Everyone knows by now that the war in Iran — a devastating conflict already exacting a heavy human toll — is disrupting the flow of oil around the world. It’s also having major effects on global agricultural markets and, with them, the world’s tropical rainforests.
American farmers are being squeezed: fertilizer and fuel costs are rising due to the war, and export markets remain volatile from Trump’s tariffs. In response, the administration is boosting biofuel mandates to drive up demand for biofuel crops like corn and soy while cutting reliance on imported oil.
According to reporting from Inside Climate News, a major problem with the plan is that the U.S. simply doesn’t have enough vegetable oil to meet the mandated increases. The gap will be filled by imports — and those imports will be filled by clearing rainforests.
The same reporting cites Princeton researcher Tim Searchinger, who found that biodiesel expansion under the mandate could drive 7 million additional acres of tropical deforestation globally, generating three to four times more emissions than the biofuel (which has lower emissions) would save by displacing fossil fuels.
In other words, Trump is obliterating a Massachusetts-sized rainforest and accelerating climate change to Band-Aid an energy and export crisis that his blunderous foreign policy helped unleash.
The bombs falling on Isfahan are connected — through energy shocks, input and export strains, and resulting policy decisions — to the chainsaws tearing through the world’s last great rainforests. Yet another example of how the environment is too often a hidden casualty of war.