In 2007, at the urging of President George W. Bush, Democrats and Republicans together created a massive new mandate for the production and sale of biofuels. It was environmental folly.

The public is familiar with that part of the renewable fuel mandate about ethanol, the politically favored, wasteful, and environmentally destructive product that is blended into gasoline thanks to federal law. But the biodiesel side of this business is less well-known.

It has, though, produced an environmental catastrophe in East Asia, the defilement of tens of millions of acres of rainforest, and increased net carbon emissions, the New York Times reported this week .

The 2007 measure stimulated worldwide manufacture of vegetable oils for biodiesel because it created huge new and artificial demand for soy oil and then palm oil, which is even cheaper. These crops required farmland in suitable climates, which meant tens of millions of acres of jungle in Malaysia and Indonesia were destroyed to make room for unnecessary farming. Worse still is the fact that this destruction is defeating its own original rationale.

The theory behind biodiesel as a carbon-neutral source of energy is that the plants grown to produce it draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere before returning it when burned as fuel. But the government-induced clearance of so much old-growth rainforest means that the supposedly green fuel is not carbon neutral at all.

The Times cites NASA researchers claiming that “accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions” in 2,000 years. Indonesia has now become “the world’s fourth-largest source of [carbon] emissions” as a result.

It's a classic example of a feel-good bipartisan government program producing unintended consequences.

Here's an irony, though. While supposedly green, virtue-signaling biofuels are inflicting harm on the environment, and fracking, that supposedly demonic, poisonous, planet-dooming technology for cheap extraction of abundant fossil fuel is helping repair the damage.

By bringing natural gas out of the earth in massive quantities, fracking has lowered its price and helped America’s utility industry cut the use of coal dramatically. Natural gas has gone from something people only used to cook food and heat their homes to the nation’s leading fuel for electrical generation.

This has made us the world leader in carbon emissions reduction for nine of the 18 years so far in this century. At the moment, America has reduced its carbon emissions more than any of the remaining signatories of the Paris climate accords. And unlike France, we've done it without measures that prompt enraged citizens to riot.

Wonderfully, our natural gas revolution is contagious. As American gas producers bring their fuel to international markets through new liquefied natural gas terminals, they will drive prices down even further. Thus, the Paris-spurning, market-worshiping, climate-destroying bad guy of green-tinged fantasists all over the globe is actually a world leader in helping the global environment. We Americans provide incentives for countries to adopt less environmentally harmful fuels for the immediate future. This will result in even larger worldwide reductions in environmental harm.

This week, American news consumers were subjected to a great dollop of the irresponsible and unscientific scaremongering to which they have become accustomed. News media were quick to hype a government report that outlined unrealistic worst-case scenarios for the pace and consequences of global warming, based on unreliable and imprecise models.

The idea is to stoke alarm, even panic, in the left-wing cause of reducing prosperity, especially American prosperity. A goal is to press forward with policies that would produce yet more destructive unintended consequences.

Calm reason points us toward a very different course of action. Fracking and market forces have done more to curb carbon emissions than all of the environmentalists and their good intentions combined.