As part of an ill-advised plan to reduce fossil fuel and use more vegetable oils in biofuels, there were policies enacted in the 2000s which spurred the development of palm oil plantations. The results have been an environmental catastrophe:
The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slash and burn of existing forests released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millennia. It turned Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions.
Southeast Asia has become a carbon bomb, as the forests are cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe. The palm-oil boom has made many heartless land-owners rich and emboldened many corporations to abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/magazine/palm-oil-borneo-climate-catastrophe.html
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