Indonesia's Peat Fires Equal All US Road, Air Vehicle Emissions In Tons Of Carbon Released

[hatrack]

TARUNA JAYA, Indonesia - Across a patch of pineapples shrouded in smoke, Idris Hadrianyani battled a menace that has left his family sleepless and sick -- and has wrought as much damage on the planet as has exhaust from all the cars and trucks in the United States. Against the advancing flames, he waved a hose with a handmade nozzle confected from a plastic soda bottle. The lopsided struggle is part of a battle against one of the biggest, and most overlooked, causes of global climate change: a vast and often smoldering layer of coal-black peat that has made Indonesia the world's third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.

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Less than a quarter of a century ago, 75 percent of Kalimantan -- which comprises three Indonesian regions on the island of Borneo -- was covered in thick forests. Gnawed away since by loggers, oil palm plantations and grandiose state projects, the forests have since shrunk by about half. Each year, Indonesia loses forest area roughly the size of Connecticut.

Fires, meanwhile, have grown more frequent and serious. For centuries, Kalimantan locals have burned forestland to create plots for farming. But what used to be small, controlled fires have become fearsome conflagrations as dry and degraded peat goes up in smoke. Estimating carbon emissions from deforested peatland is a highly complicated and inexact science. Even when not burning, dried peat leaks a slow but steady stream of carbon dioxide and other gases. Once it catches fire, the stream becomes a torrent.

In 2006, according to Wetlands International, a Dutch research and lobbying group, Indonesia's peatlands released roughly 1.9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide -- equal to the combined emissions that year of Germany, Britain and Canada, and more than U.S. emissions from road and air travel. When particularly bad fires raged across Kalimantan in 1997, according to a study led by a British scientist, the amount was up to four times as high -- more than the total emissions by the United States in that period.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34035624/ns/world_news-washington_post/

[Dead_Parrot]

1. Fucking hell. That's a lot of CO2

OFHWAD.