A 35-metre pine rests at a sick angle on the roof of a Washington DC home on the city's edge. The tree snapped like a toothpick midway through the storm, tearing down the electrical lines and leaving this household dark – and along with an estimated 200,000 people, reliant on battery and candle power.

Meanwhile, Snow chaos is set to return to Britain this week as temperatures drop to as low as -6c.

The new icy blast comes after Britain's coldest January in more than 20 years, but it will be nothing like as bad as the ‘Snowmageddon’ that has descended on parts of America, with Washington DC smothered in as much as 32 inches with the biggest snowfalls in 90 years.

The storm paralysed travel and left hundreds of thousands without power. When the President ventured out of the White House, his motorcade was involved in a minor crash on icy roads.

Nearly 2ft of snow fell on Washington yesterday with President Barack Obama dubbing the whiteout ‘Snowmageddon’.

The ferocious storm was sweeping across the mid-Atlantic coast with mountainous areas of Maryland and West Virginia set to be
covered in three feet of snow. Local media have dubbed the storm 'snowpocalypse'.

The weather has crippled all transport services with all flights in the Washington-Baltimore area's airports and at Philadelphia International Airport cancelled.

Driving in the region was treacherous and authorities advised motorists to stay off the roads. Delaware govenor Jack Markell declared a state of emergency and ordered all vehicles off the road by 10pm last night.

Scores of road accidents have been reported already. A father and son were killed in Virginia after they were hit by a lorry while they were trying to help passengers escape a car stuck in a snowdrift.

Washington's Metro train service operated only underground on Saturday and all bus services were been cancelled. Train operator Amtrak cancelled a number of services on Saturday between New York and Washington and also between Washington and some destinations to the south.

Although it is already mid February 2010, the situation still looks grim. Several areas across the U.S. South might soon be glazed with another coating of snow.

The National Weather Service says 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimetres) could fall late Sunday and early Monday across southern Tennessee and northeastern Alabama, while 1 inch to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 centimetres) could fall in parts of northern and central Georgia.

Mountainous portions of Georgia and the Carolinas could get up to 3 inches (7.5 centimetres).

Several cities that are ill-equipped to deal with icy roads and piled snow, including Atlanta, were paralyzed by a snowstorm that dropped several centimetres of snow on the region Friday and Saturday.

Thousands of flights were cancelled at the nation’s busiest airport in Atlanta, and icy streets caused hundreds of traffic accidents in the region.

Throughout all this, environmentalists like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth maintained an embarrassed silence.  Ever quick to scream global warming at the first hint of a warm summer, these environmentalists had no response to a weather
system that has contrived for the past half a decade or so, to show them up for their “cry-wolf” tendencies!

In fact, the environmentalists have been “crying wolf” and scaring us for so long that it's now possible to check if things are turning out as ot as they warned. Unfortunately for the scaremongers, many of their predictions have gone south like the cold winter moving south towards hot Atlanta GA.

At the rate the weather is going, it would not be long before these environmentalists are driven out of the climate prediction vocation and along with it, the palm oil bashing business!

For in addition to scaremongering on climate, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other “environmentalists” have been making a comfortable living out of palm oil bashing.

Using smear tactics that would have made Hitler proud, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have been making scurrilous allegations against palm oil, accusing it of a whole host of environmental transgressions ranging from indiscriminate destruction of rainforests to threatening the extinction of biodiversity including the orang utan.

Unfortunately for these “environmentalists”, like the just deserts that are being served up by the wintry weather across the North Atlantic, the facts on the ground refuses to cooperate with them.

Malaysia is a case in point.  A small country, Malaysia had been the world’s largest producer of palm oil for over a century. Yet, despite cultivating palm oil for more than a hundred years, Malaysia can still boast forest cover of more than 60 % according to a 2001 FAO Report.

The sheer incongruity between the allegations of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and this fact alone destroys the credibility of the two “environmental” organizations.  100 years of palm oil cultivation and the world’s largest producer country can still have forest cover that dwarfs that from the countries from which Greenpeace and FOE hail? What’s even more confounding is that the world’s largest producer of palm oil is a relatively small country. Something doesn’t compute.  Either Greenpeace and FOE are trying to pull the wool over the world’s eyes or the palm oil industry is found only in Lalaland.  But palm oil is grown in Malaysia and Indonesia, 2 countries very much established in South East Asia.

It is obvious to even the uninitiated that palm oil cultivation doe not require quite as much land as these two renegade environmental NGOs would try to have the world believe.

This is due to the fact that the crop is the most productive of all oilseed crops with a yield of 4-5metric tons per hectare which is close to ten times that of its closest competitors like soy, rapeseed or sunflower.

Add to that the sheer versatility of palm oil as a consumable product (palm oil’s uses range from being an edible oil to biofuel feedstock to olechemical uses, etc.) and a clue emerges as to why the commodity attracts so much flak.

Deforestation Watch is compelled to ask.  Could this high yield, consequent low cost and growing popularity of palm oil for a
variety of uses (especially biofuel) be the reason for the commodity coming under such concerted attacks by “environmental”
organizations like Greenpeace and FOE?  Could Greenpeace and FOE be hired guns?  Legitimate questions in the light of the sheer incongruity of the reasons proffered for the attacks.  It can’t be sustainability as the enduring forest cover in Malaysia has proven beyond all doubt that the crop is probably the most sustainable of all oilseed crops! THE END.