A green oil company can halve diesel emissions. But obtaining its wonder ingredient involves destroying vital rainforest
A slew of green campaigns has crossed my desk this week. An invitation to go guerrilla gardening in Camden. Smart meters to help home-owners to save electricity. An older people's manifesto on the environment. All worthy ripples on the deep, dark pond. Plus one tidal wave. A small protest in a cold country took place on Tuesday. It was not covered in the British press, but it has huge implications.
The protest outside a state-owned oil company in Finland pitched one kind of green against another: Greenpeace activists versus a company that is sincerely trying, I judge from a conversation with one of its executives, to create an environmentally sustainable fuel.
Neste Oil has discovered a way to halve emissions from diesel cars. Eventually it hopes to use animal fat or even algae (my hot stock for the future if you have any shekels left). Right now, however, its wonder ingredient is Malaysian palm oil. And that is a problem. European demand for palm oil has led to widespread destruction of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia, to make way for plantations. In Indonesia, the amount of land devoted to growing palm oil has more than doubled in ten years, mainly to supply ingredients for Western food and cosmetics. If the market for diesel from palm oil takes off, spurred by EU subsidies, even more rainforest will be destroyed to create more plantations.
This is a classic green paradox. Western governments have set targets for “renewable” fuels, ostensibly to prevent a warming world. But tropical forests are the best, last and cheapest insurance policy against climate change. They absorb roughly a fifth of the world's total annual emissions of carbon dioxide. They are ancient and complex ecosystems that store water, regulate rainfall and are home to what some think are almost half the world's plant and animal species.
Man could never begin to replicate this global nervous system. Its destruction has implications that even the best scientists will never map fully - until it is too late.
Here's the really striking statistic. Deforestation, mainly in the tropics, accounts for almost 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. That's more than is produced by every single car, ship, truck and aircraft on the planet. It's more than either the US or China (each of which contributes about 15 per cent of global emissions, depending on which analysis you believe). The slashing and burning of rainforests and the peatlands they rest on has made Indonesia the world's third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, followed by Brazil. More than half of Brazil's emissions come from the destruction of the Amazon rainforests.
We can't solve the climate change problem without preserving these potent carbon “sinks”. But destroying them makes economic sense. Loggers get a good price for timber. Farmers make a living from planting cleared land. But a living tree in a rainforest has no clear value. Tropical governments and people apply a different equation from Western activists. It is often rational for people to cut down trees, sell the timber and use the land - as I discovered years ago, when I presided over a tree-planting project in Bangladesh. My trees were soon stumps.
Yet it might not be impossible to protect trees. Lord Stern of Brentford, the former Treasury economic adviser, has calculated that it could cost $5 billion to $10 billion a year to reduce deforestation significantly in developing countries. That is about what the British Government spends annually on Culture, Media and Sport. There is a deal to be done between rich nations with environmental concerns and poor nations with tropical forests. Various ways to pay to avoid deforestation are being discussed in negotiations between 192 countries before the meeting to sign a new UN climate change treaty in December.
One option would be to give permits to countries with valuable forests, to be traded in the same way that Western oil companies are beginning to trade carbon credits. This might help to reduce hostility in the US Senate to signing a climate change treaty as the US has substantial forests, and because the issue of deforestation could be one way to bring India and China to the table.
An obvious problem is how to prevent countries from taking the money and then shouting “timber”, without anyone knowing. But high-resolution satellite monitoring can track deforestation. The Brazilian space agency does this, through a program called PRODES, and publishes the images on the internet. It has offered to give the technology to other nations. I can foresee a new space race in which nosy-neighbour satellites peek at other nations' trees.
But this could be a new form of imperialism. If our welfare depends so heavily on what a few countries do to preserve their forests, it raises huge questions of territory and sovereignty. Unless we can convince tropical countries to act - and Brazil has given a commitment to reduce drastically its rate of deforestation if an international regime can be designed to reward it properly - there will be conflicts not just over water, but forestry too. But if a deal is done, there could be a changed landscape in every sense, with a huge shift in power from oil-producers towards tropical countries.
Given the importance of these issues, it is surprising that the EU bureaucracy apparently remains sceptical. The EU seems more interested in maintaining its target for making 10 per cent of all transport fuel “renewable” by 2020. That target is driving Neste Oil's development of new refineries in Finland, Rotterdam and Singapore.
Its technicians are not the villains of this piece. They hope to get their palm oil from certified existing plantations, by farming more intensively, and they dispute Greenpeace's claim that they will soon be the world's biggest palm oil user. But right now, that is where the money is, thanks to the EU. Palm oil is “renewable”. But the rainforests are irreplaceable.