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
How much plastic packaging they are producing
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.