This is a fun and entertaining read:

Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.

In short: in the early 2000’s the government sought to combat global warming and carbon emissions. Not, say, by doing something as monumentally sensible as building a crop of new breeder reactors, but instead by focusing on biodeisel and ethanol: the turning of food into fuel. In the midwest the corn farmers loved this, as now there was a whole new market for their crops since corn could be turned into ethanol; at the same time, poor people who kinda relied on cheap corn for, you know, eating, were just SOL because the price of corn went up. But corn was not the best source of bio-fuel. That would be oil-palm trees, whose fruit produce an oil that’s just great for that sort of thing. Problem: oil palms don’t exactly grow like champs in the US. Solution: find a place where they do, like Borneo, then chop down, clear cut and burn off the existing forest to plant crops of oil palms. Result:

The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe.

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

So not only did this dump boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, it trashed the local ecosystem and has led to the usual dystopias of corruption and crackdowns. The palm-oil based fuels are now mandated by law within Indonesia.

Tell me again why we’re better off not building latest-gen nuclear power plants?