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'Massive Amounts' of Carbon Sequestered for Centuries Released By Clearing Indonesia's Peatland (msn.com) 130

"Indonesia has been clearing tens of thousands of acres of densely vegetated peatland for farming, releasing massive amounts of carbon that had been sequestered below for centuries," reports the Washington Post, "and destroying one of the Earth's most effective means of storing greenhouse gases." The country is home to as much as half of the planet's tropical peatland, a unique ecosystem that scientists say is vital to averting the worst results of climate change. Government leaders have made halting efforts to protect peatlands over the last two decades, but three years ago, when the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, officials launched an ambitious land-clearance operation in a push to expand the cultivation of crops and cut Indonesia's reliance on expensive imports. By transforming 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of what environmental groups say is predominantly peatland into fields of rice, corn and cassava, the government projects that it will achieve self-sufficiency in food... But disrupting the peatlands comes with devastating, likely irreversible costs for the climate, say environmental experts and activists.

"To restore these vast areas of peat forest being destroyed will take years and huge investments in labor and funds," said David Taylor, a professor of tropical environmental change at the National University of Singapore who has researched peatlands in Asia and Africa. To do it on the timeline that global leaders have set for the world to achieve net-zero emissions? "Near impossible," Taylor said... While peatlands make up just 3 percent of the Earth's land, they store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined, according to the United Nations. When peatlands are drained, layers of aged biomass that are exposed to oxygen-rich air decay at an accelerated rate, releasing carbon from bygone eras into the atmosphere.

Even worse, when the weather turns hot, unprotected peat dries out, becoming combustible. Already, environmental activists and villagers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, say peatlands cleared by the government are fueling more-intense wildfires... Left intact, peatlands are naturally protected against fire. Once degraded, however, they produce infernos that are notoriously difficult to put out because they can travel underground, feeding on dried biomass yards below the surface.

Tropical peatlands are also threatened by development in Peru and Africa's Congo Basin, according to the article. But they add that there's something especially ironic about Indonesia's government project. "Research shows that tropical peatlands tend to be too acidic to grow crops.

"Indonesian environmental groups, including Pantau Gambut and WALHI, said they have documented widespread crop failures in areas targeted by the government's project. Rice planted in some peat-rich areas has had less than a third of the yield of rice planted in mineral soil, according to the groups' analysis."
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'Massive Amounts' of Carbon Sequestered for Centuries Released By Clearing Indonesia's Peatland

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  • ... they are non-European! How can we do anything other than applaud and laud what they do?!?

    Oh wait, this means we are supposed to pay them not to, right?

    • Re:But ... but ... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday January 28, 2024 @08:36AM (#64194222) Homepage

      Iceland has the exact same problem, and we're European.

      Well, not "exact" same - in our case, rather than clearing vegetation over bogs, we drained them with ditches (likewise for agriculture). The government incentivised it for much of a century; people drained them even when they didn't have plans to use them. The growing availability of excavators made it a relatively simple process.

      One of the first people known to have spoken out publicly about it was our Nobel laureate, Halldór Laxness, criticizing the mass destruction of bird habitat. It was only more recently that we came to understand the CO2 impact of removing cold low-oxygen water from all this organic matter.

      • Your bogs are nothing next to what your volcanoes are doing. What are you doing to end volcanic eruptions? Do you realize how much environmental harm you're doing by ignoring the volcano problem?

        • by Rei ( 128717 )

          There are in the ballpark of 50 eruptions on Earth per year which together produce a combined around 0,3 GT of CO2. Iceland normally averages one eruption every 2,5 years or so, though it's been more as of late, and let's just assume ours are more CO2 rich than average, so let's just say 10MT of CO2 per year on average. This page by contrastsays that Iceland's volcanoes only emit 1-2MT of CO2 per year [phys.org]. Though again activity has increased recently as Reykjanes has returned to activity, and there's also no

          • Re:But ... but ... (Score:4, Informative)

            by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday January 28, 2024 @10:17AM (#64194394) Homepage

            Some nuance:

              * Draining bogs does stop their methane emissions. But the impact is much smaller than the CO2 impact, even though methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, just because of the scale of the CO2 emissions. And methane's mean atmospheric residency time is just a couple decades

              * Volcanoes actually cause cooling in the shorter term, due to all the SOx and PM that they emit - quite a lot, actually. Hence the term "volcanic winter". Back in the late 1700s Laki caused so much cooling (despite its high latitude, which makes it much harder) that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and there was ice in the Gulf of Mexico.

    • Re:But ... but ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday January 28, 2024 @09:06AM (#64194276)

      ... they are non-European! How can we do anything other than applaud and laud what they do?!?

      Oh wait, this means we are supposed to pay them not to, right?

      I get your point. It is similar to how oceanic plastic pollution is blamed on The USA and Europe.

      Despite the provable fact that the leading countries in this problem are in rough order Phillipines, China, Thailand ans some countries in Africa.

      Using plastic derived and formed in their respective countries.

      I get UN Environment reports, and it is grimly amusing how they do a tapdance around the fact that the designated "good" countries cannot be blamed by narrative, and some like China, just ignore everything. So somehow someway this is the US and Europe's problem.

      The admonitions tend toward telling teh evilz westerners to stop using plastic straws, then slipping in the cleanup efforts in the countries that are the real problem.

      • that the reason China, Philippines, etc are the ones contributing most of the plastic is that all our manufacturing is over there, right? And that we moved it there because our factories were better regulated and couldn't pollute like that?

        It's disingenuous as fuck to blame them for a system we set up. Like when you're driving through a town where the highway's speed limit suddenly drops 15mph. It's a rigged system.
        • It's disingenuous as fuck to blame them for a system we set up. Like when you're driving through a town where the highway's speed limit suddenly drops 15mph. It's a rigged system.

          Thinking that somehow it is anyone else's responsibility for the people who are using the plastics and throwing the empties in the river is perhaps not well thought out.

          These people could recycle plastics, no matter where they are made, or what equipment it is made on, or where the equipment comes from. That's the problem. They don't recycle the plastics that are produced and used in their own countries.

          And at least in the Philippines, the government is working hard to get people to recycle. But it is

      • by evanh ( 627108 )

        What good countries? The west already dug up all our peat long ago.

        • What good countries? The west already dug up all our peat long ago.

          Hmm, you didn't read the article about Indonesia I guess. Indonesia id digging up peatland. Or is Indonesia a part of the west now?

          • by evanh ( 627108 )

            The article is condescendingly calling out Indonesia now but forgets we already dug ours up long ago. That's called hypocrisy.

            If we expect them to preserve their peat, which we should, then we are the ones to pay for it ... indefinitely. Either that, or we need to replenish our own peat bogs.

            • The article is condescendingly calling out Indonesia now but forgets we already dug ours up long ago. That's called hypocrisy.

              If we expect them to preserve their peat, which we should, then we are the ones to pay for it ... indefinitely. Either that, or we need to replenish our own peat bogs.

              Why? Indonesia is a sovereign country, and if they want to dig up their peatlands and de-sequester every molecule of CO2 and methane in them, why shouldn't they be allowed to do as they please with their peat. It isn't ours, it is theirs, and they own it.

              • by evanh ( 627108 )

                Ah-ha. Why was the article even written then?

                • Ah-ha. Why was the article even written then?

                  Probably because some people don't think that is a good idea.

                  It is probably a little jarring to many who might possibly believe that there is only one allowable blame target.

                  I'm not certain of your location, but you do that yourself. Saying the US is being hypocritical because we dug up our peat bogs long ago.

                  Truth is, we're working to map and preserve them - even in other countries. https://www.fs.usda.gov/featur... [usda.gov] If you want to do some blaming, here's some info. The US is a real piker in the pea

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      Dont pay them but then dont tell them what to do with their land. Nothing stopping Europe from turning its farmland into Forests and carbon sinks and importing food from Indonesia to feed itself.
  • Commons tragedy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Sunday January 28, 2024 @07:54AM (#64194184) Journal

    Government leaders have made halting efforts to protect peatlands over the last two decades, but three years ago, when the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, officials launched an ambitious land-clearance operation in a push to expand the cultivation of crops and cut Indonesia's reliance on expensive imports.

    It's difficult to look at the big picture with an empty dinner plate.

    • by Alworx ( 885008 )

      Absolutely... who cares about tomorrow if I can't live today? And if of course, like anyone, I'm too proud to depend on others, because nobody in their right mind would like to be in debt to the "west"

      • Indonesia has a per capita GDP of about $5,000, which is not poor by Asian standards. Economically, they're doing okay.

        Most cleared peat bogs produce palm oil for export, not rice.

        Ironically, some countries subsidize palm oil as a biofuel, believing it reduces CO2 emissions. That's a dumb policy.

        Disclaimer: I've been to Indonesia. The people there are very friendly, and the food is great.

      • It's not pride, it's survival instinct. The pandemic proved the west was not reliable to provide the food in case of an emergency, hence the reaction to get more security. They don't want to be dependent on the whim of the west, or whichever crazy governments the west elects every X years.
    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      Saying Indonesian farmland is the commons is like saying European cities are the commons. How about sharing a few apartments with Indonesia? No? But they should share their carbon sink with you? Does it make any economic sense?
      • How about sharing a few apartments with Indonesia?

        Why? Indonesia doesn't have a housing crisis. ... unlike say some European countries.

        • by ghoul ( 157158 )
          They only need the ownership. They can give it on rent to the Europeans. The ex owners dont even have to move out, just pay rent.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      This just delays that empty dinner plate and makes it much, much worse. It is difficult to survive long-term without strategic planning.

    • It's hard to have a full dinner plate when you've overpopulated your country.
    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      pandemic disrupted food supply chains

      Root cause right there.

      Meanwhile, the Amish went right on farming. And refusing vaccinations. Some died, but most lived. Meanwhile, the first world went into a panic. Basically trying to save the lives of everyone with co-morbidities.

  • That is nothing. What about all that Cambrian Carbon in coal .... there is no easy way out of this. Whether environmentalists like it or not, at some point we are going to have to resequester much of our carbon artificially. And FWIW, carbon is not the biggest problem. Aside from Methane, we just use a lot of energy and it's form doesn't matter that much in the end. It all ends up as heat. We have turned earth into a garden and we need to start thinking of it that way.

    It is kind of pointless to go fr

    • No problem. The Pierson's Puppeteers already had that problem lots of years ago, and they solved it by simply moving their planet a bit further from their sun. We just concentrate on developing the needed tech. Properly fed Indonesians sure could help into that.

    • by sfcat ( 872532 )
      You do know that gasses like CO2 and Methane leak out of the atmosphere naturally right? Half-life of CO2 is 200 years, half-life of Methane is about 20 years. And no plan makes sense without large amounts of nuclear power.
    • by evanh ( 627108 )

      There is an easy way out - Just let mother nature have her land back.

    • You’re wrong about the source of heat. The actual heat that we generate is so tiny compared to heat from the sun that it’s basically zero. The problem is the extra trapped sun heat. So, yes, the problem is the extra co2 and ch4, which we are NOT gonna stop anytime soon because our species is currently incapable of collective action at that scale. Which means that the consequences of more thermal energy in our atmosphere are gonna hit us like full-speed freight train. We’ve been watching it
      • If we actually were generating enough power that the heat made a significant difference... well, we're already going to have to sequester the last 100+ years of extra CO2 we released, we could just sequester a bit more and make the planet cool more rapidly to even things out.

      • by MrBrklyn ( 4775 )

        It is not just our body heat. It is our civilization and machines and farms. What I said was correct. We are just shifting the heat imbalance from point to point and we generate a lot of heat in a paper thin atmopshere. It is not "basically zero". That is the understanding of an undergraduate.

        • You seem to imply that you have graduate-level knowledge of this? Please educate me. Assuming a radius of 6000km and solar irradiance of around 1kw, I calculate that the total solar irradiance on the planet is around 1e17 watts. A human is around 100 watts, so 10 billion humans makes for around 1e12 watts of basic biological metabolism. Factor in all the other human activities, maybe that energy usage goes up by a factor of a thousand to 1e15? That would still make human activities a hundred times less than
    • Either bitch-Gaia or human culture is your highest value. I understand  German druids wept when Julius Caesar cut down their sacred oaks. Same weeping now from the green-beanerz when yeomanry extract value from land  to improve their lot. Cry me a feckin-A river. 
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Whether environmentalists like it or not, at some point we are going to have to resequester much of our carbon artificially.

      That is not a question of "like". It is a question of "possible". And it is not possible for the foreseeable future. Maybe in 100 or 200 years, but currently, we do not have the tech or the industrial base or the consensus on it. This idea is nothing but grasping at straws.

    • Whether environmentalists like it or not, at some point we are going to have to resequester much of our carbon artificially.

      Why? Carbon is an awesome element. It can be used in so many ways. Could you imagine a chain made out of perfectly aligned carbon atoms connected to a carbon weight in Earth orbit?

      Where would you get the carbon you need when it is all sequestered away? If you are pulling carbon from the atmosphere, use it. Could you imagine using carbon bricks for building? Carbon roads?

  • So... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday January 28, 2024 @08:50AM (#64194250)
    ...try to make their food supply more robust by contributing to the conditions that'll make growing stuff more difficult. Sounds like a great plan!
    • VeryFluffyBunny gets a bingo. Ironically might get short term food production gains but Indonesia is closer to the danger zone for warming. Unfortunately near term tends to be higher on hierarchy of needs. Empathize with the Indo leaders they need to appease constituents now or they will lose. Similar dilemma in many places.
      • by jmccue ( 834797 )

        Empathize with the Indo leaders they need to appease constituents now or they will lose.

        The leaders were mainly appeasing the developers so they can get bribes. We all know the leaders do not care 1 bit about the farmers who will use the land. The leaders, developers and people selling the land are the winners. I doubt they care if the new farmland can grow anything.

        And this is not just an Indonesia issue, this happens everywhere.

        • by ghoul ( 157158 )
          No problem fossil fuel created fertilizers can be used on the land to make it grow anything. It works for Europe which is a frozen wasteland. Indonesia is on the equator with a year round growing season.
    • ...try to make their food supply more robust by contributing to the conditions that'll make growing stuff more difficult. Sounds like a great plan!

      Humans can be amazingly short sighted. And I suspect that things will get much worse before they get better.

      I guess that statement was a bit of a trueism. The amount of CO2 and methane being de-sequestered isn't leaving the atmosphere any time soon, and present day activities are just making it worse. Even here in middle PA, this winter is like the last decade or more. We are in what has always been the coldest part of winter - the last week in January, first week in February. Looking out my office wind

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Typical human mode of operation. Done something stupid? Try to fix it by doing something even more stupid!

  • by kackle ( 910159 ) on Sunday January 28, 2024 @09:34AM (#64194344)
    But hey, this planet can support billions more people, no problem! /s
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by christoban ( 3028573 )

      Don't worry, world population is already shrinking, except Africa and that'll get there in a few more decades.

      • We will still hit 10 billion regardless of peatlands.
        • Since most of that's in extremely poor nations, I doubt they're contribute much to the increased temperatures. We're probably past the point of no return, anyway. This planet, too, will be for the machines.

      • by kackle ( 910159 )
        Maybe that's the trend/future, but the simple numbers say that it's not yet "shrinking": It was 6 billion a few decades ago, 7 billion a few years ago and it's 8 billion now.
        • I'm saying the rate of growth is shrinking. China and India both started shrinking last year.

          Really the only place that's still growing very fast is Africa, as very poor people are uneducated and religious, and so don't use contraception. Or apparently, have much else to do. :D

  • The gist of the article is the gods have decried that Indonesians should stay poor.
    • The Great American Swamp stretched from Richmond to Tallahassee ... and was ( mostly ) drained in the 18-th / 19-th centuries. That drainage created pastorial Eastern America; you know all the nice little towns and surrounding farms. Now some green-beaning snake-lovr bitches about developing countries doing the same to their peet-bogs. Yummy bogberries aside, the hypocrisy doesn't just shout ... it swears ...
  • There is insufficient caring to induce meaningful action.

    All the short-term economic incentives push us to burn everything for fuel and damn the future, so that's what we're going to do. "Sacrifice now, benefit later" is not really something people are good at, Indonesian or not.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. This does unfortunately also mean that people are not good at long-term survival. Essentially this is on par with eating the seed grain, just on a longer time-scale.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      They're not burning it for fuel. They're clearing it for use as farmland. So solutions that address the problem as one of energy (let's use solar and wind) are destined to fail.

      I'm not sure how much land Indonesia holds back for other environmental reasons. But perhaps some tough choices must be made and they need to let go of some.

      • >They're not burning it for fuel.

        I recognized I was not 100% right after I submitted the post.

        However, in this context I was going more for the general attitude of 'burn it all down' rather than suggesting the peat was actually being burned for fuel.

        • And now I've totally skipped an entire word in my clarification post.

          "I was not 100% clear right after".

          Ugh.

  • These evildoers are trying to cultivate their own food!
  • In any sane world, Western countries would be paying Indonesia to keep that carbon in the group and claiming that saving. Indonesia should be guaranteed fair food prices in exchange for leaving their land unproductive
  • Yeah, the third world has a long way to go in its environmental destruction until they reach the levels we've already achieved in our developed countries. And it's not going to stop. But hey, buy an EV, it will make you feel better.

  • Destroying ecosystems bad, obviously. But how bad in quantitative terms of pulse and ongoing emissions of Gigatonne of CO2?

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