0.14 Related issues in sustainable development and the environment  (Page 6/7)

There are only about 50-60 thousand orangutans left in the world. They require large tracts of jungle to survive. They cannot survive in the monocultures that are palm oil plantations.

In deforestation, are things changing for the better? Somewhat, in some venues. For example, after decades of heavy, misdirected subsidies for land-clearing for cattle raising and plantation agriculture Brazil finally began curtailing their grossly wasteful and destructive incentives in the late nineties. And as noted, Brazil in 2009 finally began clarifying property rights to forest, to make them secure.

Indonesia has also undertaken some measures to protect what is left of her intact forests. Subsidies to plywood mills are less important than they used to be. And, years ago, the government established a 1,600 square mile forest reserve in Southern Kalimantan. There live 6,000 endangered orangutans, the second largest concentration of these primates anywhere. The park is called Tanjung Puting national Park. That is good news. The bad news- Indonesia seems unable to resist intrusions in the park by tree poachers.

Just in the month of July 2008, loggers cut over a 40,000 acre area in the NE side of the park, to clear the forest for new palm oil plantings. This illegal logging alone displaced 560 orangutans.

The European palm oil initiative for so-called “green fuels” is just on more example of how policy failures in rich and poor nations wreak environmental havoc in poor nations.

Second Green BackFire See “The Wisdom of Governments”, The Economist , April 6, 2013.

One truly perverse green backfire coming from Europe: classification of wood as a renewable resource to be used in electric power generation.

But what in fact is one of the main beneficiaries of the EU policies toward non-renewables?

Specifically, when the EU decided to label wood pellets as a renewable, its usage in electric power generation skyrocketed. The wood pellets are utilized in “co-firing” power stations that burn 90% coal and 10% wood. This is supposed to cut down on carbon emissions.

The EU goal is to have “renewables” constitute 20% of its energy by 2020. This goal cannot be reached without “co-firing.” Indeed, a few power stations in England and Germany have been converted to run on wood energy alone.

This source of energy is actually subsidized (about U/S/ $63 per megawatt hr).

In 2012 Europe consumed 13 million tons wood pellets much of which came from forests in the U.S. What is wrong with this picture? Wood as a fuel yields carbon twice over:

1. When you grind it up
2. When you ship it

In fact, to produce 1mwh of electricity from wood pellets releases 200 kg of CO ² into the atmosphere. Is this good environmental policy?

According to research by Tim Searchinger of Princeton University, using whole trees to produce energy increases carbon emission by 79% compared with coal over a 20 year period.

This green backfire increases carbon emissions, rather than decreasing it.

Genetically modified food

A third serious example of “Green Backfire” with adverse environmental and nutritional impact on poor countries has been the widespread phobia toward genetically modified foods such as “golden rice”. Golden rice was genetically engineered to produce betacarotene, to help reduce Vitamin A deficiency, which causes 2 million deaths a year in young children. This phobia is deeply seated in some continental European countries (e.g. France and Germany) and has been exported to many African nations. In the former group of rich countries, laws and regulations severely restrict both the use of genetically modified seeds as well as genetically modified food products, including basic grains. Fear of genetically modified foods persist in Europe in spite of the fact that billions of people have eaten such foods since 1990. Not one problem has been found. Indeed one respected scientist claims that there is not a single credible report of dangerous health effects from genetically modified foods. Pamela Ronald, “How Scare Tactics on GMO Foods Hurt Everybody”, MIT Technology Review , June 12, 2014.