A Tipping Point

The culprit wasn't a forest fire.

It was, well, in a way, kind of everything we've been talking about this season.

The US had passed laws incentivizing corn ethanol, so all the corn that used to be used for corn oil in cooking was being used for ethanol instead.

The world needed a replacement for cheap cakes and cookies, and it found it in palm oil.

Throughout the early 2000s, much of the rainforests of Borneo were replaced with palm oil plantations, and plantation owners would use fire to quickly clear the rainforest.

Then that fire would spread to dried-out peatland, which can burn underground for weeks.

You ended up with vast underground peat fires in Indonesia that you just couldn't put out.

You just couldn't put them out.

So they're just billowing it all out, right? And a billion tons of CO2 were produced.

From June to October 15, about two and a half million hectares of Indonesia burned.

When Tim sees what's happening now with corn ethanol in the US and Brazil, he thinks about what his family members went through in Singapore.

So if you grow soybean oil, for example, or you grow corn oil, um, and you say, "Okay, great.

This thing is awesome and green." And now everybody starts to make sort of more corn oil, and that can sort of cause the displacement of land that was previously growing something else.

And so then the question becomes, how do you count that displaced amount of land into your accounting methods?

Meaning there's a domino effect to growing more corn for fuel.

In Mato Grosso, where Bruce Rastetter and his Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz, Paulo Franz, and Miguel Vaz Ribeiro, have driven a massive corn boom, we've seen displacement of a bunch of other kinds of agriculture and vegetation, not to mention a whole lot more pollution.

In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency used to require that businesses account for this kind of impact.

It was called land use and land use change.

This sounds terribly dull, and everybody's, uh, ears and eyes, like, immediately [laughs] glaze over, but you and I know that this has enormous, absolutely transformational, in fact, horrific impacts upon the world, right? So in the 2007 sort of renewable fuel mandate, which is what created this enormous boom of corn ethanol in America, well, what happened?

[tense music] That's the renewable fuel standard that you heard Bruce Rastetter asking US politicians about in the last episode.

Let's talk about the RFS, renewable fuels.

Next subject, the RFS.

Ag industry-backed politicians in the US Congress fought to get rid of the requirement to account for land use change.

The cheapest oil that was u- used, um, for, for your cakes and for your cookies, um, you know, basically stopped becoming corn oil because corn oil prices went up because corn's demand went up.

And so, well, what's going to be the cheapest oil became the question.