Greenpeace Discredited on Palm Oil Issue

FOE, Greenpeace Discredited on Palm Oil and Environmental Alarmism

By Simon Chambers

The 1954 Oscar winning movie, “Three Coins in the Fountain” was a worldwide hit. Frank Sinatra sang the title song, a winner that made Rome's Trevi Fountain -- into which visitors toss a coin to assure their eventual return to Rome -- one of the world's most famous landmarks.

Summer in 2003 was extremely hot in Europe. The blistering heat drove thousands to the beaches and the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Italy was filled with tourist throngs happily cavorting in their swim-suits under the spray of the renowned Trevi fountain.

It did not take long for environmentalists to come out of the woodwork touting the hot 2003 summer as the hottest in history, and consequently heralding the coming of global warming.

A paper titled "European seasonal and annual temperature variability, trends, and extremes since 1500" was published in the issue dated March 5, 2004, of the AAAS magazine named Science. The authors concluded that the summer of 2003 was the hottest summer in Europe since 1500. As is often the case, alarmists can seldom withstand the scrutiny of scientific analysis.

Scientist Hans Erren does not share that conclusion, and in an article at “A debatable European summer temperature since 1500
” he pointed out that the summer of 1540 rivals the summer of 2003 in the category of hot European summers.

Among the points of contention are the accuracy of tree ring, and other, proxies for temperatures, as well as the validity of extrapolation of small geographic area information to large geographic areas.

Suffice it to say that this tendency of environmentalists to cherry pick their data is so entrenched that it is difficult to distinguish when they are being truthful!

Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth (FOE) have carried on this dubious tradition with their recent anti-palm oil campaigns. Alleging that palm oil is causing massive deforestation, and hence contributing to global warming, both the FOE and Greenpeace have been shown up to have a less than salutary commitment to the truth!

First, it is well established that palm oil is the most productive oilseed crop in the world, so productive that it yields ten times as much oil as its competitors like soy, canola and sunflower. It is elementary therefore, that palm oil requires ten times LESS land to yield the same unit of oil as its competitors.

The sheer incongruity of FOE’s and Greenpeace’s argument is therefore apparent to even the casual observer. Yet these two rogue environmental organizations continue to launch their vicious campaigns against probably the most ecologically friendly of oilseed crops.

In the view of Deforestation Watch, it is this baffling anti-palm oil stance by both FOE and Greenpeace that has brought forth rumblings from within the environmental community that these two organizations could have a hidden agenda against palm oil! Could their intransigence against palm oil be motivated, not by a genuine concern for the environment but by something far more sinister? To quote Shakespeare in Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the State of Denmark”!

ENDS

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