Here on the island of Borneo, a thick haze often encloses this city of 500,000 people. The cause: forest fires that have blazed across the island. Many of them were set to clear land to produce palm oil — a key ingredient in biodiesel, a clean-burning diesel fuel alternative.
At a new oil-palm plantation, the hillsides have been cleared and terraced.
The bluish smoke is at times so dense that it leaves the city dark and gloomy even at midday. The haze has sometimes closed Pontianak’s airport and prompted local volunteers to distribute face-masks on city streets. From July through mid-October, Indonesian health officials reported 28,762 smog-related cases of respiratory illness across the country.
[…]
In the 1800s, Dutch and British traders began carving up parts of the island to produce rubber and other commodities. Later, Malaysian and Indonesian timber barons devastated millions of acres of forest logging tropical hardwoods. Today, only a little more than half of Borneo’s once-ubiquitous forest cover remains, according to WWF, the global conservation organization.
Now, the palm-oil boom threatens what’s left. In West Kalimantan, a province along the western coast, the palms cover about 988,000 acres or more, up from less than 37,000 acres in 1984. Fleets of orange and mustard-colored trucks ply the province’s few paved roads, ferrying the oil to river ports.
[…]
As fires burn deep into the dry peat soil beneath Indonesia’s forests, centuries of carbon trapped in the biomass are released into the atmosphere. A study presented last month at a U.N. Climate Change Conference in Nairobi showed that Indonesia is the world’s third-biggest carbon emitter behind the U.S. and China, when emissions from fires and other factors are considered.
Currently behind a WSJ subscriber wall, I received the full article by email, but if someone finds a free access page, let me know.
Previous: “climate injustice”
This is a glaring example of why we need individual responsibility and action, not Kyoto.
But widespread will to act is slow in coming. I believe there are two major reasons:
1) those who are convinced that there is a problem are waiting for Kyoto to fix it;
2) those who are fighting Kyoto (or pretending to fight Kyoto) are mostly just convincing themselves and others that there is no global warming problem.
An example: David Deming makes an allegation in a Senate hearing. He had published this serious allegation over a year ago, but apparently nobody has followed it up, because there is still no news about who this “major researcher” is. Bloggers take his statement and run with it, using that one unsubstantiated allegation to suggest that the whole global warming problem has been cooked up by corrupt researchers.
Climate cahnge is a fact…warming (and cooling trends) are facts but the theory that we are in a global warming trend due to an inert gas which plants eat and which reflects the portion of the solar light spectrun which causes heat, IS bogus…Kyoto is a con job. Now
I bet the eco-lefties didn’t see that coming. Maybe they could start a palm oil plantation on Hans Island??
this sounds like the argument that extracting oil from the tar sands consumes more energy than is produced.
Ethanol from grains is similar.
The palm oil plantations are very stupid policy. I suspect they’re a cynical attempt by Blair to make like he’s doing something on Global Warming kind of like the Fuel Cell car bollocks we all heard in Canada and the US a few years back.
Climate injustice hit London England yesterday.
How much/per person tax is dion going to hit us with for producing co2. In other words, stop breathing 7 growing gardens. We could kill all the animals in the world and that would reduce a lot of co2 but then what would the peta idiots do. We would miss all those so called famous people on the ice flows with the seals. Next year the sealers can say they are reducing co2 production by killing seals and helping canada meet its kyoto targets. Who comes up with these definitions. By the way, big protests today and tomorrow for WAA. I wonder what happened at their office. Can’t get a human to answer the phone, just the answering machine. Must be all those women calling telling them it is groups like them we are angry at. At least they can’t hang up on you when the machine answers. There site says they will publish you story, but I can’t find any stories pro or con.
I have commented on this on my blog it is the problem with the expansion of agribusiness into the developing world where they displace subsistance farming, including farming for exchange in the marketplace, with coroporate farming for palm oil.
The nasty folks behind this are companies like Cargill. And if they don’t have the ‘corporate’ responsibility to end slash and burn policies well I don’t know who does.
“Climate cahnge is a fact”
The U turn is coming, slowly.
maryT – did you say that we will be told to stop growing gardens, to reduce CO2 emissions? I hope you’re joking. Food transportation is a big source of emissions; growing a garden instead of a lawn is one of the best things an individual can do about CO2 emissions.
But there is the danger that it will get you in better shape, and weight loss releases carbon to the atmosphere, you know. 😉
David Suzuki just said, on cbc, that he is aware of the carbon dioxide emmitted by his families life style, but they travel alot. Does he mean he and his family are responsible for global warming. Seems roses are still blooming in England, evidence that the warming is affecting plants. Magna is cutting 3000 jobs, will BS have to cut back on hairdressers or find a richer man to break up his marriage.
sequestering CO2
we need to cut down all the trees, paint them in thick impermeable sealant and put them somewhere for ever. Replant all the forests and do it again.
this is a temporary stopgap measure until we can build more limestone mountains. say about 20 million years.
Gardening not a replacement veg source for urbanites; it requires a great amount of land to provide for the staggering volume required for the populations of cities. Plus winter storage, or do you like scurvy?
Best plan for reduction of CO2? Buy books, newspapers, boxes, anything made from non-recycled paper – don’t recycle paper, in fact. Build as many stick-framed houses, and wooden items as possible. Cut down mature forest and replant. Dump all paper and wood waste into landfills.
The CO2 enters the trees over many years. If left in the forest, the dead wood rots and returns to CO2. Untouched, the forest becomes a stable cycle of CO2 formation and binding. So, cut them down, turn the wood into something useful, keep it as long as it is useful, and then bury it in a dry, airless, clay-capped landfill so that rots very sloooowly over a hundred years. THAT is a carbon sink.
Trees are not eternal and mystical; they are plants. They live and they die. Forest fires burn through them regularly to clean up the old stuff and renew the forest. The nice part is that, when the forest is ready for renewal, the fire will come. New forests don’t burn well. Just us idiots keep a pristine, stagnant, geriatric forest going as long as humanly possible.
There is currently endless landfill space in Canada; there is a shortage of common sense, honesty, and a surplus of NIMBY.
The stmt was, global warming is having an effect on plants, so it seems likely that to stop this we have to stop growing plants. I do not have a green thumb, do not like flowers, and do not garden. My husband does all that but learned years ago never buy me flowers as a gift. As for losing weight and getting in shape, I weighed 110 lbs 53 yrs ago, today I weigh 115. Diet and exercise are forbidden in my vocabulary. Roses still blooming in England was the reason for the stmt. Probably made tongue in chedk, but who would expect that on the cbc.
Jose said:
“Climate cahnge is a fact”
The U turn is coming, slowly.
Who ever said it isn’t? The climate is always changing. Perhaps one day in the future they will be farming in Greenland like they were 1000 years ago.
The eco-freaks want to replace re jibs with this eco-tourism whata crock
The nut bars are only interested in North Americian pollution as we are the only ones that pollute the world.Borneo is not on their scope.I still like Greenland 1000AD weather.No cars then.
Can someone tell me what sea level and earth temperature is supposed to be when everything is normal? If you have it handy, could you also include CO2 levels at normal?
I just got openoffice calc … with the above numbers I’ll be able to figure out how far we are out of whack.
“Gardening not a replacement veg source for urbanites”
So nobody else should think about it either? If we can’t have one equal solution for everyone, we’ll have no solution at all?
I’m working with a group that is involved in Indonesia Indo-Asian and Asian Pacific nations/regions that are affected by severe pollution cased by palm oil production…..we are looking for ways to use the by-products which are currently being dumped wherever it’s convenient. Never mind the fact that otherwise pristine forest is simply bulldozed and burnt to create palm plantations the production of the palm oil is polluting scare water resources and land.
In the mean time there is a severe protein shortage in the entire region that could be Alleviated by use of land and water for meat/dairy/fish production.
This is the nasty untold truth of many pet ideas of the Enviro-Commies : There is NO Such Thing as polutionless energy! Or “Free Lunch”
arcolaura: Food transportation is a big source of emissions; growing a garden instead of a lawn is one of the best things an individual can do about CO2 emissions.
We are in Canada right? Please speak to the fact that a “garden” has a max of 2 months of harvest. Explain the energy to convert to canned. Tell us about how much it would cost in CO2 to freeze it up to 10 months. Compare to transportation costs.
Has there been anything!!! the environmentalists have done that has not caused more damage than it cured?
Meanwhile, with starving people all over the world, we are converting megatons of eatable food into a poor fuel substitute that consumes more oil to produce than it saves.
A garden doesn’t have to supply the entire diet for the entire 12 months to be beneficial. As for canning and freezing – how about potatoes in a root cellar? Squashes in the porch? Oh, I forgot, nobody knows how to cook and eat those things anymore.
arcolaura-Hey, I had mashed spuds and butternut squash last night. You better explain to people what a root cellar and porch are. I agree with you, no one knows how to cook much anymore. I still remember a young bride, watching a neighbor baking a choc cake, asking what is that, sour cream was the answer, The young bride replied, I am sure happy my husband makes enought money for us to buy sweet cream. She was serious. At that point the old farm wife gave her a lecture on who was better off, and who could survive loss of income. Farm wife won, hands down.
The eco-freak green nuts say america is the worlds biggist poluter but theres places in the former USSR that are enviromental nightmares so why dont they concenstrate on that and besides everytime the eco-freaks go about to whine about GLOBAL WARMING their using thier private jets and brning up all that fuel and putting all that CO2 in the air
Way back in the late 70s, I conducted an experiment, running a small diesel generator on Canola Oil. Undergraduate project. Biodiesel, the term, hadn’t been invented yet. It ran almost as well as on diesel fuel.
But, and this was the big issue. When crunching the energy numbers; BTUs, caloric-content, power output, energy input and all that, we discovered it was a lost cause.
When taking into account the energy used to make the farm machinery, the fertilizer(organic or chemical), land use, processing ect, low and behold, MORE energy (from fossil fuels) was used to make a litre of Canola fuel oil(sorry, biodiesel), than was recovered by burning the Canola Oil.
Unless there is something far, far different in the equation now(I doubt it), we are barking up a hoaxy tree. Most people with a little knowlege in the area know this unreported(MSM aren’t, blogs are) fact.
Who doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know ??
Activists type of environmentalists
The Politically Correct
The MSM
UNers
Kyoto Nutbars
Biofuel production scam peddlers
Oh, and one more thing. When the price relationship between a barrel of oil and Oilseeds(Canola, Palm Oil, soybeans, ect) became more normal, the whole idea was forgotten.
Until recently. Mixture required for the hoax to reapear ?? Low oilseeds prices, high fossil fuel prices, but mostly, a new crop of lefty, so-called enviros, coming out of our beloved Universities. “Hey, look at me. I need a so-called job, cushy job, with pension. And, oh ya, the world is coming to an end too”.
One more thing. Should we allow hungry people to eat food instead of burning it in our vehicles ??
I cant for the life of me figure out why why why when the predominant, er, exclusive economic priority is to clear the forest, why cant the trees be hauled off to a mill and cut into useful lumber like we do here in canada???
surely to blazes (pun intended!! ) just abnout any kind of tree can be used for some form of lumber even lowly friggin PARTICLE BOARD.
but nope, get out the book of matches and let fly the smoke and sparks.
Ive seen satellite pics of the amazon at night and its thousands of fires burning.
global cooling.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061211/plesiosaur_bones_061211/20061211?hub=SciTech
mindyou- long term