Indonesia's palm oil fires emitted more greenhouse gases in a day than the U.S.

http://qz.com/528160/indonesias-palm-oil-fires-are-emitting-more-greenhouse-gases-every-day-than-the-entire-us/

by Thorondor • 11 years ago

137 161 11 years ago

gsibble• 11 years ago

This is why I don't buy into cap and trade and other expensive systems for the US to reduce its emissions. Compared to emerging economies, our emissions are already dramatically lower. It's the 2nd and 3rd world that needs to get in line (China most of all).

Afforess• 11 years ago

Yes, it would be terrible if we did all that work to improve the atmosphere for nothing.

http://i.imgur.com/kUCPeBo.jpg

deepvibrations• 11 years ago

Amazing- I've been looking for this image for years, sums it up perfectly!

unethical_ban2• 11 years ago

"for nothing"

At huge cost to the economy and freedom from government regulations and bureaucracy. Plus, a lot of "green" solutions aren't utopic or practical.

It's not all or nothing, and I support being ecologically conscious. But I don't think it's wise to dismiss all criticism of the climate change cult.

claar• 11 years ago

This is a weak argument. No one is saying that smog in cities is desirable. But rather that there is insufficient evidence to show certain interventions are necessary/economical/effective.

karl_gluck2• 11 years ago

Come on, that's incredibly disingenuous.

Of course it's not terrible to improve the atmosphere. But you're making it sound like all methods are equivalent; when there are limited resources to address the problem, they need to be allocated accordingly.

It's a similar situation to water in California -- yes, everyone should cut down on consumption. But the single-family mega-mansions using as much as 90 normal residences [1] cutting 10% of their water usage has a much bigger impact than an average residence cutting 10%.

Edited:

If a billion dollars spent in the US reduces US emissions by 5%, and US emissions and emissions from these fires are equivalent, and it costs less to incentivize Indonesian / Malaysian palm oil producers to stop burning peat forest and reduce emissions by 5%, we should be doing that instead.

[1] https://www.revealnews.org/article/the-wet-prince-of-bel-air...

Original before edit: If the US could spend a billion dollars to reduce our carbon emissions by 5%, or could spend a billion dollars paying Indonesia & Malaysia to stop setting palm oil on fire and reduce THEIR emissions, the results are not equivalent. The latter is 200x more effective. [the 200x was from a misreading of the article]

oberstein3• 11 years ago

Crocodile humor.

planfaster9• 11 years ago

Cartoons use a myriad of figures of speech in order to build a setup-punchline structure that is actually funny.

One of the tricks of the trade is to use logical fallacies, as they are mechanisms for hiding premises or faulty logic, which is ideal to build assumptions in the viewer's mind that are then shattered by the punchline.

The figure of speech employed here is a fallacy called Begging the Question. When the character says "what if we create a better world for nothing" he is implicitly accepting the premise that the changes proposed by the presenter would create a better world even though he might not agree with the presenter's conclusions.

So the "funny" comes from pretending that we all agree that the list of things the presenter is talking about actually describe "a better world".

As for real life, I would say the cartoon, while funny, does not "sum up perfectly" the issue in real life, because in real life what is under dispute is whether governments taking more control for themselves, in order to carry out those things in the presenter's slide, is actually a better world than all of the alternatives, including taking care of the planet without giving more power to government institutions which have proven themselves incapable of seeing to completion endeavors several orders of magnitude simpler than "saving the world".

gambiting• 11 years ago

Well, US just burns off some crazy amount of natural gas that is released as the byproduct of oil drilling/fracking. It's not captured because it's too cheap to be worth it. 10 billion cubic feet in a month[1], just because it's "not worth it". So maybe,actually, US needs more caps and expensive systems to curb such behaviour?

[1]http://www.wsj.com/articles/north-dakotas-latest-fracking-pr...

codecamper3• 11 years ago

Agreed. Methane is way worse than CO2 as well. It is really shocking that companies inside the US borders are allowed to do this.

Avalaxy• 11 years ago

The fact that other people are messing up doesn't mean that you should as well. Everyone should take responsibility for their own actions.

planfaster9• 11 years ago

The Tragedy of the Commons illustrates precisely the opposite: that if other people are messing up a common good (the world, or the atmosphere, in this case), that means you should mess up as well, or you lose (in every sense: productivity, sustainability, etc).

_nedR• 11 years ago

Yep. Like the WWII Japanese General said :

"Just went we learn to play poker they change the game to bridge."

codecamper3• 11 years ago

Wouldn't raising the cost of energy around the world mean that goods made in China become more expensive. Meaning... we'd maybe move some jobs back to the US. Maybe a carbon tax would actually boost the US economy?

thrownaway24243• 11 years ago

Your statement does not square with reality, or the facts as stated in this article. Indonesia is a country close in population to the US, but the US releases dramatically more carbon, both in aggregate and per capita. For the Indonesians to even draw even with the US, they have to literally set their entire nation on fire.

mikeash15• 11 years ago

I don't follow. This is an unusually bad year for these fires and they surpassed US emissions for 26 days. US emissions are cranking year-round, year after year.

The US is the second largest emitter of CO2 in the world, and emits one seventh of the world total. China emits twice as much but has four times as many people. If you brought China into line with the US on a per-capita basis, you'd increase their total emissions by a factor of two!

masklinn11• 11 years ago

As the article notes Indonesia exceeded US greenhouse productions for 26 days. Out of 300. Don't worry love, the US are still solid #2 emitters of grenhouse gases (China being #1)

noobermin• 11 years ago

My SO is in Singapore, and she complains almost everyday about the smog.

While we in the US and other 1st worlders could do much to stem our pollution especially given our ability, the fight against climate change has to be a global fight, and not just the acts of a few willing nations.

Alkim• 11 years ago

I was just in Singapore for the past few days, after living there for several years. It really is awful this year.

The haze did make the laser show from the top of the Marina Sands really spectacular. ;-)

oberstein3• 11 years ago

Are there any engineering efforts[1] being proposed or actively worked on by Singapore to solve this issue? Every now and again I hear about the hazes forcing everyone in Singapore to wear masks and stay indoors as much as possible until the hazes dissipate. That state should be unacceptable for a first world city.

[1] Like, a giant sci-fi ocean-fan... Or a military solution of invading their neighbors and running things better.

whatgoodisaroad• 11 years ago

That state should be unacceptable for a first world city.

Happens in Los Angeles.

newman3142• 11 years ago

Do you understand how small Singapore is? (Not trying to be snarky)

But yeah, they are not invading anyone anytime soon.

codecamper3• 11 years ago

palm oil is a terrible, terrible thing. If you have travelled at all to central america or asia, you know what i mean. (ok yes, you got me... traveling to asia isn't so hot for the environment either)

Wherever you think a jungle should be, you see palm trees. As far as the eye can see.

If you care about this. And you probably should. Then have a look at the ingredient list & don't buy products with palm oil.

flycaliguy• 11 years ago

Don't forget that palm oil is sometimes used in animal feed and will not be found on packaging.

A family member recently switched from buying margarine to butter after reading about the environmental effects of palm oil. Our dairy farming uncle then reminded us that they use palm oil in the feed for the animals to aid in managing digestion and fat levels.

GordonS• 11 years ago

IMO, it also tastes bloody horrible!

krisroadruck• 11 years ago

Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all. Every tree releases its carbon, either by being burned or when it dies by rotting. It's effectively a non-trapped part of the atmospheres circulatory system. Remember trees breath the stuff in and eventually they exhale. The problems only crop up when you extract trapped hydrocarbons from underground and burn those. Oil and Coal bad, Tree's not so much.

dymk• 11 years ago

Sort of. It would be nice if we could sequester the carbon already in the air in trees. The benefit is two fold: More trees, and removal of carbon that is already in the air from burning fossil fuels.

thrownaway24243• 11 years ago

You cannot just infinitely accumulate trees. In a steady state, forests neither sequester nor release carbon.

briholt• 11 years ago

To add on - the goal is to preserve more forest space. If we do that, we can effectively sequester that carbon for long periods of time.

DrPhish• 11 years ago

Wood construction (e.g. 2x4 or other dimension lumber houses) does this to some extent, although there is carbon emission inherent in the harvesting, sawmilling process, transportation to the worksite and actual house construction. I'm surprised there isn't more general public awareness of using wood in engineering processes to offset the carbon costs and provide long-term carbon sequestering

cubano• 11 years ago

So the fact that it's releasing as much in one day as the entire US does in a year means nothing?

Wow...that's strange...it's going to take a bit to get my head around the logic of that. I'm not saying your wrong but I have to ponder it a bit...

[EDIT] So the article edited its conclusion after I posted this...please consider this before you ding me. It originally said the fires were releasing that much. Thank you.

thrownaway24243• 11 years ago

That is not what the article says. The article claims that for a single day these fires emitted more than the US did on that day.

mikeash15• 11 years ago

It's not as much in one day as the entire US does in a year. It's as much in one day as the entire US does in one day.

khuey2• 11 years ago

The article says the fires are especially bad because they're burning peatland this year, which is releasing trapped hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.

refurb2• 11 years ago

Peat contains hydrocarbons? Are you sure?

masklinn11• 11 years ago

It's not "this year", most indonesian forests sit on peat. This year's bad because it's a severe El Niño year making south-east asia very dry and thus fires worse. The article notes that the previous record year was 1997… which was also a strong El Niño year.

jbattle• 11 years ago

that's true if they let the trees re-grow to maturity and let the deep layers of peat reform (which AFAIK takes a really long time).

for better or worse these stands of older trees are a finite resource, and once they've burned them all the problem stops getting worse. But by then the CO2 is released and unlikely to be re-sequestered in Indonesia anytime soon

sophacles• 11 years ago

This is not the point, nor the problem....

1. Tropical peatland is not just trees. Its also got peat - a pile of vegetation that isn't exactly rotting - but rather storing carbon. In fact peat is a fuel source in many parts of the world - not coal or oil, but similar to those in releasing otherwise stored carbon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_peat

2. The process in this area also releases a lot of methane, which rotting doesn't always release, and certainly doesn't release this quickly.

mrtron• 11 years ago

Semi-permanently eliminating forested regions for alternate use shifts the environmental carbon balance - doesn't it?

ThomPete• 11 years ago

Are you sure about that?

Burning the tress is not part of the natural process that I can only imagine have been built over millions of years to find some sort of balance.

Just like any other system if you overload it beyond what it's built to handle it has consequences.

Genuinely interested.

herge• 11 years ago

Trees, on average, have a life span of a couple of decades. If we could capture all that carbon back by just re-growing trees for 10-20 years, we'd be fine. It's releasing over a period of 200 years the carbon accumulated through millions of years of oil and coal formation that is uncontrollable and will have devastating effects on the environment.

maxerickson• 11 years ago

I don't know about the forests in Indonesia, but for the most part, it's natural for forests that will burn to burn. At the extreme, there are tree species that only really reproduce after a forest fire, Jack Pine and Sequoia come to mind. Google says they are pyrophytes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte

robotresearcher• 11 years ago

Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all.

Of course it does. I have a tree. I can leave it alone for 100 years and it will reproduce itself several times over and then die and rot. Or I can burn it today.

masklinn11• 11 years ago

Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all. Every tree releases its carbon, either by being burned or when it dies by rotting.

In the normal lifecycle of a forest, there is a continuous low-level carbon release from trees rotting (or small fires) which is cycled back in the forest by new trees growing up in their placed. A mature forest is a carbon store, if the forest is stable it takes in as much carbon as it produces out.

You burn the forest, all the locked carbon gets released in the atmosphere with no recapture.

And that's not even considering that indonesian forests sit on peat, which are non-cycling long-term carbon stores.

The problems only crop up when you extract trapped hydrocarbons from underground and burn those. Oil and Coal bad, Tree's not so much.

All that oil and coal originally came from the environment, it's the exact same result.

arandomJohn• 11 years ago

If by burning the trees you are also permanently changing the use of that land from forest to agricultural then you are changing how much carbon is held by that area. This leaves aside the problems with burning peat.

This does change both the short term and long term atmospheric balance. If the land were left to eventually recover then the long term balance would be restored. That isn't going to happen.

sosuke• 11 years ago

So one tree burnt is the same as one tree sure, but when you're killing year old trees that usually live for 30 years then it seems you would be adding more carbon than you would have otherwise. 30 1 year trees or 1 30 year tree. Is it still equivalent?

vonmoltke• 11 years ago

Burning trees doesn't actually change the atmospheric balance at all.

This gets trotted out every time population, deforestation, and similar are discussed in relation to climate.

Yes, the cycle is roughly balanced. However, the magnitude of CO2 in the cycle increases. The cycle is not instantaneous; some of that CO2 in the cycle is always atmospheric. If you increase the volume of CO2 in the cycle you by definition and necessity increase the volume in the atmosphere at any given time.

siilats2• 11 years ago

The article title is misleading though. It was for 1 day that they emitted more. So overall about 1% of us emissions if you average for the year or 100 times less.

mikeash15• 11 years ago

How is it misleading? The title seems to be saying exactly that. Or was it edited?

aidenn02• 11 years ago

If the fires only burn e.g. 1 day per year, then they emit far less per day on average than the US.

masklinn11• 11 years ago

The title implies continuous superiority of indonesian emissions, not that they out-produced the US emissions for a peak day (or 20, out of 365)

mcherm• 11 years ago

Original Article Title: Indonesia’s palm oil fires are emitting more greenhouse gases every day than the entire US

More Accurate Title: Indonesia’s palm oil fires are emitting more greenhouse gases on some days than the entire US

nathangrant• 11 years ago

"On 26 days from the period of Sept. 1 to Oct. 14, their daily emissions surpassed those of the entire US"

It seems they claim 26 days not 1, but you are correct the initial assumption readers will come to is that every day they exceed US emissions.

siilats2• 11 years ago

Even though the article claims this, 26 days would be 7% and I cannot see this being true. They must use some creative measurement that measures 10% of us emissions or something like this. There is no way that the emissions are more than the weight of the burning material plus oxygen and there is no way an island can burn thru so many tones every year

dougmany• 11 years ago

It is also misleading in that burning trees and burning fossil fuels is very different in terms of global warming. The carbon trees are made of was extracted from the air as the tree grew so the net added to at atmosphere is zero. The carbon from fossil fuels was nicely sequestered before it was dug up an burnt, adding to total carbon concentration in the air.

Edit: OK I read the second half about peat and yes, the peat was sequestered before the fire so that is not good.

seunosewa• 11 years ago

Also, methane. It's worse than CO2 for 2 reasons: (1) It contributes far more to global warming, pound for pound. (2) Once you emit it, you can't take it back by planting trees, etc.

dang2• 11 years ago

Ok, we changed the title in an attempt to make that clear.

miles• 11 years ago

And, though environmental groups are loathe to discuss it[1], animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from ALL transportation[2].

[1] http://www.cowspiracy.com/

[2] http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM

cjensen• 11 years ago

All animal-produced carbon came from the air. Converting CO2 into more interesting greenhouse gasses generates a constant offset from the "natural" state. It's irrelevant in the long term view.

masklinn11• 11 years ago

All animal-produced carbon came from the air.

All carbon comes from star fusion, what relevance does that have?

It's irrelevant in the long term view.

It's irrelevant over geological term view, over "human" long-term view it's very relevant.

scythe2• 11 years ago

Not all greenhouse gases are the same. One of the unfortunate things about agriculture is that it's a major source of nitrous oxide, via fertilizer decomposition, and methane, via mostly cattle. Both N2O and CH4 are drastically more potent GHG than CO2, essentially because the atmospheric concentration of those gases is already much lower, so the proportional impact of N2O/CH4 emissions is much greater.

CH4 emissions from agriculture could be potentially reduced by improving manure treatment on farms (because untreated manure releases CH4) and regulating feed quality. Both have the side-effect of higher meat prices. N2O emissions are harder: you'd have to stop using nitrate-containing fertilizer.

thescriptkiddie• 11 years ago

Some of those more interesting greenhouse gasses, eg methane, can be hundreds of times worse than carbon dioxide. So the net impact is not zero.

scythe2• 11 years ago

Basically all vegetable oils are the same; palm oil is actually more efficient than any other crop that grows in Indonesia. It would be clearer, in my opinion, to say that Indonesia's vegetable oil fires emit [...], which prevents the interpretation some people apparently take where they buy coconut oil instead. Coconut is only better because it's expensive but if everyone used coconut oil it would be way, way worse than palm oil, because it takes three times the land area of coconuts to produce the same amount of oil as oil palms! If they used soybeans, it would take six times as much land to produce the same amount of oil.

In other words, the only way to lower demand for palm oil is to lower the demand for all oil. In my opinion, the best way to do that is to kill the perception of biofuel as sustainable. Eating food is bad enough -- all agriculture is bad for the environment -- but burning it is ridiculous. With the exception of biofuel avgas (which is a tiny proportion of the market) electricity is superior in every way.

nostromo2• 11 years ago

So interesting to follow the chain unintended consequences.

Trans fats make great muffins. But, oops, they happen to kill humans. So we ban them. Turns out palm oil also makes great muffins and doesn't kill humans. So, we burn down the ecosystem in Indonesia to make more of those delicious muffins and contribute to global warming.

Maybe we can just go back to using butter?

lisper7• 11 years ago

Except that cows are pretty environmentally-unfriendly too.

Sigh. There is no getting around the elephant in the living room: population. Either we control it, or the laws of physics will do it for us.

bostonpete2• 11 years ago

Except that cows are pretty environmentally-unfriendly too.

Well, you can milk anything with nipples.

moonchrome9• 11 years ago

I hate this sort of regressive thinking. We can just come up with more reliable ways of producing food.

I expect food production to see a huge revolution in 10-20 years - think something like genetically modified simple organisms that are designed to produce specific nutrients - like specific protein or sugar or fat.

If you can design them to be energy efficient and work in low amount of space in a controlled environment (say a shallow pool of water + UV lamps or something like that) you can have huge factories that stack these "ponds" on top of each other working 24/7 pumping out nutrients.

Then it's just a matter of combining them in to food.

merah3• 11 years ago

This.

Having studied environmental and social science for 11 years, published and achieved multiple "degrees of knowledge" for a solid career base; it was so very sad and frustrating that everyone seemingly persisted to "talk" around the elephant.

It drove me bonkers and was labelled a pessimist by my peers. I left academia 3 years ago and now travel the world, programming and documenting tropical flora and fauna. Best decision I ever made, pity it cost me £20,000 to arrive at it though.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

There is no getting around the elephant in the living room: population. Either we control it

Fine, lets not talk around it. Bluntly, experience has shown that "population control" boils down to one of two things:

(1) Strong and effective social security networks, which shift incentives and produce declines (often to negative levels) in natural population increase, or

(2) Brutal authoritarian repression, extending (among other things) to either including or incentivizing outright slaughter.

cosarara97• 11 years ago

Butter is more expensive than burning down Indonesia. (Using certain definitions of expensive)

tomphoolery• 11 years ago

How about we figure out a way to make palm oil somewhere else? Is it really that hard?

masklinn11• 11 years ago

Yes? Making any oil takes lots of room, palm is actually one of the most space-efficient productions (according to wikipedia it's 38% of the total vegetable oil production for 5% of the vegetable oil farmland), however it grows in tropical climates competing with existing old-growth native forests and the demand for it grows exponentially.

guelo3• 11 years ago

Wrong. The biggest consumers of Palm Oil are China and India, and the main driving factor is price. Palm oil is cheap. It has nothing to do with the FDA's position on trans fat.

aidenn02• 11 years ago

Is it cheaper than rapeseed or soy? I know corn oil in the US is cheap, but it's also heavily subsidized.

nostromo2• 11 years ago

You're reading an American-centricity into my comment that wasn't there. The fact remains that palm oil consumption is growing world-wide, in no small part as a replacement for trans-fats.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7157/full/448993a...

http://news.mongabay.com/2015/06/fda-bans-artificial-trans-f...

oneJob2• 11 years ago

Cowspiracy

ck2• 11 years ago

I find that hard to believe given that the way US farmers harvest sugar cane is to burn the entire field off.

https://google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sugar+cane+burn+field

IkmoIkmo• 11 years ago

Sliiightly misleading headline, although not incorrect in some ways.

For about a quarter of the year there are virtually no fires, another quarter (we're there now), there are a lot. Further, in most years the fires are much fewer than they are now, and we're now in a record year.

So the headline is true, but only for the worst part of a record breaking year. You can't extrapolate it. In general, say per year or per decade, the headline is false, and CO2 emissions are a topic that is spoken about in the context of such timeframes, not 'who emitted the most in a 30 day period in one particular year'.

Further, the comparison itself is misleading as the CO2 figures for the US (and all other countries, for that matter), only count burning fossil fuel (and producing cement). Not capturing emissions when fracking? Not counted. Millions of cows farting all over the place? Not counted. Agriculture? Not counted etc. That's why if you compare Indonesia to the US, Indonesians emit about 6 times less CO2 per capita. That's why it's a bit of a weird comparison. You're comparing one country's emissions within limited parameters, to another country's emissions from phenomena that fall outside of those parameters.

Anyway obviously it's a big concern nonetheless and a better comparison would probably be that this single industry approximately doubles Indonesia's fossil fuel burning CO2 output on average every year. That's quite excessive for just one industry (last I checked ~8% of exports, with exports at $200b on a GDP of $870b) and it doesn't have to be that way, palm oil can be grown (slightly more expensively) by simply clearing a forest rather than burning it and all the peat underneath. (the peat is really the issue, forest burning itself is often in large part compensated by regrowth)

fredkbloggs2• 11 years ago

Further, the comparison itself is misleading as the CO2 figures for the US (and all other countries, for that matter), only count burning fossil fuel (and producing cement).

Some of the things you note that aren't counted should be counted. But burning trees should not. Those trees removed the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere while they were growing that is given off when they are burned; it will eventually be absorbed by whatever is then grown there afterward. The same thing goes for most (but not all) agricultural processes.

The real problem is not the CO2 that's given off, but the CO, soot, and various other organic and nitrogen compounds. Better known as smoke, which fouls the air for critters, like humans, that breathe it. Any change in the greenhouse effect is incidental and temporary. That doesn't mean that Indonesia should not be required to compensate those whose air is fouled, if they wish to continue allowing this. My guess is that if they were forced to do so, they would suddenly find it much easier to enforce their existing law against this type of burning.

gmac• 11 years ago

I call 'denier' on this.

The greenhouse effect is 'incidental and temporary' in the same way as a pandemic or nuclear war: if you're thinking in geological timescales and have no particular interest in the wellbeing of human beings.

Trees that are cut down (and their predecessors) may have been storing carbon for a long time, and whatever comes next may not store anything like as much carbon (or may be continually harvested and used).

Retric2• 11 years ago

Sorry, it's a vastly misleading headline, US wildfires release a lot of CO2, but it's counted as ~zero because that carbon started out in the atmosphere. So, the net effect (ed: of all forests) over the US is ~zero in the average year.

masklinn11• 11 years ago

That makes no sense unless the forest can be regrown as-is within a year.

oneJob2• 11 years ago

Someone please come up with a butter that uses only algae produced inputs. You'll save the world.

contingencies• 11 years ago

Fact: Singaporeans own and operate the burning palm oil plantations via Indonesian shell companies and labor. (Source: Horse's mouth)

cozzyd• 11 years ago

I was just looking at http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/epic-archive/png/epic_1b_201510210... and wondering what all that smoke was.

Indonesia's palm oil fires emitted more greenhouse gases in a day than the U.S.

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