@kapitolai_: Europe put food oil into diesel engines, counted it as renewable energy and rewarded fuel suppliers for doing it. But once the land emissions left outside the official score were added, every major crop oil in a Commission-funded study came out worse than fossil diesel. In 2009, EU law required 10% of transport energy to be renewable by 2020. Suppliers turned to biodiesel. By 2015, 72% of Europe's bio-based diesel feedstock was virgin rapeseed, palm, soy or sunflower oil. Palm oil exposed the loophole. By 2014, 46% of Europe's imported palm oil was being used for biofuel, six times the 2010 volume and enough to require roughly one million hectares of tropical land. An existing plantation could pass the EU test because it cleared no new forest. But using its oil for fuel did not erase food demand. Replacement farms could expand elsewhere into rainforest or peatland, while those indirect land-use emissions stayed outside the fuel's carbon score. A Commission-funded model added those land emissions to standard EU estimates for farming, processing and transport. The resulting lifecycle estimate put palm biodiesel at 3.03 times the greenhouse-gas emissions of fossil diesel: 203% more. Soy was 113% more, rapeseed 18% more and sunflower 4% more. The average across the four crop oils was 81% higher. These are modeled marginal lifecycle estimates, not a measurement of every litre produced. But the result was brutal: all four were worse than the fossil fuel they were supposed to replace. Palm was later classified as high-risk. In January 2026, the European Commission concluded that expansion of both palm and soy into high-carbon land erased all greenhouse-gas savings versus fossil fuel. Worldwide, vegetable oils still supplied 65% of biodiesel feedstock in 2023. In the EU, crop oils still made up 38% of total biodiesel feedstock in 2025. Europe did not eliminate the emissions. It moved them off the certificate while forests and peatlands paid the real bill, then used incomplete accounting to call the fuel renewable. #biodiesel #europeanunion #climatepolicy #palmoil #greenwashing

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Sunday 02 August 2026 06:44:05 GMT