{"id":1349,"date":"2014-11-10T08:00:49","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T13:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2014-11-10T08:00:49","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T13:00:49","slug":"how-did-palm-oil-become-such-a-problem-and-what-can-we-do-about-it-ensia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=1349","title":{"rendered":"How did palm oil become such a problem \u2014 and what can we do about it? | Ensia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/ensia.com\/features\/how-did-palm-oil-become-such-a-problem-and-what-can-we-do-about-it\/\">How did palm oil become such a problem \u2014 and what can we do about it? | Ensia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\"><span class=\"postDate\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">November 3, 2014 \u2014\u00a0<\/span>Last August, from the window of a jet high over Sumatra, I counted nearly a dozen plumes of smoke rising from the vast jungles and plantations below. Some more than a half-mile wide, they looked like pillars holding up the sky. That week the Indonesian Disaster Mitigation Agency detected 143 new wildfires in Riau Province, the area beneath my flight. All of the fires were almost certainly related to deforestation for timber operations and agriculture \u2014 predominantly oil palm cultivation.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\">Palm oil \u2014 which\u00a0<a style=\"font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; color: #1f589a;\" href=\"http:\/\/ensia.com\/voices\/palm-oil-is-everywhere-heres-what-to-do-about-it\/\">appears in a dizzying amount of food and cosmetic products<\/a>\u00a0and is a feedstock for biofuel \u2014 poses many environmental problems. It\u2019s the largest driver of Indonesian deforestation, which destroys habitat and contributes to climate change. And ponds of wastewater at palm oil refineries\u00a0<a style=\"font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; color: #1f589a;\" href=\"http:\/\/ensia.com\/voices\/fixing-palm-oils-other-climate-threat\/\">release immense amounts of methane<\/a>, a greenhouse gas 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\">Solutions to the environmental problems posed by palm production are complicated, partly because palm oil\u2019s ubiquity, but also because alternatives lack many of the benefits of the versatile oil. But they are out there.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 0px;\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How did palm oil become such a problem \u2014 and what can we do about it? | Ensia. November 3, 2014 \u2014\u00a0Last August, from the window of a jet high over Sumatra, I counted nearly a dozen plumes of smoke rising from the vast jungles and plantations below. Some more than a half-mile wide, they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1004,1003,1002,1005],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-co2","tag-palm-oil","tag-sumatra","tag-wastewater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1350,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/1350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}