Talk about unintended consequences! In 2007, the US started mandating biofuels with at least partly environmentally friendly intentions, but it led to increases in palm oil prices, which motivated companies to burn Indonesia’s forests and the peatlands they sit on in order to grow more palm oil, which spewed far more carbon into the air than the biofuels saved. The New York Times Magazine has a sobering story about this:
The supposed carbon gains of plant-based fuels have to be offset, Searchinger argued in subsequent papers, by one of three things: reducing food consumption, increasing yields from existing cropland or — most likely — creating entirely new cropland, probably in the countries with the largest “underutilized” forests. And the typical analysis doesn’t count the carbon produced by cutting down these forests or — if that deforestation happens to take place in Indonesia — emissions from disturbing the extremely carbon-rich peatland soils that much of the forest grows upon….
With the machinery, the forests are cut down, their timber efficiently removed, and the swampy peatland they sit on is left to drain and dry. Once it’s dried, it’s burned….
The dried and decaying peatland soil in this part of Borneo would almost certainly continue to burn for many more months, even years, releasing volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that far exceeded those from the rain-forest deforestation itself….
Right now deforestation globally contributes 15 percent of the planet’s total emissions, the same as all the cars and trucks and trains across the globe.
This is a sobering lesson about how even environmentally friendly policy changes can backfire in horrifically unintended ways if it occurs in isolation from other needed environmentalist policies. Unfortunately this will be used by conservatives to say “I told you so, science is bad at engineering solutions to climate change, we might as well just keep burning up the planet and hope that God intercedes, since nothing we do can prevent climate change.” But we have to push back on that, by saying that, on the contrary, we need more environmental engineering worldwide, not less. Switching to biofuels would have been, and could still be a way to reduce carbon emissions, but only if we simultaneously give all countries enough incentives to make protection of peatlands and forests more profitable than burning them down and turning them into farmlands, drastically decrease the need to use gas-guzzling vehicles at all, and ultimately drastically reduce fertility worldwide (ideally through increased education and access to contraception) so that we need less food as well as less fuel. To do this, we need bigger and stronger international organizations and agreements—another thing that conservatives are trying to destroy.