Re: Deal before Year End?
Originally Posted by
Zaphod
->
The bullying bunch aren't content with trying to strong-arm Britain and the Swiss,
they try it with Malaysia over palm oil and Brazil in a trade deal try-on over the Amazon.
As many are well aware, I'm no fan of palm oil plantations because they actually strip all nutrients out of the soil even though shedloads of man-made fertilisers are thrown at them on an annual basis. They leave the soil totally barren and unfit for anything other than building on. This link goes some way to explain why a ban on Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil would be counter-productive as far as deforestation is concerned.
I also posted previously that a natural rubber plantation is much better at sequestering carbon dioxide than normal, unmanaged rainforest. Here are the numbers to back this assertion up:
The natural rubber tree, Hevea Brasiliensis, efficiently sequesters carbon*:
Photosynthetic rate of mature Hevea leaf = 11 µmol/m2/s
Other tree species = 5-13 µmol/m2/s
Over a 30 yr life for
Hevea b, Carbon sequestration/hectare = 272 tonnes
Rain forest = 234 tonnes
Secondary rain forest = 150 tonnes
Hevea b is also a valuable source of timber.
The numbers above were published in peer reviewed papers by:
Jones, K.P. (2000) Kautsch. Gummi Kunstst. 53, 735, and
Chung, C.-M., Wang, R.-S. and Jiang, J.-S. (2007) J. Env. Sci. 19, 348
As a matter of interest they were also presented by me in a paper entitled "Polymers based on natural rubber: Renewable materials with unique properties". I was co-author along with Drs S. Cook and A. Chapman. I presented the paper at the Plastics & Rubber Institute of Malaysia's Golden Jubilee Conference, May 2010.