Products that should disappear from our everyday life in the fight against climate change are playing an important role again because the Ukraine war is making their alternatives rare. That should only be temporary, assure politicians. Environmentalists find that questionable.
Almost every summer in Southeast Asia, the sun eclipses. From Thailand to Malaysia to the Philippines, a veil is moving through the air, and huge clouds of smoke can be seen on satellite images. They arise in Indonesia, where despite bans, farmers and companies set fire to huge areas of rainforest every year to make room for new fields. Mainly palm oil is then grown on the freshly cleared areas.
The practice has been banned in theory for 20 years. Since then, western producers have also been trying to use less and less palm oil in their products in order to deprive the farmers of the basis for slash and burn. Most European manufacturers of everything from potato chips to margarine and baby milk have swapped Asian palm oil for European sunflower oil in recent years.
But now there is the role backwards. Because most sunflower oil comes from Russia and Ukraine and both countries drastically reduced their exports during the war, cooking oil has become scarce worldwide. So that production can continue, manufacturers are dependent on alternatives – and are now buying palm oil again. In Great Britain, for example, food manufacturers and supermarket chains who had boycotted the raw material since 2018 are now backing down.
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The two most important growing countries, Indonesia and Malaysia, are accordingly expecting growing export rates this year. Both want to increase their exports by six to seven percent. This is significantly stronger than the average for the past five years. In addition, the revenues for both countries are increasing because the price of palm oil has risen by 47 percent compared to the previous year. However, the price has fallen sharply in recent weeks. That’s not a good sign, as commodity traders expect the supply of palm oil on the market to increase significantly this year.
In Germany, the controversial plant sap is still widely used. When Indonesia imposed a temporary export ban at the end of April, there was an outcry from German industry. Confectionery manufacturers in particular use palm oil, but also Dr. Oetker. The Bielefeld group announced price increases immediately after the export stop.
Palm oil is not the only controversial commodity making a comeback as a result of the Ukraine war. Because Russian natural gas in particular is becoming scarce in Europe, countries are now increasingly turning to coal-fired power again. Coal-fired power plants in Germany, for example, are to be reactivated by March 2024, announced Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck (Greens). The phase-out of coal by 2038, ideally even by 2030, should not be shaken. The opposition, above all the CDU, would like to reverse the nuclear phase-out and let the remaining nuclear power plants in Germany, which would be switched off at the end of the year, continue to run – only temporarily, of course.
Germany is not alone with these plans. In March, coal consumption in power plants in the EU increased by 51 percent compared to the previous year, data from the Fraunhofer Institute show. Greece recently announced the reopening of coal mines that had actually been shut down, and Austria is also reactivating shut down coal-fired power plants.
There is great concern among climate protectors that the changes will not only be temporary. “We cannot allow ourselves to push back the exit from coal any further,” said Annika Rittmann, spokeswoman for Fridays for Future in Germany. “The longer the Ukraine war lasts, the worse the consequences for the climate will be,” warned John Kerry. He is the US government’s special envoy for the climate. “Climate change is not an item on the agenda that we can simply push back,” said UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa from Mexico at the Bonn climate conference in early June.
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