Behind every cheerful sustainability pledge could lie a supply chain that tells a darker story.
In the age of carbon credits and eco-pledges, the global pursuit of sustainability increasingly resembles a theater production. Symbolic gestures substitute for actual progress. The modern environmental movement charges forward, propelled by subsidies, mandates, and moral certainty, rarely pausing to ask whether its solutions create worse problems than those they claim to solve. This isn’t an argument against protecting the planet. It’s an argument for doing it honestly, and for acknowledging what the physical world will and won’t permit.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is a prime example. The concept appears sound: convert used cooking oil into jet fuel, cutting aviation emissions while recycling waste. Western governments have thrown enormous financial support behind this vision. The United States offers tax credits of up to US$1.85 per gallon under the Inflation Reduction Act. Europe has implemented comparable subsidies and binding mandates requiring SAF blending ratios rising from 2 percent in 2025 to 70 percent by 2050. The promise is seductive: transform yesterday’s fryer grease into guilt-free flight.
There’s one structural problem the subsidies can’t fix. The only commercially viable SAF technology right now is Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA,) which runs on used cooking oil (UCO,) animal fats, and vegetable oils. There simply isn’t enough waste grease in the world to fuel the global aviation fleet at anywhere near the volumes mandated. The math doesn’t work at any scale. When waste supply runs short, the alternatives are worse. Growing crops specifically for fuel risks deforestation and food price spikes, and lifecycle analysis confirms that when indirect land-use change is factored in, crop-based SAF can produce emissions worse than conventional jet fuel. Policy moved faster than physics. Acknowledging this constraint isn’t defeatism. It’s the starting point for policy that might actually work.
Cooking Oil to Jet Fuel: A Sustainability Story of Corrupted Incentives
Malaysia filled that gap, and what happened there is instructive.
Malaysia now exports more used cooking oil than its population could credibly produce. Because UCO is categorized as waste, it receives massive subsidies and carbon credits in Europe and North America. This creates a green premium: waste oil commands US$1.00 per kilogram on international markets while subsidized fresh palm oil sells domestically for US$0.60. The arbitrage opportunity is obvious. The response was entirely predictable.
What followed wasn’t creative recycling. It was systematic misrepresentation at scale. An investigation by AFP and SourceMaterial, drawing on trade data and customs documents, found that suppliers in Malaysia and Indonesia were taking virgin palm oil, mixing it with small quantities of genuine used cooking oil to achieve the right smell and color, then exporting the blend as 100 percent UCO. Malaysia routinely exports three times more used cooking oil than it actually collects domestically. The missing volume isn’t a measurement error. It’s mislabeled virgin palm oil moving through a supply chain that Western regulators designed, subsidized, and chose to trust.
Indonesian authorities subsequently arrested eleven people, including customs officials, for labeling palm oil as certified waste between 2022 and 2024. Among the implicated firms, Green Product International supplied shipments to major European fuel producers Eni and Neste. In early 2025, Reuters reported that Malaysia’s Deputy Plantation and Commodities Minister acknowledged the problem publicly. He said the government was strengthening enforcement, and that complaints from buyers could endanger Malaysia’s credibility as an exporter. The European Commission’s anti-fraud office has separately investigated UCO import irregularities. These aren’t climate skeptics raising alarms. They’re institutions inside the system that looked at the numbers and found them wanting.
The environmental consequences are the precise opposite of the policy’s intent. To meet surging demand for both legitimate palm oil and improperly certified UCO, Malaysia continues clearing rainforest to plant additional oil palms. These forests are vital carbon sinks. When land-use change is factored into the full lifecycle, the greenhouse gas emissions from palm-oil-derived SAF can exceed those of conventional jet fuel. Western climate policy designed to reduce aviation emissions is directly financing tropical deforestation. The effort to decarbonize flight is accelerating the destruction of the planet’s lungs.
Green Theater, Darker Backstage
The UCO situation isn’t an isolated failure. It’s part of a broader pattern where the appearance of environmental progress and its reality diverge, and where nobody with a financial stake in the system wants to be the one to say so.
When Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic in 2019 to demonstrate zero-emission travel, the voyage aboard the racing yacht Malizia II was genuinely low-carbon: solar panels, underwater turbines, no support vessels at sea. But as Team Malizia’s own spokeswoman acknowledged, the trip to New York was added at short notice, requiring four transatlantic flights to reposition crew members who couldn’t sail back. The yacht was principled. The logistics weren’t. This isn’t a cynical observation about a teenager’s activism. It illustrates a recurring problem: the carbon accounting of symbolic gestures rarely survives contact with operational reality, and that gap is almost never examined.
The electric vehicle parallel follows the same logic. Replacing a functional older car with a new electric vehicle is widely presented as an environmental upgrade. It often isn’t, at least not immediately. Manufacturing a new electric vehicle produces roughly 80 percent more emissions than manufacturing a comparable conventional car, driven primarily by battery production: lithium mining, cobalt extraction, and energy-intensive manufacturing. Whether the new vehicle eventually offsets that carbon debt depends on how long it’s driven and how clean the local electricity grid is. Replacing a car with several years of useful life remaining, for which the buyer receives a tax credit and a clean conscience, can increase net emissions while appearing to reduce them. The mechanism is identical to the UCO situation. A policy that measures certifications and inputs rather than outcomes and lifecycle emissions produces exactly this kind of result.
The pattern isn’t coincidental. Subsidies reward what’s visible, measurable, and certifiable. They’re poorly equipped to capture what happens in supply chains under financial pressure, or what gets manufactured and discarded in pursuit of the next clean-looking transaction. Every participant in these systems has a structural incentive to not look too closely at whether the numbers actually work.
The Case for Honest Accounting
Aviation accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of global CO2 emissions. The sector has made binding net-zero commitments that depend heavily on SAF scaling to meaningful volumes by 2030 and beyond. The HEFA pathway can’t get there. The waste feedstock doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity, and that’s been known to researchers and supply chain analysts for years. Rather than acknowledge it, policy doubled down on subsidies and mandates. Those didn’t create more waste cooking oil. They created more incentive to certify fresh palm oil as waste.
The fact that this supply constraint has been known for years, and hasn’t been publicly acknowledged by the institutions promoting SAF mandates, is itself worth sitting with.
Some environmental harm is inseparable from human activity. Mining, manufacturing, agriculture, aviation all carry costs, and pretending otherwise doesn’t reduce them. The honest position isn’t that we should stop flying or abandon cleaner fuels. It’s that we should be clear about what our policies actually produce, not what they were designed to produce. A net-zero aviation target built on a feedstock that doesn’t exist in sufficient supply isn’t a plan. It’s a commitment to theater.
Real progress requires lifecycle analysis applied to entire supply chains, not just end products. It requires verification mechanisms designed around how suppliers actually behave under financial pressure. It requires policymakers willing to say publicly that aviation’s dependence on liquid fuel won’t resolve quickly, that HEFA can’t scale to meet mandated targets, and that the alternatives require longer timelines and harder conversations than the current framework permits. Calling for systemic thinking isn’t a substitute for acting on what systemic thinking reveals. What it reveals here is that the current framework is producing documented harm that outlasts the next policy review.
The question isn’t why the misrepresentation happened. Incentives explain that entirely. The harder question is why the institutions that designed those incentives haven’t acknowledged that the feedstock they’re subsidizing doesn’t exist in the volumes they’ve promised. That answer, too, is probably in the incentives.
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