Palm Oil Home  FOE, Greenpeace: The Polar Bears of the Anti-Palm Oil Lobby |
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FOE, Greenpeace: The Polar Bears of the Anti-Palm Oil Lobby |
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Written by Jon Tomczyk
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Friday, 27 February 2009 |
 Polar bears have often been called the “canaries of climate change”, referring obviously to the practice of miners in times past to bring a canary along upon descent into the coals as a test for air quality.
There is no shortage of doom-laden reports about the bears’ imminent demise on our warming planet. Indeed, so strong is the misery-mongering about polar bears that the US is currently trying to list them as an endangered species; and its campaign has been aided and abetted by several pieces of US government-sponsored research into polar bear numbers.
Towards the end of 2006, Senator Kempthorne, secretary for the United States Department of the Interior, announced America’s plans to list ‘this Great Icon of the Arctic’ as an endangered species (i). This assumed that rising temperatures were causing the polar bears’ Arctic habitat to ‘literally melt away’. Iin order to support its case, the Department of the Interior commissioned the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to research the effect climate change would have on the Arctic region. And with this, they surmised, they could predict the future of the polar bear, too.
The conclusions were unequivocal. Steven Amstrup of the USGS Alaska Science Centre, co-author of one of the commissioned reports, stated: ‘As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear.’ (ii) Since then, matters have continued apace, and this January the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works convened to examine ‘Threats and Protection for the Polar Bear’. However, despite the best efforts of the pro-listing lobby, there is just one problem: the methods used to divine the fate of the polar bear due to climate change are not very scientific.
Scott Armstrong, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, Kesten Green, senior research fellow at Monash University, and Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at Harvard, in a report commissioned by the State of Alaska: Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit found so many contraventions with the scientific methods of the commissiones reports, including the Amstrup Report, as to render them worthless! As international experts in forecasting methods, they examined the two main reports commissioned by the US Department of the Interior and failed to find ‘a single climate modelling procedure which was consistent with scientific methods’(iii). On 30 January 2008, they presented their findings to the US Senate Committee.
As their audit makes clear, the forecasting principles contravened by the Department of the Interior reports are not esoteric points only of interest to mathematical pedants; rather, the Department contravened principles that are the scientific equivalent of common sense.
For instance, according to Armstrong, the government-sponsored reports failed to ‘conduct experiments to evaluate forecasts,’ ‘be conservative in situations of high uncertainty or instability’, or ‘ensure that information is reliable and that measurement error is low’. These are just some of the 41 principles of scientific forecasting contravened.
If climate itself is difficult enough to predict, then attempting to predict the effect it will have on the polar bears’ habitat is doubly so. Moreover, the interactions between the polar bear and their environment add another set of variables to an already confusing whirl of possible scenarios. It is unsurprising, then, that a chain of assumptions compensate for the want of unambiguous evidence. This chain runs something like this: global warming will occur; summer sea ice will reduce and thin; polar bears will obtain less food by hunting from the sea ice than they do now; there will be no supplementary food; the polar bear population will decline; the endangered species act will help; and no other policies would prove as effective. Such a causal whitewash occludes factors that should temper the wilder assertions of forecasting.
This propensity of activists to embellish their “reports” with wild and unsubstantiated claims cloaked in “scientific jargon” is so all pervasive that it is more than troubling. For instance, palm oil has been subject to anti-palm oil campaigns initiated on the basis of blatantly and grossly skewed “reports” issued with such remarkable disdain for the truth and rigorous scientific methods by the likes of the Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Greenpeace that they bring discredit to the entire environmental movement!
In a “report” called “Malaysian Palm Oil: Green Gold or Greenwash?” the FOE makes the tenuous and false claim that palm oil is causing massive deforestation and consequently, global warming. Just why the FOE should single out palm oil for these outrageously dishonest attacks even baffles the mind of the most neutral and independent of observers, to say the least.
For one, palm oil is clearly one of the most productive oilseeds around, yielding more than 4.5 metric tons of edible oil per hectare planted. This incredible yield does not sound remarkable until it is juxtaposed against the typical yield of its competitors, such as soy, sunflower and canola, which typically yields less than 0.5 metric tons per hectare. Logic dictates that such high productivity should mean that palm oil requires close to 10 times LESS acreage to produce the same unit of edible oil as its competitors.
This probably explains why Malaysia, despite being the world’s largest producer of palm oil for more than a century can still boast forest cover of more than 65%. Read that again – one hundred years of palm oil cultivation by the world’s largest producer still leaves 65% forest cover. This might not sound like much, until we compare it against the typical 20% forest cover in the countries of the industrial west from which the “paragons of environmental virtue” such as the FOE hails!
It is certainly perplexing to note Greenpeace’s and FOE’s irrational intransigence against a commodity that has promised and done so much to lift third world communities out of poverty and yet at the same time embrace sustainable planting practices.
Take the recent “much ado about nothing” by Greenpeace against the first shipment of sustainable palm oil from Indonesia. In typical Greenpeace fashion, they attempted to prevent the loading of crude palm oil on the Isola Corallo, a Rotterdam-bound tanker in Dumai, Indonesia's main palm oil export port.
A Greenpeace activist was locked onto the anchor chain of the Isola Corallo for over 36 hours to stop it from moving. The Greenpeace ship, Esperanza, then occupied the palm oil loading facility to prevent the Isola Corrallo from loading Sinar Mas palm oil. The Esperanza was finally forced off the berth by Port authority tugs after a seven hour face-off.
When Greenpeace is not engaged in deviant criminal acts such as the Dumai port Cirque de Soleil act, they are busy shouting themselves hoarse about the imagined damage to the rainforest by palm oil.
The Palm Oil Truth Foundation is compelled to ask just why so much of the policy debate is centered around the idea of imminent catastrophe and not on more pressing human issues such as the eradication of poverty and hunger and the provision of basic healthcare, education and clean water supply to the undeveloped parts of the world? Such programs would save more lives, preserve more wilderness and have a better chance of improving the life of every human on this planet than the current transfixion with global warming which has led and will lead to further wastage of scarce resources! THE END.
Reference
(i) http://www.doi.gov/news/06_News_Releases/061227.html
(ii) Polar Bears: Alaska polar bears are doomed, Anchorage Daily News, 08 September 2007
(iii) Polar Bear Population forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit
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The chickens are coming home to roost. FOE and Greenpeace should be called to account for their dishonest handling of the palm oil issue! Posted by Muffy, on March 8, 2009 at 17:47
Greenpeace and FOE's actions would make early conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt turn in their graves! Posted by Spike, on March 4, 2009 at 11:06
These environmental boys in FOE and Greenpeace care only about the funds they can raise. Give them money, dough, greenbacks, and enough smackeroos and they'd attack anything - even water! Posted by Pumpkin Spade, on March 2, 2009 at 14:11
Palm oil causing deforestation? Pure whitewash as far as I'm concerned. I should know. I live in Malaysia. FOE and Greenpeace is indeed bringing disrepute to the entire environmental movement! Sad but true. Posted by Ace, on March 2, 2009 at 12:21
It is the misery mongering that brings in the bacon for FOE and Greenpeace. Why would they care about the more pressing issues like 'the eradication of poverty and hunger and the provision of basic healthcare, education and clean water supply to the undeveloped parts of the world?' Posted by G. Kaplan, on March 2, 2009 at 12:07
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