, Columnist
A $12,000 EV Makes Indonesia’s Biofuel Bet Obsolete
Indonesia has a far better option to cut spending on crude: electric vehicles.
Photographer: Dimas Ardian/BloombergThe world’s biggest program of deforestation is being made superfluous before it’s really begun. Thank electric cars.
In Indonesia, President Prabowo Subianto is planning to convert 20 million hectares of forest into plantations to grow food and biofuels. That’s roughly equivalent to the area already given to palm oil cultivation, and almost sufficient to cover the island of Great Britain. In November, the government announced it had allocated 920,000 hectares to ethanol as part of a plan to mandate a 10% biofuel blend in the country’s gasoline by 2027.