Planting Palm Oil Poses Serious Threat to the Environment

The clearance of tropical peat swamps in Indonesia for the cultivation of palm oil trees to produce biofuels and other chemicals is releasing 1.8 billion m.t./year of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, according to “Cooking the Climate,” a new report released by Greenpeace.  Peat swamps are understood by scientists to be one of the most valuable stores of carbon in the world. The carbon dioxide is stored at high concentrations within microbes in the peat swamps. Clearing the Indonesian wetlands, usually through burning, releases even more CO2...

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