2008 was a crazy year! Apart from the global financial crisis, this was the year that saw the green tinged madness of hyperventilating green loonies at their worst with their deliberate panic inducing allegations of melting polar ice to the potential extinction of polar bears to Olympic smog in Beijing! You can be excused if you think that the world was losing its collective mind along with the loonies!

This was also the year where Interior Secretary-designate Ken Salazar was appointed by President Designate, Barack Obama and raises the question of how Salazar will deal with polar bears. Yes, polar bears.

As ever, climate change has coloured thinking about almost every other issue, and the poster beast of global warming has been the polar bear. The cute white face of man’s inhumanity to nature is deemed to be in peril as warming seas in the north become ever-freer of ice. The bear-as-victim was personified by the erstwhile cuddly cub Knut in Berlin Zoo, though he is now a rather large predator. The facts don’t fit the image, however. Polar bear numbers are far higher now than in the past, despite warming temperatures, mainly thanks to restrictions on hunting. Alarmist predictions of the animal’s future have been
criticised for failing to apply some basic principles of forecasting to the (often patchy) available data, preferring to assume a gloomy outlook rather than admit that this is a complex problem with many factors we’re not sure of.

Believe it or not, environmental loonies want to use the threat that supposed global warming poses to polar bears as the basis of legal suits to stop economic development not just in Alaska but throughout the United States. This sounds outlandish, but it's true. No economic growth because it might raise temperatures in the Arctic, which might in turn reduce the number of ice floes that these attractive carnivores jump on.

So what else is new? Palm oil has kind of gotten used to the onslaught of the integrity challenged Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Greenpeace and their wild claims of the humble commodity causing massive deforestation that allegedly threatens the extinction of the exotic red ape, the orang utan.

In a “report” called: “Malaysian Palm Oil: Green Gold or Green Wash”, FOE accused the Malaysian State of Sarawak of developing “large-scale plantations at breath-taking speed having overexploited its timber resources and depleted its forests.” The “report” contends that oil palm plantations are being expanded at the expense of tropical forests.

Let’s examine the facts. The agriculture to forest land ratio in Sarawak currently stands at 8:76. That means that agricultural land in Sarawak is currently only 8%. How could it even be remotely possible for Sarawak to be expanding palm oil plantations “at the expense of tropical forests”? Isn’t it obvious then that the true situation in Sarawak is that palm oil plantations are primarily developed on legitimate agricultural land or previously logged over areas?

Not to be outdone, according to a report from Reuters, Greenpeacers once again formed a symbolic blockade with their ships and trademark rubber lifeboats in order to stop three tankers from leaving the Port of Dumai in Sumatra. One of the ships detained by Greenpeace was the Gran Couve, owned by the world's largest palm oil supplier Wilmar International. Apparently, a few activists chained themselves to the ship's anchor, leading one prominent environmental site, The Green Daily to ask whether these Greenpeacers are heroes or crazies and whether their actions were not dangerously irresponsible. (i)

The Palm Oil Truth Foundation takes the view that it is such irrational attacks that alerts right thinking individuals to question just what the true agenda of environmentalists such as Greenpeace and FOE are. Whatever they are, they certainly are not helping to resolve the perennial problems faced by the planet which are all purely structural and developmental such as the eradication of poverty and hunger. As it is, environmentalism as promoted by the likes of FOE and Greenpeace resembles the Da Vinci Code. It is a great story that sells best selling books and newspapers. It contains a grain of truth and a mountain of nonsense! The year 2008 appears to have heralded the coming of the age of unreason which will eventually prove economically destructive and harmful and profoundly disquieting! THE END.

Reference
(i) http://www.greendaily.com/2008/11/12/greenpeace-blocks-palm-oil-tanker-heroes-or-crazies/

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