Coal, nickel, palm oil, rainforests.
The riches of Indonesia matter to the rest of the world. Therefore, so does its presidential election.
Early results on Wednesday in the world’s third-largest democracy signaled the victory of Prabowo Subianto, a former army general linked to human rights abuses, as the country’s next president. The new government’s approach on the management of its natural resources could have a significant effect on the world’s ability to keep global warming to relatively safe levels. Environmentalists are also watching what the vote might mean for their ability to operate freely in a country with a history of repression.
Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel and something that the world must quickly stop burning in order to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. But Indonesia also has huge reserves of nickel, which is critical to battery-making and the transition to cleaner energy.
Mr. Prabowo has said that he supports transitioning the country away from coal power, though gradually. He also supports a ban on exports of raw nickel, designed to encourage a homegrown battery-making industry, that has been in place for several years.
Those two initiatives clash.
Processing nickel requires vast amounts of energy. So, Indonesia has been on a binge of building new coal-burning power plants. That, in turn, has driven up Indonesia’s emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Mr. Prabowo has cast himself as a candidate who would largely continue the policies of the departing president, Joko Widodo, whose administration imposed the nickel export ban.
Indonesia’s global climate role is important in another way. The country has vast stretches of forest that are vital to the effort to slow global warming because they pull so much planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
However, Indonesia is also the largest exporter of palm oil, which is used in a range of everyday products from soap to ice cream, and the production of palm oil has led to severe deforestation in recent decades. While deforestation rates have slowed lately, Mr. Prabowo’s promises to produce more biofuels could quickly reverse those gains.
In short, what happens in Indonesia doesn’t stay in Indonesia.