Breakthrough Moment to End Deforestation for Palm Oil

2018 has been a full year of campaigning to end forest destruction for dirty palm oil, and if Wilmar sticks to its promise to monitor its suppliers, forest destroyers will have nowhere to hide.

It’s been a full year of campaigning to end forest destruction for dirty palm oil. After Greenpeace International exposed how Wilmar was still buying palm oil from rainforest destroyers and selling this dirty palm oil to brands all over the world, you took action.

Activist Larasati Wido Matofani holds a banner reading: ‘Drop Dirty Palm Oil Now” as she hangs on a rope during the action in Bitung, North Sulawesi. Thirty Greenpeace activists from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, UK, France, and Australia occupy a palm oil refinery belonging to Wilmar International.

Thanks to over 1.3 million people who called on the biggest global brands to drop rainforest destroyers – we have been able to move the world’s largest palm oil trader, Wilmar to action. Wilmar has now launched a groundbreaking plan to map and monitor its suppliers and stop buying from forest destroyers!

If Wilmar sticks to its word, forest destroyers will have nowhere to hide. This could change the entire industry as other traders will be under pressure to do the same.

In the last few months alone, street artists painted murals in 20 cities around the world to draw attention to rainforest destruction for palm oil. Activists occupied one of Wilmar’s palm oil refineries, and intercepted a tanker carrying Wilmar’s palm oil products into Europe – twice!

So now we are deploying the Greenpeace ships

We are rallying supporters worldwide to help hold these companies accountable and to make sure they follow up on their words with bold action. Because we don’t need more talk — we need concrete, urgent action to stop plastic pollution at the source!

How much plastic packaging they are producing

Building on this momentum, thousands of people called on President Obama to use his legal authority to make the U.S. Arctic Ocean off limits from future oil drilling. In late 2016, Obama took action to permanently protect all of the Chukchi Sea and the vast majority of the Beaufort Sea — as well as a number of biologically important undersea canyons in the Atlantic.This was a big victory for the people-powered climate movement, signalling that the relentless expansion of the oil industry into new areas was finally at an end.But then Trump happened.

The Trump Twist

Trump came into office calling climate change a hoax and giving handouts to dirty energy companies. His plan to open up nearly every U.S. coastline to more oil and gas drilling was extremely unpopular, and in the case of the Arctic Ocean, it outright ignored the fact that Obama had already ruled out future leasing there.

Trump’s new offshore oil plan called for lease sales in the Beaufort Sea starting in 2019 and the Chukchi Sea in 2020. In response, Greenpeace joined with other groups in a lawsuit to challenge the plan in court. Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council led the litigation, representing Greenpeace along with Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, League of Conservation Voters, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society.

The key issue was that when Congress enacted the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), it gave the president authority to withdraw areas from oil and gas leasing, but made no mention of revoking previous withdrawals.

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That’s an act that only Congress itself can take. Judge Sharon Gleason agreed with this analysis, and as she stated in her ruling, Obama’s withdrawals “will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.” The government may appeal this ruling, but for now this is a big victory for the climate.
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