Scientists weigh downside of palm oil

Only a few years ago, oil from palm trees was viewed as an ideal biofuel: a cheap, renewable alternative to petroleum that would fight global warming. Energy companies began converting generators and production soared. Now, it's increasingly seen as an example of how well-meaning efforts to limit climate-changing carbon emissions may backfire. Marcel Silvius, a climate expert at Wetlands International in the Netherlands, led a team that compared the benefits of palm oil to the ecological harm from destroying virgin Asian rain forests to develop lucrative new plantations. His conclusion: "As a biofuel, it's a failure."

Palm oil is attractive because it is relatively abundant, cheap at about $550 per ton, and requires few or no modifications to existing power stations. Unlike fossil fuels, palm oil is considered carbon-neutral. But the result of intensified farming has been to unleash far more greenhouse gases than will be saved at power stations. The report issued by Wetlands International studied the carbon released from peat swamps in Indonesia and Malaysia that had been drained and burned to plant palm oil trees. About 85% of the world's palm oil comes from the two countries, and about one-quarter of Indonesia's plantations are on drained peat bogs, the report said.

The four-year study found that 600 million tons of carbon dioxide seep into the air each year from the drained swamps. Another 1.4 billion tons go up in smoke from fires lit to clear rain forest for plantations - smoke that often shrouds Singapore and Malaysia in an impenetrable haze for weeks at a time. Together, those 2 billion tons of CO2 account for 8% of the world's fossil fuel emissions, the report said.

Deforestation is the No. 2 cause of greenhouse gas emissions after the burning of fossil fuels, said Jeffrey Dukes, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts. It not only releases carbon trapped over many millennia, but destroys the most efficient ecosystem on the planet for sucking carbon from the atmosphere, Dukes said. Expanding production of palm oil is "a terrible decision. Whether or not it's consciously made, it's society going in reverse."

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