantations in tropical rainforests may sound productive but is actually worse for climate change than leaving the forest be, according to a paper to be published early next year in the journal Conversation Biology.
The report (which can be read in full here) was summarized by the World Wildlife Fund in time for the start of this month’s U.N. climate-treaty talks in Poland. (WWF’s Dr. Neil Burgess was a co-author, alongside “an international research team of botanists, ecologists and engineers from seven nations.”)
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Tags: · Biofuels, deforestation, tropical forest
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