HECO greenwashing unethical fuel business

Haleakala Times
July 17, 2007
by Lance Holter

From 2001 to 2005, ten million acres of the Indonesian section of Borneo were cleared by slash and burn harvesting for palm oil plantations. This destruction is ongoing. Indonesia is the third largest contributor of carbon dioxide to the earth's atmosphere. Twenty percent of the world's global warming carbon dioxide gases are created from slash and burn logging and clearing.

I recently spoke with an eyewitness to the palm oil plantations in Costa Rica. He said, "We were driving through the most magnificent forest we had ever seen. Sloths, toucans, myriads of colorful tropical birds, butterflies. We have seen many forests in our lifetimes but none compared to this forest and then all of a sudden the forest canopy ended and we came upon African palm oil tree plantations. These oil trees went on for miles in all directions and we drove for hours through this weird monoculture environment."

Things are no better for the people who work there. "We came upon small housing settlements in these plantations where the workers lived," he told me. "I went into a restaurant to get directions and the workers there were very, very angry. They had just been screwed by the plantation management and they were not getting paid."

Hawaii is about to undertake a decision and is at a crossroads. At biodiesel plants on Maui and Oahu our electric utility company is going to share in "green washing" a very unstable, volatile and unethical business of palm oil biodiesel for electric generation. In the last year Indonesian palm oil has risen in demand and thus in value on the world market from $400 a ton to $800 a ton. This in turn is driving the illegal cutting of ancient tropical rainforests by Indonesian/Malaysian military generals and multinational corporations.

They call it "land clearing" now instead of logging. The alternative of GMO soybean oil from South America is just the same thing but taking place in the Amazon instead. It is destroying ancient ecosystems, displacing indigenous tribes, and putting entire communities under the control of unscrupulous multinationals and plantation bosses. This idea that we can "certify" as sustainable a destructive undertaking like palm oil is a fraud. All the unsustainable uncertified oil will be bought up by China as they already buy 85 percent of the oil produced in Asia.

We'll only be helping the process and giving credibility to an unethical product. Once it's all blended into a tanker and imported to Hawaii, how will you tell the difference?

This is just the beginning for Hawaii and I am afraid that the good name of Maui and the State of Hawaii is at risk. Tourists around the world will not be pleased to learn that our electricity is generated from palm oil or GMO soybeans from lands which once were magnificent, unique, biologically diverse ancient tropical rain forests - that we feed our air conditioners with the lungs of planet earth.

Before we blindly go any further, let's invest in research in Hawaii and find out exactly what we ourselves can grow locally and sustainably for oil and ethanol feedstock, factoring in what lands will be prioritized for food production.

Let's also research how much of this liquid fuel must meet the needs of transportation. Finally, let's research how we can maximize the use of wind and solar for electric generation. We already have access to the Saudi Arabia of energy - our sun.