Existential Environmental Crisis 2.0
How the UN's next planetary crisis is exacerbated by the biofuels policy it advocated for in response to the first one.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.” – George Orwell
The world’s best eco-tourism destinations are renowned for the diversity of their terrestrial, avian, and marine species. In Costa Rica, Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, or the rainforests of Borneo, visitors marvel at the sheer abundance and variety of birds, mammals, plants, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and other creatures. These are among the world’s most biologically diverse landscapes.
Merriam-Webster defines biodiversity simply: “biological diversity in an environment as indicated by numbers of different species of plants and animals.”
There is no avoiding the reality that the activities of 8+ billion humans impact biodiversity and degrade land. In some areas, the impacts are severe.
Urban areas only cover about 2-3% of earth’s land surface (~580,000 square miles), but they exact a heavy toll on plant and animal life and ecosystems. “Brownfield” sites, former industrial lands with known or perceived contamination, stand as urban land degradation monuments, many having been carved out of undisturbed land more than a century ago.
The resource extraction, processing and industrialization that support most of earth’s population in some way also takes a toll on biodiversity. Mining across the globe (land use ~25,000 square miles), in particular hard rock mining, disrupts not only the land surface, but the associated acid mine drainage (AMD) at some sites damages groundwater and downstream water quality and ecosystems for decades (or centuries) after the economic rewards have been reaped, leaving only reclamation and remediation liabilities behind.
There is no doubt that large areas of land have been seriously degraded all over planet earth by urban development and industrialization, and that significant biodiversity challenges exist, both terrestrially and in the world’s oceans and estuaries. But urban, mining, and industrial sites cover a fraction of earth’s land surface.
Food production, on the other hand, accounts for ~35% of land use across the globe, with about one-third used for growing crops and the balance for grazing livestock. Just like industrial activities, food production has negative and often severe environmental consequences.
Biodiversity and land degradation are being positioned as the next “existential” environmental crisis. And “climate change” is a significant threat to biodiversity. Enter the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Ironically, one of the UN’s favored “solutions” to the “existential crisis” of “climate change” is exacerbating the biodiversity and land degradation “crisis,” and the UN is caught in the middle. Which UN climate policy is at cross purposes with “biodiversity/land degradation” worries? What is the elegantly simple solution? Let’s dig into another story conveniently avoided by polite company and the legacy media where energy, environmental, and economic policy intersect.
We begin our story in a place we normally do not: the end. The simple, long-term solution for protecting biodiversity and guarding against land degradation is to put large landscapes off-limits for the purpose of all human commercial activities. In his 2000 book Hard Green - Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto, Peter Huber argues that the best and most time-proven means of protecting the planet’s biodiversity is a return to the conservation environmentalism envisioned by Theodore Roosevelt era conservationists. This is an ethos we enthusiastically embrace.
Conservation environmentalism gave the U.S. its system of National Parks, National Forests, National Wildlife Refuges, and National Wilderness Areas, the sum of which total over 475 million acres (not including State designated and managed conservation areas, e.g., State Forests, Conservation Areas, and Wildlife Management Areas). Spread across all 50 states, and stretching from a latitude of nearly 70 degrees (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Noatak National Preserve) to 24 degrees north (Key West National Wildlife Refuge, Dry Tortugas National Park), America’s national conservation lands extend across a wide range of biodiverse habitats, from Arctic to subtropical.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) designates the highest levels of protection as Level I (Strict Nature Reserves & Wilderness Areas) and Level II (National Parks). The U.S. is home to more than 10 percent of the world’s IUCN Level I and II lands, an area encompassing more than 200,000 square miles (or nearly the size of France).
Returning to the UN, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil gave birth to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its progeny the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and later the Paris Agreement (2015). The Earth Summit that kicked off three decades of climate hysteria also gave birth to a second child, this one dealing with flora, fauna, and ecosystems: the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which entered force in 1993. The U.S. is the only major nation not to sign the CBD.
Like the UNFCCC, the CBD has been convening conferences to share the latest scientific information on biodiversity, compel nations to preserve land and, naturally, seek funding. The first of these “Conference of Parties” (COP 1) took place in the Bahamas in 1994, and after two more annual events in 1995 and 1996, shifted to a biennial event in even numbered years.
At COP15 in Montreal in 2022, the Parties reached a new agreement known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (or GBF). A key objective of the GBF is preserving 30% of land and aquatic areas by the year 2030, known as the “30 by 30” target.
Also emerging from COP15 was a new financial mechanism designed to help signatories tap funding to enhance biodiversity and reduce land degradation. The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) was ratified by 186 countries in Vancouver, Canada in summer 2023, and has already raised nearly $400 million from twelve sovereign and subnational governments (Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Province of Québec, Spain, and the United Kingdom). The GBFF has much bigger ambitions.
The UN effectively has two environmental religious branches. Doomberg has labeled the sect that concerns itself with “climate change” as the “Church of Carbon™.” The other sect is The Church of Biodiversity™, which concerns itself with plants, animals, and ecosystems.
While the two Churches share ideologies, they have an inherent and unresolvable conflict. That is where this story gets interesting.
Both teach that “climate change” has already negatively impacted biodiversity and those impacts will only get worse. Both teach that human land use for food production is the primary driver of biodiversity loss.
An example from this UN webpage on “Climate Action” and “Biodiversity” conveniently consolidates the two issues as lead sentences in two consecutive paragraphs (emphasis added):
“The main driver of biodiversity loss remains humans’ use of land – primarily for food production. Human activity has already altered over 70 per cent of all ice-free land. When land is converted for agriculture, some animal and plant species may lose their habitat and face extinction.
But climate change is playing an increasingly important role in the decline of biodiversity.”
Another example comes from the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2024, its flagship annual account of the “existential biodiversity crisis” (emphasis added):
The global food system is inherently illogical. It is destroying biodiversity, depleting the world’s water resources, and changing the climate, but isn’t delivering the nutrition people need.
Cue the irreconcilable conflict.
The Church of Carbon™ proselytizes “biofuels” as a solution to “climate change.” But biofuels are farmed on land by humans just like food, most use ammonia-based fertilizers just like food, and degrade soil quality just like food, making that church’s teaching quite obviously antithetical to the very mission of the Church of Biodiversity™. (An analogous situation applies to “biomass”, in particular the harvest of vast tracts of trees for the purpose of burning for energy, a topic we covered in our two part series A Pulp Fiction.)
We wondered just how antithetical. The answer might surprise you.
“Monoculture” is the practice of farming a single crop in a given area, generally as large-scale industrial farming across vast landscapes. It is driven by big agriculture, big capital, and, over the last 20 years, by big climate.
In the U.S. monoculture manifests as large-scale corn and soybean farming across vast landscapes in the Plains states. In Canada, vast acreages of wheat, barley and canola stretch across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. In Brazil, industrial monoculture takes form in sugar, corn, and soybeans. In the rainforests of southeast Asia, monoculture manifests as palm fruit plantations for palm oil. All of these areas are easily identifiable on satellite imagery.
Compared to naturally evolved landscapes, monoculture is hell on biodiversity. Displaced flora and fauna are indifferent to whether crops are grown to feed humans or to foolishly go into our gas tanks.
In addition to plundering biodiversity and wildlife habitat, growing and refining crops for biofuels uses enormous volumes of water (e.g., ~3 gallons of water are required to produce one gallon of corn ethanol). In the U.S., much of this water is pumped from aquifers that can least afford it. The nitrogen and phosphorous-based fertilizers on which corn ethanol relies degrade soil quality and condition and have significant and far-reaching water quality impacts. We highlighted these and other consequences in our March 2023 post Crying Fowl.
Almost 70% of the world’s biofuels are produced by three nations, the U.S. (38% - mostly corn ethanol, also soybean-based biodiesel), Brazil (22% - around 80% ethanol from sugar, some corn; some soybean-based biodiesel), and Indonesia (over 9% - biodiesel from palm oil). Brazil and Indonesia contain some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems and rainforests treasured by the world’s “environmentalists.” Malaysia, which also hosts vast areas of rainforest, is the world’s second largest producer of palm oil. Malaysia and Indonesia both export palm oil-based biodiesel and have mandated significant increases in palm oil biodiesel blends in their domestic fuel supplies over the last few years.
As of 2023, Brazil had ~360 ethanol plants, the vast majority of them (~333) sugarcane-based.
Four of the top 10 global biofuel producers are European nations. Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands together account for approximately 8% of global biofuel production.
It is ironic that European countries producing so few of the hydrocarbon molecules they consume are contributing to a biodiversity “crisis” they claim to care about by growing and burning food for fuel, all under the pretext that this is actually “sustainable.” This is a wonderful example of what we call “sustainabilchemy.”
Estimates on the amount of global farmland used to grow crops for biofuels vary. A 2016 study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports put the figure at about 4 percent of the world’s agricultural land (and 3 to 4 percent of its fresh water).
A 2021 report from Germany’s Union for the Promotion of Oil and Protein Plants (UFOP) reported that “only around 8%” of the ~1.4 billion hectares of land used to grow crops globally is “used to supply feedstock for biofuels production.”
“Only 8%” of the world’s farmland amounts to over 276 million acres. Measured in square miles, this is a land area nearly the size of Germany, France and Italy combined.
Using data from a variety of UN, national government agricultural agencies, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and other sources, we estimated the amount of farmland currently in production for biofuels in the world’s three largest biofuel producers plus Malaysia. We included Malaysia because of the well-documented rainforest destruction for palm oil production taking place there similar to Indonesia.
Our analysis indicates that around 74 million total acres in the world’s two largest ethanol producers (U.S. and Brazil) and two largest palm oil biodiesel producers (Indonesia and Malaysia) are used to produce biofuels. More than 30 million acres of this total are in Brazil, Indonesia, and Malaysia, home to some of the worlds most renowned, prized, and biodiverse rainforests.
The map below comes from an October 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF) article on biodiversity loss. Red/orange/yellow areas denote severe biodiversity loss, while dark areas show where biodiversity is most intact. Our overlay notes draw out the paradox between our graph above and WEF’s findings, denoting the area of most U.S. national parks and forests for perspective:
The UN’s aim to preserve biodiversity is a worthwhile objective. But plundering it by plowing up land that could otherwise be conserved and plastering entire landscapes with faux “energy transition solutions” in the form of food crops does the opposite. Someone please explain that fact to UN, the Church of Carbon, and the Church of Biodiversity™.
Biodiversity loss from the “biofuel” supply chain as an ironic unaccounted-for casualty “environmental externality” of “climate change” policy is bad enough, but not the worst of it. The human and cultural consequences of this insanity are worse and, tragically, those impacts are felt the most by those with the least in the developing world.
Indonesia provides a compelling and instructive example. In 2006, about 9% of the European Union’s (EU’s) palm oil consumption was in the form of “biodiesel”. In 2009, biodiesel became an important element of the EU’s “climate change” policy in the form of its “Renewable Energy Directive” (RED). By 2012, biodiesel accounted for almost 30% of EU palm oil consumption.
Eyewitness accounts of mercenaries associated with corporate palm oil interests violently driving indigenous people out of their homes in Indonesia began to take the shine off of palm oil biodiesel in the EU after 2010. The widespread destruction of Indonesian rainforests for food, cosmetics, and now biofuel began to have a troubling Indigenous human component.
The EU acknowledged the problem in revised versions of RED (RED II in 2018/RED III in 2023) and began to dramatically reduce their imports of palm oil biodiesel. Indonesia and Malaysia reacted to the import reductions by mandating increases in the amount of palm oil biodiesel blended into domestic fuel supplies. And in both countries, those increases are significant and growing.
Palm oil industry associations could not hide the issue and voluntarily adopted standards to certify that palm oil was “sustainably” sourced without negative human rights or environmental consequences. Products containing Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) certification carry the label of the world’s largest association for the “ethical” palm oil production industry, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) seal.
For years in Indonesia, in order to gain social license and access government financial support, corporations buying up rainforest for palm oil plantations have agreed to let Indigenous farmers retain small plots known as “plasma.” In 2007, plasma schemes became mandatory, with the requirement that corporate plantation owners give 20% of new plantation holdings to community farmers, who earn income selling their palm fruits to the corporate owners.
While plasma has helped lift some rural Indonesian communities out of poverty, the results are mixed. In some communities, the land was transferred, rainforest was pillaged for monoculture (with predicable consequences for wildlife and biodiversity), and villagers’ promised plasma never materialized.
Returning to palm oil monoculture’s negative impacts on rainforest ecosystems and biodiversity, numerous studies call into question whether RSPO certification actually ensures “environmental sustainability.” As noted in this 2020 study:
“Our findings clearly show that certification does not ensure “environmental sustainability” of palm oil production. In fact, our analyses revealed that higher portions of endangered large mammals’ habitat (like that of Bornean orangutan and Sumatran tiger, rhino, and elephant) and almost intact tropical forests were depleted in very recent times (<30 years) to leave space for oil palm plantations. These, a few years later, were unreasonably certified as “sustainable.”
The human rights and environmental “sustainability” problems with palm oil plantations are no longer limited to southeast Asia. As poverty-focused non-profit Trocaire noted in a 2024 story about palm oil plantations in Guatemala (emphasis added):
Maria’s village, surrounded by idyllic rolling hills, was shaken to its core when security forces evicted more than 200 people from their land. The land, which the Maya Q’eqchi’ community of Chinebal claim has been theirs for generations is being taken over by companies for the production of African palm oil.
We close by noting two items we noted during the research for this piece that raised our eyebrows. The first comes from the Preamble to the original 1992 Earth Summit’s Convention on Biological Diversity and implores the Precautionary Principle, the abuse of which helped lead to the present energy, environmental and economic debacle in Europe (emphasis ours):
“Noting also that where there is a threat of significant reduction or loss of biological diversity, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to avoid or minimize such a threat.”
We know from more than a quarter century of experience exactly how policy trucks get driven right through the holes in that scientific fence.
The second comes from the CBD’s landing page and is likely to raise the blood pressure of conservative conspiracy theorists (emphasis added):
Conceived as a practical tool for translating the principles of Agenda 21 into reality, the Convention recognizes that biological diversity is about more than plants, animals and microorganisms and their ecosystems – it is about people and our need for food security, medicines, fresh air and water, shelter, and a clean and healthy environment in which to live.
“Biodiversity,” like “climate change” may turn out to be a real crisis. But growing food for fuel will only make it worse.
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Thank you for an excellent article.
CO2 is not the enemy. Destruction of ecosystems and toxic land and water pollution is.
You guys do such a brilliant job of explaining this to the average viewer (me). I wish you had a much larger audience. I keep sharing the hell out of your articles, hope others are doing the same.