Eco-police find new target: Oreos

CNN/Money/Forbes ^ | 8-21-2008 | Marc Gunther

[lainie]

(Fortune) -- What do Oreo cookies made by Nabisco, Cheez-It crackers from Kellogg's or General Mills' Fiber One Chewy Bars have to do with global warming and the destruction of tropical rainforests? A lot, say environmental activists.

The link between the supermarket shelf, climate change and shrinking rainforests is palm oil, a controversial ingredient that may now be the most widely-traded vegetable oil in the world.

Here's the problem: Demand for palm oil, which is found in soaps and cosmetics as well as food, has more than doubled in the last decade as worldwide food consumption has soared. Farmers, in turn, are expanding their plantations, burning forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, where nearly all of the palm oil imported to the United States originates. Deforestation is the primary reason that Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions are the third-highest in the world.

The Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace International, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are all campaigning against palm oil. (You can find their arguments here and here and here and here.) Last week, RAN asked about 2,000 volunteers to sneak into food stores across the United States and attach stickers to products made with palm oil.

"Warning!," the stickers said. "May Contain Rainforest Destruction."

[wildbill]

American cookie eaters are only 3% of the world’s cookie eating population, but consume 95% of the Oreos.

You wanna make something of it? You wanna piece of my Oreo?

[According2RecentPollsAirIsGood]

"The growing use of palm oil in biofuels has made the problem even more urgent."

The only relevant thing in this article. Buried in paragraph 11.

These are the same people who demand we drop petroleum and power everything with "renewable" biofuels. Well, that's what's driven the increased demand for palm oil which has the highest (yet still pathetic) yields of oil per acre of currently-used biodiesel plants.

Therefore, these same people are themselves the ones responsible for the increased destruction of rainforests, not Nabisco. How ironic, yet how expected.