The Wall Street Journal offers this story (subscriber link) for the “when good intentions have bad consequences” file:
Here on the island of Borneo, a thick haze often encloses this city of 500,000 people. The cause: forest fires that have blazed across the island. Many of them were set to clear land to produce palm oil — a key ingredient in biodiesel, a clean-burning diesel fuel alternative.[...]
Seasonal rains have helped quell the fires over the past few weeks. But the miasma of smoke from Borneo and the island of Sumatra — an annual phenomenon that blankets large parts of Southeast Asia in smog — underscores a troubling dark side of the world’s alternative-energy boom. Among other problems, the fires in Indonesia spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, experts say. In doing so, they exacerbate the very global-warming concerns biofuels are meant to alleviate.
Such side effects are not an isolated problem. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada and elsewhere, forests are being slashed for new energy-yielding crops or other unconventional fuels. In India, environmental activists say, water tables are dropping as farmers try to boost production of ethanol-yielding sugar.
There’s something not-quite-right with the idea of doing environmental damage to save the environment, isn’t there?
