The European Union wants to protect the climate and reduce carbon emissions from motor vehicles by blending fuels with increasing shares of supposedly eco-friendly “biofuels.”
Last year, 1.9 million tons of palm oil were added to diesel fuel in the EU – in addition to millions of tons of equally harmful rapeseed and soybean oils.
The plantations needed to satisfy Europes’s demand for palm oil cover an area of 700,000 hectares (1,729,738 Acres) – land that until recently was still rainforest and the habitat of 5,000 endangered orangutans.
Despite the clear-cutting, the EU has classified palm oil as sustainably produced.
This policy has now blown up in the legislators’ faces, with scientists confirming what environmentalists and development experts have long asserted: biofuels help neither people nor the environment – and they are most certainly not climate-neutral, as even studies commissioned by the EU show.
Biodiesel from palm and soybean oil, but also from European-grown rapeseed, has a larger carbon footprint than diesel from fossil sources.
The EU must scrap its biofuels policy immediately, but the agri-industry is fighting hard to maintain the status quo.
Not surprising, when one considers that biofuels are currently subsidized to the tune of 10 billion euros in the EU alone.
Decision making in the European Union is a long process and involves many different actors that bring in studies, reports, arguments, and numbers.
Hundreds of industry lobbyists seek to influence this process and they are trying hard to protect their financial interests.
Next, the European Parliament and its committees along with the Council of the European Union will need to agree on a compromise based on the proposal published in October 2012.
Read more at Rainforest Rescue
Ethanol has effectively done the same thing. Not rain forests, but stands of trees that separated fields and harbored wildlife. But oh no, once ethanol became mainstream, all those trees were torn out and every bit of land possible put to the plow for corn. For food? To end up feeding our nation? No, to burn in our gas tanks.
And for no proveable benefits except to the farming industry. But try to back out off this mess, and you the Mid-west senators will tear you up. You can’t put this pandora back in the box.
Alright you Save the Rain Forests freaks where are your protesters to demand a end to this all all that Save the Rain Forests stuff from back in the 1990’s the Rain Forests the Lungs of the Earth? load of Malarkey i can still remember all this load of Malarkey from the Eco-Wackos