https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/mailalert/908/biofuel-eu-destroys-700-000-hectares-of-rainforest
The European Parliament is debating the blending of palm oil in motor vehicle fuels
The European Union wants to protect the climate and reduce carbon emissions from motor vehicles by blending fuels with increasing shares of supposedly eco-friendly “biofuels”.
Last year, 1.9 million tons of palm oil were added to diesel fuel in the EU – in addition to millions of tons of equally harmful rapeseed and soybean oils.
The plantations needed to produce the palm oil cover an area of 700,000 hectares – land that until recently was still rainforest and the habitat of endangered orangutans.Despite the clear-cutting of the rainforests, the EU has classified palm oil as sustainably produced.
This policy has now blown up in the legislators’ faces, with scientists confirming what environmentalists and development experts have long asserted: agrofuels help neither people nor the environment – and are most certainly not climate-neutral, as even studies commissioned by the EU show. Biodiesel from palm and soybean oil, but also from European-grown rapeseed, is more harmful than diesel from fossil sources.
The EU should therefore abolish its biofuels policy immediately, but the agro-industry is fighting hard to maintain the status quo. Not surprising, when one considers that biofuels are currently subsidized to the tune of 10 billion euros in the EU alone.
The European Parliament is currently debating the future of biofuels. The allegedly green energy will be put to a vote on June 20 in the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, on July 10 in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, and on September 10 in the plenary session of Parliament.
Please sign our petition to the EU and demand an end to agrofuels.
Start of campaign: Feb 20, 2013
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