How Palm Oil in EU Biodiesel is fueling both the climate and biodiversity crisis

We’ve seen the heart-breaking pictures of Orangutans brutalized, killed or orphaned by the deforestation caused by the palm oil industry. Besides the unbearable cruelty, the clearcutting of the virigin rain forest for palm oil worldwide has precipitated a loss of biodiverstiy on a scale that is precedented only by the mass extinction events the world has experienced just five times in its long history. Because of awareness campaigns many of us have even chosen to avoid certain products that use palm oil that has been unsustainably harvested.

Palm Oil’s use in Biodiesel though is a frightening story that has not yet received the social media campaign attention it deserves. While it is also a story of grim loss of nature it is also a story of exceptional human stupidity and group think.

In 2018 65 % of all palm oil brought into the European Union was used to make power and 55% of this amount was used to make biodiesel.

Biodiesel sounds good doesn’t it? They also call it “greenfuel”! Sounds like it must be saving the planet or at least making some impact on the climate crisis we face right? Think again.

According to the European Federation for Transport and Environment “Palm oil biodiesel is the worst of all biofuels. It releases three times the greenhouse gases emissions of fossil diesel.”

Most environmental problems are caused by greed and an incomplete evaluation of the true costs of certain industries. In this situation there is no greed just severe stupidity. Here you have governmental subsidies, set up presumably to reduce the impact of climate change but in effect compounding its effects by three times. While the European Union has recognized that there is some kind of problem they still have not committed to ending palm oil use in EU biofuel till 2030. What will be left then?

I encourage you to read more about this issue here on the German Rainforest Rescue Organization’s (Rettet den Regenwald) website and to spread the word about this senseless and dangerous use of palm oil.

https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/petitions/1183/stop-palm-oil-and-soy-biofuels-now