How the ethanol mandate caused deforestation in Indonesia (and maybe 100,000 premature deaths from smoke due to burning)

See Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe: A decade ago, the U.S. mandated the use of vegetable oil in biofuels, leading to industrial-scale deforestation — and a huge spike in carbon emissions by Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica in The New York Times Magazine. Excerpts:

"When a truck burns biodiesel, the carbon emissions that come from its tailpipe aren’t much different from those of a truck burning petroleum. But a part of the biodiesel emissions aren’t counted, because — in theory — they have been balanced out: Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere when they grow, and fuel experts subtract that sequestered carbon from the tailpipe emission, completing a transaction that they say balances at zero.

In ideal circumstances — unvegetated land planted for the first time — this balancing out really happens. When corn grows, it soaks up carbon, and when it is consumed (whether as food or fuel), it releases that carbon back into the air. But the analysis breaks down when faced with the reality of land use. Almost everywhere in the world, planting more corn or soy for biofuel would involve creating more farmland, which in turn would involve cutting down whatever was already growing on that land. And that would mean releasing a huge amount of carbon into the air, with nothing to balance the books."

"The expected gains were enormous. The switch to biofuels, the E.P.A. would later calculate, promised to stop the release of 4.5 billion tons of carbon over three decades, the equivalent of parking every single American automobile for more than seven years."

"Biodiesel production in the United States would jump from 250 million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016. Imports of biodiesel to the United States surged from near zero to more than 100 million gallons a month. As fuel markets snatched up every ounce of domestic soy oil to meet the American fuel mandate, the food industry also replaced the soy it had used with something cheaper and just as good: palm oil, largely from Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the sources of nearly 90 percent of the global supply. Lawmakers never anticipated that their well-intentioned plan — to help the climate by helping American farmers — might instead transform Indonesia and present one of the greatest threats to the planet’s tropical rain forests."

"In Indonesia, officials directed state-owned and regional banks to make loans on more than $8 billion worth of palm-oil-related development projects and pledged to produce 5.9 billion gallons of biofuel within five years. They also announced that Indonesia would convert more than 13 million acres of additional forest to industrialized palm production."

"the ripple effects from land use would be so great that ethanol wasn’t going to be better for the climate at all; instead, it would create nearly double the greenhouse-gas emissions of conventional fuels.

How was this possible? A typical life-cycle analysis adds up just the carbon emissions involved in the chain of fuel production and use: the carbon produced by burning the fuel, the carbon spit out by the tractor in the field, the carbon produced by the fertilizer manufacturer and so on. By this accounting, vegetable-oil-based biofuel fares well against petroleum fuels, reducing CO₂ emissions by as much as 80 percent.

What that analysis does not take into account, though, is that there is only so much land. 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."

"The American biofuels law, for instance, was designed to support soybean and corn farmers, not palm-oil producers. But the United States began increasing foreign palm-oil imports nonetheless — they more than doubled by 2017 — in large part because so much of the domestic soybean production that once went to food was now being used for fuel. Much of that palm oil went to food production. But the increased use of palm oil in food production was largely a byproduct of the increased fuel-oil production."

"The E.P.A., in 2009 . . . determined that the carbon footprint of land-use changes overshadowed any other consideration, and not by a small margin. In fact, when land changes were accounted for, the climate benefit of biofuels was entirely wiped away. Because a huge pulse of emissions comes from land change immediately after forests are cut, the E.P.A. concluded that it would take 32 years before biodiesel from soybean oil was truly net-zero for carbon on an annual basis, and a century for it to reach the level of benefit required under the law."

"The agriculture industry went to war to save the mandate they worked so hard to put in place. They lobbied the E.P.A. to abandon its consideration of indirect land-use change, describing it as a “radical” approach that could hold American farmers responsible for business decisions made by villagers halfway around the world."

"By the time the E.P.A. released its final rule in early 2010, it had made a complete about-face. Its models now found that the impact from land-use changes were almost negligible."

"It was nearly two years later that the E.P.A. issued its analysis of palm oil; it said in a cursory three-page draft rule that palm oil did in fact fall short of the E.P.A.’s bar, because of its direct impact on Indonesian forests. And that analysis, which remains in draft form today, simply ignores the substitution effect — which, calculated in any form, would suggest an even greater carbon cost."

"Land has competing uses, and taking more of it for agriculture has to have some consequence for the climate."

"After the palm-oil companies gained control of the land, the clearing began. The fastest method was to rip out the forests with excavators and torch what remained. In 2015, the fires spread out of control. Kalimantan — and most of Indonesia, for that matter — was overwhelmed by billowing clouds of smoke and ash, visible from hundreds of miles away."

"Forest fires are an annual event in Indonesia — sparked in the dry early fall as village farmers clear their fields and then extinguished by the monsoons. But this year was different. NASA officials said they were the worst fires they’d ever observed. Indonesians suffering from the effects of smoke inhalation were streaming into hospitals by the tens of thousands. Researchers at Columbia and Harvard later estimated that the fires led to 100,000 premature deaths."

"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."

"Indonesia’s peatland destruction — just the amount that has already occurred — is roughly the equivalent of opening 70 new, large coal-fired power plants."

"Indonesia’s peatlands . . . now emit more than 500 megatons of CO₂ each year, an amount greater than the entire annual emissions of the state of California."

"six of the world’s leading carbon-modeling schemes, including the E.P.A.’s, have concluded that biodiesel made from Indonesian palm oil makes the global carbon problem worse, not better. The World Agroforestry Center found that peatland-based biodiesel could produce nearly four times the emissions of petroleum diesel."

"When Nancy Pelosi took the stage, she looked back on the 2007 fuel-economy bill and biofuels mandate she shepherded into law. The initiative should be credited, she said, with “charting a new path to clean energy, reducing emissions, increasing the use of renewables.” She made no mention of Indonesia. When I asked her about the deforestation in an earlier email, her office wrote back defending the bill, citing the Union of Concerned Scientists and arguing that even with the Indonesian forest effect accounted for, biodiesels were cleaner than fossil fuels. “Bottom line,” the office responded, “the biofuels in your tank are better for the planet than 100 percent fossil fuels.”

Henry Waxman, of course, doesn’t agree."

The advanced cellulosic-biofuels program that once seemed so promising has been a failure. It never attracted the investment it needed, and the E.P.A. has allowed biodiesel to serve as a substitute in meeting the mandate. "