Word: oil
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...Malaysia commemorated 50 years of independence this past summer, but the celebratory pageantry masked an underlying identity crisis. In many ways, the country is a success story, the very model of a modern Asian nation. Buoyed by oil revenue, capital Kuala Lumpur bristles with skyscrapers and industrial parks, while a massive administrative capital called Putrajaya has risen from what were palm-oil plantations two decades ago. In September, Malaysia's first astronaut blasted into space, his flight mirroring the nation's ambitions. Poverty has been reduced from half the population at independence to just 5% today, as an affirmative-action...
...ambles off to the fields to work. Suranto isn't a local; he has come from northern Sumatra because there are jobs in Riau. The forests and peatlands of the area are being transformed into plantations, and workers are being paid to plant tens of thousands of young oil-palm trees in fields stripped bare of their native vegetation by burning. As Suranto stoops and digs one hole after another amid the blackened stumps of an old tropical forest, he looks like a camp follower picking through the detritus of a still-smoldering battlefield...
...Which is exactly what Riau province is, in a way. Roughly the size of Taiwan, the area has become the focus of a green-versus-green tussle pitting environmentalists trying to protect Indonesia's disappearing forests against a fast-growing alternative-energy business. Palm oil, a byproduct of the oil-palm tree such as those being planted in Riau, is used for cooking and as a food additive. Growing it has long been a big business in Southeast Asia. But it can also be used in the production of a relatively clean-burning alternative fuel: biodiesel. As oil prices have...
...past 10 years, a deforestation rate that is among the fastest in the world. In other words, razing forests is a big business - and carbon credits might not provide an adequate substitute for the profits that come from converting fallow land to income-producing ventures like palm-oil plantations...
...rules of the game will bring us to ruin. Fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - have powered economic development for two centuries, and without them we'd all be stuck in poverty. But we've learned step by step of harmful side effects. First we learned that coal-fired power plants created acid rain, so we changed the rules of the game to insist on smokestack scrubbers to eliminate pollutants like sulfur oxides. Second we learned that automobiles produced pollutants that caused smog, so we changed the rules to insist on catalytic converters. Now we've learned that...