The palm oil demand has been rising very fast since the 1980s.
To add injury to insult, palm oil has also been promoted as green “renewable energy”, which of course will cause even more rainforests to be destroyed.
While the European Union has threatened to phase out palm oil as biofuel by 2030, cynically continuing to subsidise this until then, the Brexitted UK seems set to buy palm oil biofuel at discount prices...
According to the following palm oil energy is even more damaging in terms of CO2 emissions than those “terrible” fossil fuels...
https://www.orangutans-sos.org/no-palm- ... -campaign/The use of palm oil for biodiesel increased five-fold following the introduction of the target to source 10% of transport fuels from renewable sources by 2020. Scientific evidence shows that burning biofuels, including palm oil, can actually release more greenhouse gases than burning fossil fuels.
(http://archive.is/DkSEL)
Major consumer brands like Nestlé, Unilever, Mondelēz International, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, and the Hershey Company have been buying palm oil from an illegal plantation inside the protected Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
Rawa Singkil holds the highest density of critically endangered orang-utans in the world...
This “illegal” palm fruit is sold by brokers to processing mills just outside the protected reserve.
The palm oil is then sold to global traders, the Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) and Indonesia’s Musim Mas Group. These companies then sell the (illegally produced) palm oil, directly or indirectly, to the household consumer brands mentioned above.
Major banks, including Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, ABN Amro Bank from the Netherlands and Singapore’s OCBC, continue to finance the GAR: https://chinadialogue.net/en/food/11597 ... n-enclave/
(http://archive.is/N2smX)
How wonderful is that? We have to be terrified of global warming and then “renewable” energy must be used that is more expensive and doesn’t even lower carbon dioxide emission and...
destroys nature!
The following “scientific” paper was published earlier this year, but can only be read after payment...
Jose Rehbein et al. – Renewable energy development threatens many globally important biodiversity areas (2020): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs ... /gcb.15067
The conclusion of the paper is that 2,206 of the 12,600 “renewable energy” facilities (sun, wind and hydro) are in important biodiversity areas, where they damage nature...
According to lead author José Rehbein:
Energy facilities and the infrastructure around them such as roads and increased human activity can be incredibly damaging to the natural environment. Many of these developments, when not well planned for, are not compatible with biodiversity conservation.
The majority of these 2,206 “renewable energy” facilities in important biodiversity areas, are now located in western Europe and developed nations elsewhere.
The new 922 “renewable energy” facilities are planned in important biodiversity areas in Asia and Africa, which hold much of the world’s biodiversity: https://ibed.uva.nl/content/news/2020/0 ... areas.html
(http://archive.is/XR7f8)
Not only palm oil plantations in Indonesia threaten the habitat of endangered orang-utans.
The Batang Toru hydropower project in North Sumatra, threatens the only habitat of the critically endangered Tapanuli orang-utan (of which there are only 800 left in the world).
India plans 175 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2022. This will require some 12.5 million hectares of land (an area the size of Austria). This could threaten more than 10,000 square kilometres of forest and 2,500 sq km of important bird habitats by building wind farms.
India’s Rajasthan desert region will be a major area for wind and solar power expansion. It is right here where the last viable population of one of the world’s most threatened birds, the Great Indian Bustard, is surviving: https://www.eco-business.com/news/solar ... sia-india/
(http://web.archive.org/web/202004041109 ... sia-india/)