“The plantations needed to produce the palm oil cover an area of 700,000 hectares – land that until recently was still rainforest and the habitat of endangered orangutans. Despite the clear-cutting of the rainforests, the EU has classified palm oil as sustainably produced.”
https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/mailalert/908/biofuel-eu-destroys-700-000-hectares-of-rainforest
We have a request from Rainforest Rescue to help get signatures for this important petition above to urge the EU to ditch biofuel. Please sign and share.
Next, please write to these 16 EU members important for biofuel lobbying. Simply copy and paste and use these emails:
corinne.lepage@europarl.europa.eu,alejo.vidal-quadras@europarl.europa.eu,
christa.klass@europarl.europa.eu, kriton.arsenis@europarl.europa.eu,
sabine.wils@europarl.europa.eu,julie.girling@europarl.europa.eu,
bas.eickhout@europarl.europa.eu,tadeusz.cymanski@europarl.europa.eu,
britta.thomsen@europarl.europa.eu,jens.rohde@europarl.europa.eu,
giles.chichester@europarl.europa.eu,marisa.matias@europarl.europa.eu,
bela.glattfelder@europarl.europa.eu,riikka.manner@europarl.europa.eu,
filip.kaczmarek@europarl.europa.eu,claude.turmes@europarl.europa.eu
Again, simply copy and paste this below in your email body (its from the petition above), and send. That’s all! (better still, write in your own thoughts!).
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Ladies and Gentlemen,
To my great consternation, I have learnt that the European Commission plans to uphold its policy of promoting “biofuels” – despite the fact that they not only lead to more hunger in the world, but also have catastrophic consequences for the environment and the climate. Worldwide, industrial monocultures are spreading at the expense of natural ecosystems and destroying biodiversity.
Environmentalists, human-rights activists, scientists, development experts and even international organizations such as the United Nations and the OECD have demanded for years that the EU put an end to its harmful biofuel policy.
Even the findings of scientific studies undertaken on behalf the European Commission show that biodiesel from palm, soybean and rapeseed oil causes more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil diesel fuel.
Moreover, biofuel production also consumes huge quantities of water, as well as fertilizers and pesticides that pollute the environment and adversely impact human health. Even here in Europe, farmland birds are disappearing because their habitat is being lost to rapeseed monocultures.
None of these serious problems can be solved by setting a limit of five percent for agrofuels derived from foodstuffs and counting the volumes from agrofuels from waste and cellulose in quadruple, as the Commission is proposing now.
Please abolish the mandatory blending of agrofuels and eliminate all related tax benefits, subsidies and imports immediately.
The human right to food, the preservation of biodiversity and the protection of the environment must take priority over the one-sided business interests of the agrofuels industry.
Yours sincerely,
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Thank you for caring, friend of the orangutans!