Die Pressemitteilungen vom Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) sind meist zum Kopfschütteln. Die folgende Pressemitteilung vom PIK jedoch ist bemerkenswert, da sie einen kritischen Blick auf das Palmöl wirft, das eigentlich Kohlenwasserstoffe ersetzen soll. Interessant: Die Pressemitteilung erschien nur auf englisch, nicht in der deutschen Übersetzung. Offenbar wollte man es den deutschen Lesern und Medienschaffenden nicht zumuten. Wir bringen die Meldung im englischen Original. Wer lieber deutsch liest, bitte oben rechts „Übersetzung ins Englische“ klicken.
Study on climate-damaging palm oil production in Indonesia shows push for industrialisation
Understanding governments’ motives is crucial to strengthening climate action. Analysis in the top journal JAERE with confidential data from the world’s fourth largest country.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population, has the biggest rainforests after Brazil and the Congo Basin. But it has cleared huge areas in the past 20 years to produce palm oil which is used in biscuits, chocolate, candles, cosmetics and instant soups. The climate-damaging palm oil boom immediately brought many jobs, and a new study examines a broader motive of the government: a push for industrialisation. The study was carried out with contributions from the Berlin-based climate research institute MCC (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change), and published in the renowned Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE).
“Climate protection in the Global South does not fall from the sky,” says Nicolas Koch, head of the Policy Evaluation Lab at MCC and one of the authors of the study. “If you want to advance it, you have to understand the mechanisms of political economy that lead governments to deliberately push development processes that are problematic from a global perspective. Here we shed light on the thorny question of positive effects of the Indonesian palm oil boom on general economic development. And, unfortunately, we find some.”
The study draws on partly confidential data on 1,150 palm oil mills in Indonesia – almost the entire sector – as well as on the 20,000 medium-sized and large companies in the broader Indonesian manufacturing sector. Using sophisticated statistical methods, it investigates the extent to which the opening of new palm oil mills has influenced industrialisation outside the palm oil supply chain. To filter out the cause-effect relationship, the research team works with a treatment group and a control group, as they would in a laboratory. They compare the development of industrial enterprises in regions with new mill investment and those without for the period 2005 to 2015, and excludes false logical conclusions by means of robustness checks.
Investment in such a mill is usually around 100 million US dollars and is accompanied by the cultivation of oil palms, which originally came from West Africa, on about 10,000 hectares (about 24,700 acres) of land. The central finding of the study is that it has considerable effects: on average, it increases sales by 15 percent in the entire industry of the corresponding region, outside the palm oil value chain, and both labour productivity and total factor productivity rise by 13 percent. A major reason for this is the road infrastructure built in the course of the investment, which also benefit the rest of the economy. Although wages for workers increase locally, which tends to slow down industrial development, this effect is greatly mitigated by migration within Indonesia and therefore is not a factor.
As carefully as the study filters out the push effect of the palm oil boom statistically, it can by no means be deduced that Indonesia has done well with this strategy in terms of society as a whole. Firstly, the research team points out that investments in new roads, for example, would also have had positive effects on the economy without the palm oil boom. It could well be that a different kind of economic development in the area would have promoted industry even more.
Secondly, the climate impacts of rainforest clearing in Indonesia also affect the country itself. “Whether the government has really acted in the national interest is doubtful,” MCC researcher Koch highlights. “This question would have to be explored by a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis that also takes into account social and ecological climate damage in Indonesia.”
Reference of the cited article:
Kraus, S., Heilmayr, R., Koch, N., 2024, Spillovers to Manufacturing Plants from Multimillion Dollar Plantations: Evidence from the Indonesian Palm Oil Boom, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE)
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/727196
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Vikings Vs Greens | Willie Soon: Time Traveller
Vikings v Greens. Dr Willie Soon exposes the climate scam in his coal-powered Time Machine. Gorilla Science strikes again … Also see Willie & the Dinosaurs!
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Neues Manuskript eines Teams um Frank Stefani auf arXiv: Darin wird das zuvor in Stefani et al. 2024 gefundene Spektrum des Sonnendynamos (welches sehr schön mit demjenigen der Klimadaten vom Lake Lisan übereinstimmt) durch ein 1.7-Jahre Signal ergänzt. Dieses ist in der Sonnenphysik auch als QBO bekannt (aber wahrscheinlich(?) nicht mit der entsprechenden QBO in der Erdatmosphäre verwandt). Interessanterweise führt diese QBO auch zu einer gewissen Beruhigung des Sonnendynamos, was möglicherweise das Problem löst, dass esonnenähnliche Sterne wesentlich aktiver sind.
Adding further pieces to the synchronization puzzle: QBO, bimodality, and phase jumps
This work builds on a recently developed self-consistent synchronization model of the solar dynamo which attempts to explain Rieger-type periods, the Schwabe/Hale cycle and the Suess-de Vries and Gleissberg cycles in terms of resonances of various wave phenomena with gravitational forces exerted by the orbiting planets. We start again from the basic concept that the spring tides of the three pairs of the tidally dominant planets Venus, Earth and Jupiter excite magneto-Rossby waves at the solar tachocline. While the quadratic action of the sum of these three waves comprises the secondary beat period of 11.07 years, the main focus is now on the action of the even more pronounced period of 1.723 years. Our dynamo model provides oscillations with exactly that period, which is also typical for the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO). Most remarkable is its agreement with Ground Level Enhancement (GLE) events which preferentially occur in the positive phase of an oscillation with a period of 1.724 years. While bimodality of the sunspot distribution is shown to be a general feature of synchronization, it becomes most strongly expressed under the influence of the QBO. This may explain the observation that the solar activity is relatively subdued when compared to that of other sun-like stars. We also discuss anomalies of the solar cycle, and subsequent phase jumps by 180 degrees. In this connection it is noted that the very 11.07-year beat period is rather sensitive to the time-averaging of the quadratic functional of the waves and prone to phase jumps of 90 degrees. On this basis, we propose an alternative explanation of the observed 5.5-year phase jumps in algae-related data from the North Atlantic and Lake Holzmaar that were hitherto attributed to optimal growth conditions.