Indonesia's biomass co-firing extends coal lock-in while driving deforestation, exposing greenwashing in energy transition
Original framing: “Coal in a green mask: Indonesia’s co-firing plan will harm, not help, the climate” — Climate Home News
The trickster Eshu (Yoruba) would place a 'green mask' on a coal plant and watch policymakers worship it as climate action — exposing the absurdity of burning forests to save the climate. As Lewis Hyde writes, 'the trickster survives by wit, not strength'; here, the wit is redefining 'renewable' to include trees cut for coal boilers. Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly' mirrors the IPCC's 2021 warning that 'biomass energy can only be low-carbon if...' — a conditional so routinely violated it becomes farce. Anansi (Akan) would note the irony: Japan funds Indonesian co-firing to meet its net-zero, while Indonesian forests become Japan's carbon colony. The trickster does not mock — it names the inversion: a climate solution that requires deforestation is a solution to the wrong problem.
Indonesia's co-firing plan is not a climate policy failure but a successful industrial strategy: it leverages Northern climate finance (JETP, Article 6) to extend the life of stranded coal assets owned by politically connected oligarchs, while externalizing deforestation costs onto Indigenous territories and Global South carbon budgets.
The trickster's mask reveals that the same institutions (World Bank, ADB, Japanese utilities) that financed coal plants now finance their 'greening' — a circular extraction that converts customary forests into boiler fuel for Tokyo's net-zero. Restoring the Dayak 'tana' ulen', the Constitutional Court's customary forest ruling, and the IPCC's biomass conditions would collapse the accounting fiction. The solution pathway requires treating co-firing not as a technical error but as a crime of ecological unequal exchange, where the remedy is not better accounting but legal recognition of forests as subjects, not objects, of energy policy.