Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet | Hacker News Reader

Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet

nytimes.com

186 pointsinostia183 comments

While the 'unintended consequences' story is powerful, the article undermines its credibility by suggesting at first that palm oil's use in US biodiesel is a significant contributor to this clusterfuck, but only halfway through does it admit that US biodiesel is chiefly made with corn and soy, ostensibly leaving less of these oils for the US food industry -- forcing imports of other oils.

But the truth is even more complex: for the last two decades, US society has gone through a nutritional awakening about the risk of trans fats, and widespread phase-out of trans fats has occurred due to consumer demand and regulatory pressure. Trans fats are a hard-to-avoid byproduct of partial hydrogenation of unsaturated oils: a process you want in food manufacturing to convert a liquid oil to a solid shortening. Corn oil and soybean oil largely consist of unsaturated fats, so partial hydrogenation will turn a fair bit of product into trans fats. But palm oil and coconut oil are naturally high in saturated fats, which gives them desirable properties by natural means and without trans bonds.

This is the primary reason for US food manufacturing's increased palm oil imports into the US: if widespread partial hydrogenation were still on the table, plentiful cottonseed oil could have been used instead. Crisco and Wesson were both early pioneers of hydrogenated cottonseed oil, but even today's Crisco -- the archetypal hydrogenated shortening -- has been reformulated with palm oil and soybean oil.

Then there's the matter of occasional palm oil boycotts in the US and Europe, protesting about food companies' use of palm oil from plantations that haven't been certified sustainable. Other than the inherent fuzziness and conflict of interest about a trade group deciding what it means for clearcut-type agriculture to be 'sustainable', these protests unfortunately cause the average price of all palm oil to drop, leaving others whose priorities are different to buy them up on the cheap. For example, palm oil is widely used as a cooking oil in the Indian Subcontinent, because it's cheap, is produced nearby (as opposed to in the Americas or Europe), and those countries have populations whose demand for simple cooking oils well outstrips their domestic supply.

There are many factors to this story: the ones investigated in the article, and others that I hope to have shown were missing. This shows that reality is sometimes maddeningly complex, different actors are frequently at odds, and one group's good intentions rarely survive the realities and the intricacies the global economy and local situations on the ground where the rubber meets the road.

Fully hydrogenated fats contain (virtually?) no trans fats. I'm curious why the shift was to palm oil, rather than to just fully hydrogenating the oil and then blending it with unhydrogenated oil to achieve the desired consistency.

I think you are misunderstanding (or I am)

This is true: oils that have undergone full hydrogenation become saturated fats, because the carbon double bonds break and bond and with excess hydrogen until the fatty acid is fully saturated. The cis/trans distinction affects the double bonds, which no longer exist once the molecule is saturated.

On the other hand, advocacy about the likely adverse health effects of saturated fats has been commonplace for a lot longer than the awareness of trans fats. This, together with likely consumer confusion about terms like "partially hydrogenated" vs. [fully] "hydrogenated", and the unwieldiness of using a solid-at-room-temp fat in a blend all add up to reasons why it's probably easier to use palm oil.

So far, coconut oil and palm oil have largely managed to avoid being caught up in the conversation about saturated fats. Marketing and market positioning undoubtedly plays a key role. The other is nutrition as a field of study and a topic of conversation: rigor is hard to achieve, conflict of interest is everywhere, advice is a mix of unhelpful and conflicting, and pop publications do even more disservice by repeating soundbites without caveats and context. In a few years, the next 'awakening' -- helped by the awful environmental and social justice of tropical oils -- will probably purge coconut oil and palm oil from manufactured foods in some countries, and we'll migrate to some other inconvenient tradeoff whose true consequences will become widely known only much much later, all the while the public is pleased that they precipitated positive change.

>> if widespread partial hydrogenation were still on the table, plentiful cottonseed oil could have been used instead.

Just curious - If cotton seed is plentiful, why is it not used to make Ethanol ?

This is why taxing carbon is better policy than patchwork regulations.

This only helps if you can fully audit carbon released from burning rainforests etc.

> This only helps if you can fully audit carbon released from burning rainforests

Murder laws aren’t rendered useless by unsolved murders. A carbon tax makes sense even if only large-scale domestic production is initially covered.

Ah sure. I wasn't making the point not to have a carbon tax. Just that it would help here unless carefully thought out. A bit like the biodiesel law.

Not at all. That creates an effective subsidy on non-domestic production. Carbon tax on my factory in California? I’ll move it to Nairobi. Add a tariff? Then other countries retaliate and domestic companies can no longer sell their goods abroad. Domestic consumers would pay higher prices and the economy grinds to a halt due to reduced production from reduced international trade.

Are there measures to combat global warming that you do support?

Why wouldn't companies start producing less carbon intensive products? Seems to have worked pretty well with cars, which even with the recent dieselgate, are much more efficient than before.

Currently there's an effective subsidy on air polluters; I can sue my neighbor who dumps waste on my land, but I can't sue the people dumping carbon in my lungs. Is that subsidy not concerning?

Five “why?”’s in practice.

Taxing is half the story. The other half is returning this tax revenue back to the economy by offsetting other taxes. Where it breaks down is when progressives push to spend this tax revenue on their pet projects.

Why is this being downvoted? It’s factually accurate.

The implication that “actually, it’s all the lib’s fault” is absurd.

Two wings, same bird.

The tax should be used for undoing the destruction caused to the environment.

This is the problemn and you illustrate it perfectly. If you propose a plan that introduces a carbon tax with the revenue returned back to the economy, progressives will attempt to kill it. For progressives, an environmental policy is only sound if it goes with massive government expansion. Nobody cares about the environment. It is always ideology first.

No. The point is not the revenue, the point is to eliminate the market distorting externalities. If anything, this is actually a free market solution.

No, a tax is not a free market solution, it's the exact opposite.

A tax is only opposite a free market to the extent that it distorts the market. The more direct and simple the tax, the freer the market. And when the tax is directly addressing externalities that are normally not paid, it makes the market less distorted.

> And when the tax is directly addressing externalities that are normally not paid, it makes the market less distorted.

Agree, but that doesn't make the tax a free market solution. A free market solution would be a solution from the market, not a government imposed tax.

A carbon tax is the most market-friendly approach on the table, so is de facto the free market solution, short of "do nothing."

No. While it may be the most market friendly approach, it's not a free market approach. There is not de facto free market solution, it's entirely possible the free market has no solution; that does not make the best available solution a market solution.

How will you lower the transaction costs enough that it's practical for polluters to pay compensation directly to all >7 billion victims?

One can agree that the tax should be implemented without agreeing with its categorization as a free market solution.

"Solution that maximally utilizes the free market to sort out the details and implementation", perhaps?

Then we can avoid disagreement over the definition of "free market solution"

Finally, someone who actually understands the conversation being had. Absolutely correct; carbon taxes might be the best solution available, but they are not a free market solution.

You seem to be the only one in this thread with the clarity of thought to see the obvious.

Totally off topic. But I’m curious. With your line of thinking I guess all gonverment imposed rules are anti free market.

So if we remove those completely, take away rule of law, abolish property rights and all of that.

Would there then exist a market to speak of at all? Would it be “free”?

Briefly.

Markets exist with or without government, governments make markets more stable and handle cases of market failures, and markets do fail. But under no case is government intervention a free market solution. Lack of government does not abolish rules or property rights, it just changes how those things are enforced as it leaves everyone to defend their own property and it leaves enforcement of rules to private security forces.

I'm not claiming government intervention isn't good; I'm simply arguing you can't call it a free market solution, because it isn't. Taxes are not free market solutions.

What would be the process for establishing rules?

A carbon tax is specifically imposed to force markets to consider externalities. That is a free market solution. The opposite would be quotas and bans.

I actually favor quotas and bans to deal with carbon dioxide emissions.

The problem with the externalities argument is that nobody really knows what they cost. A market solution would be based upon true supply and demand and agreement on price in buy / sell transactions. A tax representing the "externality" is just a politically made-up number. So it's sort of free market but not really.

> The problem with the externalities argument is that nobody really knows what they cost.

One asks to what degree do we not know the costs? And these costs aren't ketchup economic prices but actual primary environmental effects. You can't buy your way out of those by having the central bank provide more liquidity.

> A market solution would be based upon true supply and demand and agreement on price in buy / sell transactions.

This is worse because the market not only has no way to price these cost but it is _blind_ to them. That you don't realize this means you think 'free markets' are 'magical'

> A tax representing the "externality" is just a politically made-up number. So it's sort of free market but not really.

FTI: Your free markets don't exist without politics.

> This is worse because the market not only has no way to price these cost but it is _blind_ to them. That you don't realize this means you think 'free markets' are 'magical'

Not the guy you're replying to, but you're wrong. This isn't a debate about effectiveness, it's about whether the tax is a free market solution or not. No one is arguing that the market isn't blind to it; this very well could be a case of a market failure and a tax may very well be the correct solution, it is not however a free market solution. A tax is government interference in the market and is by definition not a free market solution.

> That is a free market solution.

No, it isn't. Taxes are not free market solutions. End of story. Taxes are government interference in the market; this isn't debatable, it's just a fact.

It is a market solution.

No, the opposite would be confiscating your oil by force. Compared to that, taxing the externalities is extremely free market.

This is downvoted but is actually a good take.

A failure mode of environmentalism is attaching it to random other progressive ideas. "Let's have a carbon tax and use it to fund universal healthcare!" I want a carbon tax, and I want universal healthcare, AND I want them to be completely disjoint. I will argue for each independently on their merits.

Otherwise both magnify each others' vulnerabilities. For example, say universal health care is funded through a carbon tax, and this tax works really well and emissions plummet. Now universal health care suffers? What a stupid outcome!

Robust government programs are independent with separate funding (see Social Security). Make a big carbon tax, have it fund an equally big carbon dividend, and run it independently from everything else on the progressive or conservative wish list.

This cuts the other way too. No, a carbon tax should not fund conservative pet projects like eliminating capital gains. That has to live or die on its own merits, not tied to environmentalism. The carbon tax must be its own thing to endure.

Hypothecation and/or ring fencing is generally bad policy anyway, but it has a certain appeal.

Here it’s mostly seen when people argue that road taxes (VED) and fuel taxes should be spent on roads.

I’m with Churchill on the one: “Entertainments may be taxed; public houses may be taxed; racehorses may be taxed…and the yield devoted to the general revenue. But motorists are to be privileged for all time to have the whole yield of the tax on motors devoted to roads. Obviously this is all nonsense…Such contentions are absurd, and constitute…an outrage upon the sovereignty of Parliament and upon common sense.”

Churchill has a pleasant way with words, but the logic of argument simply boils down to "no u". Not everyone agrees that parliament is sole sovereign over citizens' lives. Many believe that Parliament's legitimacy derives from consent of the governed, and that taxes should be justified for a purpose, not arbitrary demonstrations of "might makes right".

Ironically, if the U.S. had national healthcare system for which the government had to pay directly, it may not have been basically the only country on Earth to reject climate change.

Countries that have to pay for healthcare have a strong incentive to keep its population healthy to reduce healthcare costs. The U.S. doesn't because it doesn't pay for it directly - it's the citizens themselves that have to pay for it.

Ultimately, the U.S. economy is still negatively impacted by an unhealthy population/workers, but since it's not a direct impact for which the government has to pay out of its tax funds, it doesn't care nearly as much about that impact.

>Countries that have to pay for healthcare have a strong incentive to keep its population healthy to reduce healthcare costs

It doesn't work that way in practice. It's a weird argument and nobody would ever buy it as there is no obvious cognitive (and politically valid) path from climate change policy to healthcare policy. This is true for America, and Canada and Australia and I suspect every other country.

Also, your underlying assumption, that the American government either has no incentive or is uncaring with respect to keeping the American public health, is just wrong and probably betrays your ideology. Both parties, Dems and GOP, care about people.

If you look at the numbers, the various levels of government in the US spend more on healthcare, as a percent of GDP, than most(all?) European countries. So if this was a thing that would push policy on climate change, it would be a bigger lever in the US than in Europe.

Medicare and Medicaid together are the federal government’s biggest expense. That’s not counting other federal health care spending, like VA or ACA related items, nor does it count state contributions to Medicaid. Or CHIP for that matter.

About 20% of Americans have Medicaid, and about 20% have Medicare. There is some, but not much, overlap, so the total percentage doesn’t hit 40%. Health care needs to be better in the US, but it’s misleading to suggest that huge amounts (trillions of dollars) of government money aren’t already being spent on it.

the government is the citizens. The government has no money of its own, and can't pay for healthcare without taking the money first from the citizens.

I don't know why you are being downvoted. We are seeing gasoline tax money moving to other budgets (not env, not energy) in my country.

Governments to determine policy goals, design efficient markets.

Taxes to discourage undesirable behavior.

Investments to encourage desired behavior, outcomes.

Regulation to ensure markets are fair, safe, competitive.

They're just tools. Why all the fuss?

Why do people keep arguing about the tools? eg "Taxes are theft!"

Is it because some don't want to argue about the policy?

The point of a carbon tax is to fund and/or incentivize research into non-carbon energy production, or carbon removal technology. If you just offset other taxes, for a tax-neutral result, then there's no (macro) tax incentive so how does that happen?

market competition leads to better manufacturing techniques that avoid the tax. Local optimization leads to global optimization. To argue otherwise would be to argue that taxes overall have no effect on business behavior, which is clearly false.

If we tax “carbon,” are you going to lower my income taxes? I’ll support a carbon tax when you support eliminating capital gains and income taxes. Unless cutting taxes and spending is a part of this carbon tax plan, I will never support it. I already give over 50% of my money to governments, I’m not about to support even more.

Would you give up more to ensure your children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare? What if the necessary amount is 60% of your income? 90%? What if our only hope is to go back to a 18C standard of living? Unfortunately the planet doesn’t care if you have enough cash to pay rent once you account for your environmental externalities.

Most people would gladly give up their income to ensure their children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare. The issue is that not everyone agrees on the way how exactly that money should be spent, and how nightmarish the future looks.

What if we can learn how to control climate and have ice free arctic, green sahara and 21st century standard of living?

While we need a way to penalize air polution (not just co2!), implementing that simply as 'extra money that government can spend on war' is not ideal.

> Most people would gladly give up their income to ensure their children don’t grow up in a dystopian nightmare.

People who start off by making an "I'm taxed too much" argument might do this for their own children, but the whole point is that they're not willing to spend a single dollar to save someone else's children.

Considering Medicare and social security, that doesn't seem to be the case. The older folks basically said: our children can pay that. And kicked the can down the road because it won't be their problem.

That never works. You part of your money today and down the line any random reason become an emergency forcing all your taxes into sustaining this or that politicized program which never does anything but help greasing the wheel of the political machine.

So you both lose your money today and you don't do your children future any better.

Taxation is the wrong answer, taxation works to resolve at most the issues of today, never the issues of tomorrow

As of today the best one can do is ethical spending and information campaigns and hope enough people vote with their wallet for sustainable companies.

You avoid paying more by buying products and services that emit less carbon and therefore are less taxed. This economic incentive is how the tax helps curb carbon emissions (and hopefully other forms of pollution also, why stop at carbon when the world is drowning in single-use plastic for example).

We are all on the same planet and we'll all suffer as temperatures rise.

Let's agree that a carbon tax should be revenue neutral (via a dividend), and not fund either a progressive or conservative agenda. The purpose of the tax is to internalize CO2 externalities. Other issues can be hashed out on their merits.

Agreed. Carbon pricing works via substitution effects: carbon-intensive goods become relatively more expensive so people substitute towards less carbon-intensive goods, all other things equal. Tax revenue hypothecation hardly ever makes sense anyway, as tax revenue is fungible.

How would that dividend work?

Hence the dividend part. You fair share of the tax should be returned to you.

The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions we can’t solve the problem just by reducing our own carbon emission.

There's no single solution and there will always be a reason not to do something.

True, but leading by example would be a good start.

Where are you getting your statistics from?

According to a quick Google search, https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc..., China is the highest emitter, followed by the US, which emits half as much CO2, and India emits half again as much as the US.

> The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions

Hypothetically provinces/countries could be taxed relative to their emissions (albeit this would take some fantasy-like widely agreed upon criteria).

Trade sanctions are the usual mechanism to influence other governments. I don’t see why this situation would be any different.

Or in a more civil way, since it seems we have entered the era of tariffs wars, perhaps countries with carbon taxes should be slapping tariffs on imports from countries with none. Tie the tariff to some metric derived from a country's estimated CO2 emissions, subtracting some amount for % land mass in forests, reforestation efforts, carbon tax rates, deployment of renewables, etc.

It would have negative economic consequences in the short term, I'm sure. But put in place by large importers it would directly motivate emission offenders to not play the game of lowest-common-denominator.

Ok, so how about implementing the tax only to the extent required to get per capita emissions down to the global mean?

What?

That doesn't make sense.

Not all countries need to do it. Just most.

In in actual fact, the sooner leader countries like the USA do it the sooner other countries get their act together.

Don't act like this is all or nothing. It's not.

Furthermore, the sooner the USA does it the sooner technologies improve, the sooner other smaller countries are suddenly enabled by said technologies.

That aside whole "we all need to do it" is utter nonsense. No, you don't. Other countries taking advantage of you is still not a socially moral excuse. Mind yourself first thanks.

The US led the world in emission reductions in 2018, meanwhile the EU, Canada, India, and China increased their production significantly. Yet the US gets slammed by the global community

https://imgur.com/a/sNWFP3k

Growing is easy when you start from zero, and reducing is easy when you can easily move your production elsewhere. BP statistical review probably have their numbers right, I'm more concern about the message they want to spread. (I do not say that EU/China should be able to increase their emissions, just that the US is not decreasing its consumption therefore it is impossible to decrease emission)

Because the US is so high absolutely. Should it get an award just because natural gas got cheaper than coal?

Yes it should. It made it happen because instead of having endless meetings and brainstorming sessions in Lesbos or Johannesburg, the heartless ignoramuses of Texas figured out how to drill for clean energy. What really did the brainstormes accomplish considering the chart presented?

You think fracking is clean?

You think the "brainstorming sessions" accomplished nothing because of cherry picked single year data on Imgur?

Yikes.

Absolutely not.

One useful rhetorical side effect is breaking the narrative linking GDP with petrol consumption. Opening people's mind's to the possibility that conservation and switching to renewable won't crater the economy.

Perceptions matter.

The USA with 4% of the world's population is responsible for over a third of the greenhouse gases unnaturally released.

You better believe the global community will slam the USA for their emissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/01/climate/us-bi...

Other countries have their issues and NOBODY is defending them here. So I'm not sure what you're getting at with the rest of that statement.

15% is massive. We're discussing the same tax in my country and we're like 0.01%.

the US is pretty big as a whole, compared the EU the difference is as extreme. Also, never allow for the discussion to go by per capita as the seriously distorts the numbers in countries where a great deal of the population does not participate

Border adjustments are a well understood policy solution to this issue. Imports from polluting countries are taxed appropriately, and exports to those countries subsidized. From the perspective of anyone inside the nation with the border adjustment, it’s as though the whole world implemented the carbon tax.

That only works if taxing countries ahave a way to estimate should-be-taxable events in other countries.

How do you know of Chieng-Shen's widgets are from polluting factories but Hong Wan's aren't?

Carbon taxes generally don’t need to be huge to achieve their goals, so anyone without proof they’re clean can be taxed as though they’re filthy.

The US has a little over 4% of the world population, yet it's responsible for 15% of carbon emissions [1]. Even if the US is the only country to implement it, it would already make a huge difference.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

So USA could breed a huge population of impovershed underclass to bring average emissions down.

OK so every response to this comment is downvoted. I know its frowned upon to talk about downvotes but this seems a bit odd.

Carbon taxing is, in some suitably narrow economic point of view, optimal, but it seems it's politically almost impossible to get it passed.

The other popular large-scale technology-neutral suggestion, cap-and-trade, suffers from much of the same problems. E.g. the EU ETS is mostly a bureaucratic boondoggle that achieves nothing (the price is so low it doesn't have much, if any, effect).

So what then? Well, performance standards may not be as neutral as a carbon tax/cap-and-trade, but they seem politically much more palatable: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/16/180963...

> This is why taxing carbon is better policy than patchwork regulations.

I don't think so. We are way past the economic incentives or the market efficiency theories.

Carbon emissions have to stop to save what can be, period.

That means outlawing.

See what's happening in France and Belgium at the moment with the "yellow jackets", a peek into the shape of things to come.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/16/gilet-jaunes-y... and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/24/french-gilets-...

Who has the power to outlaw carbon globally? Those with energy have the power, and currently carbon is where our energy is. I don't see a ban working.

Further, our whole systemis dependent on carbon. Millions (billions?) would starve without it, along with other downsides.

Future impacts will be worse if we don't stop, but tell that to people suffering today.

The advantage of a carbon tax approach is that it uses market incentives to encourage investments in alternatives. Hopefully, we are able to discover viable alternatives via this method, otherwise we're done for either way.

A command and control shutdown simply seems impossible. Maybe carbon taxes are too, but I feel a tax and dividend approach could work, as everyone gets money from it. Or a proposal to tax carbon and massively cut income taxes.

The yellow jacket protests you cite:

1. Didn't have any return of money to taxpayers. It was just a tax hike.

2. Would be even worse if fuel were banned

Actually Diesel car are going to be banned pretty soon in some European countries.

I do not entirely disagree with the principle that a hard tax carbon could alleviate the symptoms. But...

No matter the solution, it's just too late for humanity to implement it globally.

That's easy to do though, as there are viable alternatives.

To be clear, I do think specific bans like a non-electric vehicle ban can be good policy. But they're not the same as "outlawing carbon".

Overall, global, carbon use it up, and the reason is that individuals find it profitable, at the margins, to use more of it.

I thought bioengineered algae oil (e.g. http://algawise.com/) was supposed to help us save the planet, seeing as it's both healthier and more sustainable than palm oil.

If it worked, sure. Just like cellulosic biofuels, mentioned in the article. Neither is cost-effective, despite a fair amount of investment.

The problem with algae derived oil is the algae requires lots of fertilizer. We need to grow azolla to use as a feedstock. It is remarkably efficient at pulling both nitrogen and carbon from the atmosphere, able to double in mass every 2-3 days in ideal conditions with minimal inputs other than sunlight and water. Makes a fairly good fertilizer, too.

This is powerful stuff - palm oil production is clearly an evil. But what really struck me from this was the rather cavalier mention of their guide killing dozens of people with a machete, during an ethnic cleansing. Isn't there a court for people like that? In The Netherlands?

You want to see evil look at Malasian deforestation due to production of this crap. It's not even a tasty in cooking. Coconut is.

And where do you think oil coconuts are grown?

Writing laws is the easy part. Actually enforcing the law is an entirely separate endeavor.

After reading some of the informed comments, I take it that the cause-effect relationship is not as direct as what's described in the article. Specifically, most of palm oil being used for food in fast-growing Asian countries, along with how much more palm oil can be produced from the same land -compared to corn oil- suggest it may not be a naive political decision from a decade ago that's now reducing the Indonesian forest footprint.

The article doesn’t touch on it much, but the palm oil industry basically runs on slave labor, too.

I thought it was just supposed to prevent a health crisis ie prevent heart attacks and other health issues. I don't remember any marketing for palm oil related to saving the environment. Am I wrong?

It’s used for bio-diesel. The cars that run on it are sold as green, but by burning the rainforest to make enough palm oil, the cars that run on it are instead the least green.

I don't remember reading any articles about palm oil being used as biodiesel in US media. Most of the coverage centered around palm oil being the savior from trans-fats.

The headline doesn't really fit the article. Here's the bit that explains it: "Imports of biodiesel to the United States surged from near zero to more than 100 million gallons a month. As fuel markets snatched up every ounce of domestic soy oil to meet the American fuel mandate, the food industry also replaced the soy it had used with something cheaper and just as good: palm oil, largely from Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the sources of nearly 90 percent of the global supply."

Biodiesel was supposed to be good. It can be made out of a variety of vegetable and animal oils. I don't think they talked about palm oil in particular.

Palm oil is a great example of the Jevons paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Vegetable oil was expensive and took a lot of land to produce, then the oil palm made it cheaper and produced more in less land. But now we spend more money on vegetable oil and cultivate more land than before.

Thank you for that, interesting like branching before and after git (and all), if something is easy and effortless you do it more.

It is amazing that around 2007 the US had declining oil production, an oil price shock and peak oil scare which probably were the primary reasons for the invasion of Iraq and terrible ethanol and biofuel policies. Now, there is talk of the US not requiring any imported oil by 2025 (not sure if that counts imports from the biggest supplier Canada), how times change due to a technological advancement in drilling practices.

I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.

Don't forget political will to disregard the consequences and externalities of such drilling practices.

Re: externalities

Check out what fracking has done to Pennsylvania's formerly wild forests compared to New York; there is a hideously ugly network of access roads and cut clearings for fracking wells .

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9889724,-78.7814974,8036m/da...

My friend pointed this out to me and I was truly disgusted...

Well, it could be worse as seen in such "formerly wild forests" of New York.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Manhattan,+New+York,+NY,+U...

Disgusted by some roads?

Same with all of british columbia, logging roads everywhere

At least that's for logging and not fracking. Logging sequesters millions of cubic meters of carbon (trees), and the BC forest license program requires audited 3rd party replanting, ensuring continuously increasing sequestration.

Even the amount of carbon sequestered in wooden telephone poles across North America is staggering, let alone houses and other structures.

Here's the same place, just zoomed out a little: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9889724,-78.7814974,128506m/...

Pretty much everything that's light green on that map is forest that was cleared for farmland. By 1872, the eastern states had cleared 52% of their forests, mostly for agriculture. Habitat destruction is an underappreciated problem, but let's keep things in perspective. Those dirt access roads are narrow strips of forest, and they'll be quickly overgrown once they're abandoned.

"The ultimate irony is that what created the U.S. energy revolution—nimble, private-sector companies using new technologies to extract previously untapped crude—keeps the United States from wielding its energy strength in the way that Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other big producers with state-owned firms willing to put geopolitics above profits do."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/14/why-american-oil-hasnt-...

The US has other more conventional levers of international power to wield. Taking oil off the table is a win for the US.

Credit where credit is due: It was because of the Bush administration’s policies around the strategic reserve and opening drilling that got us off of our dependence on middle eastern oil. I’m no fan of the Bush admin, but this is one of the few things they probably got right.

Except for the irreparable environmental impact of it all...

Certainly true, but more complex than it may seem. How much environmental damage has been saved by not having to ship oil from the middle east and not propping up those countries and all of the environmental damage they do? I don't think it's possible to know.

Meh, I'd rather keep ours in the ground and be the last to run out. Maybe that's a selfish and defeatist mindset, but it's another way to look at things besides just "lets not ruin our own environment".

"Last to run out" makes it sound like oil will be increasingly valuable as time goes on. What if you leave yours in the ground, and eventually it is worth almost nothing, because the world has moved on?

Oil has much greater economic value when used as a feedstock for non-fuel purposes. It is almost certainly a better idea to let any reserves you possibly can stay in the ground for as long as possible, and let everyone else sell theirs for cheap first.

But if 90% of the demand for oil (transportation) disappears and supply stays the same, the price is going to drop big time.

If demand dropped, initially supply would drop offline as prices could no longer support the more difficult wells rather quickly. And as actual production falls, the amount charged that the market could bear (if the market was mostly the non-fuel, high-value uses) could be significantly higher than what we see today. A scary time to be an investor in an oil company, absolutely. But taken in the broad view, leaving oil for later will almost certainly enhance total future potential profits, if not the rate of profit per unit time.

Good, that's even better.

This is assuming oil is still valuable in the future in the face of increasing pollution standards, potential carbon taxes, and the rise of cheaper renewable energy production.

Oil will be a valuable feedstock for the forseeable future. Look at all the plastic in your house, in your clothes, in your car, wrapping your food, coating your circuit boards, the list goes on. Yeah, that's oil. Shame we can't harvest the plastic from the oceans and reformulate it into something useful.

Why not?

I haven't run the numbers, but seriously doubt it is economically viable. Most of the ocean plastic is small particles and it'd have to be collected, filtered and dried first.

Those first two can be done passively, or on the go with solar power.

Diesel and jet fuel by themselves account for over 30% of global oil consumption. Even if we get all other vehicles running on something else (ha), big trucks, freight planes and air travel will be guzzling oil for probably as long as we still have some left.

But oil products can be produced from biomass and energy too. And is carbon neutral, and doesn't have the potential side effects of extraction leaks and fracking concerns.

Oil isn't magic, it is straight up organic buildup put under heat and/or pressure. You can make 'fossil fuels' out of trees, grass, frogs, people, ect. It is just limited by our ability to produce energy which is currently our biggest restriction on pretty much every industry in the world and is what we are most concerned about solving.

Could you elaborate? As far as I understand it, the primary drivers by far were technological advancements in fracking and horizontal drilling. These technologies initially led to the gas boom and then later leveraged for oil.

I would say Obama's EPA standards on cars had a bigger impact than what you described, with the added benefit of being a move in efficiency and not just burning through reserves.

"Credit where credit is due"

How many people die of cancer in the US due to massive pollution brought on by "policies"? 10k, 100k, 1M?

And how long will it take the US courts to find the CO2 producers guilty, same as they did with tobacco?

All big oil producers are on ultra shaky ground due to future settlements and fines.

A huge part is not about energy. As the American Chemistry Council are delighted to tell, $200bn has been invested since 2010 in increased production from fracking for ethane and other products for plastics and chemicals[0].

Yet they still find it necessary to campaign against chemical regulations and restrictions on plastic carrier bags.

So we're still accelerating nicely towards that precipice.

[0] https://www.americanchemistry.com/Media/PressReleasesTranscr...

When did America invade Iraq post 2007?

> I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.

Yup, that was the one of the main reasons we bore the cost of being the world's policeman and securing global shipping routes. We're going to largely stop doing that, and turn inward, leaving the rest of the world to scramble over how to secure shipping routes on their own resulting in new alliances. The oil will start flowing to China mostly and Russia will expand its borders by force. China will be too busy trying to stop its fake economy from crashing to care.

> how times change due to a technological advancement in drilling practices.

Is it really just that or maybe also the erosion of environmental protections? [0]

[0] https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/id/10665.pdf

> I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.

It's possible but I think corporate interests, rather than our energy independence, will be the driving force of US foreign policy as it had been in the past. As long as banks, oil companies, etc stand to make a lot of money in the middle east, our foreign policy won't change much.

In UK rain forest anti deforestation TV ad "Rang-tan" was banned for being "too political" - https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/how-the-world-is-wakin...

It was not the ad that was deemed too political. The problem was that it was made by a political organization. If Iceland had made it themselves, it would likely have been fine.

Thought I was on Facebook for a moment there

The more general pattern is that, because of the sheer volume of demand, solutions that merely substitute one material resource for another no longer work.

Reminder: Don’t buy crap with palm oil in it, at least not things with oils not clearly marked as sustainably/ethically produced.

So I should eat hydrogoneated oil instead and have a heart attack?

Buy stuff with no, or with good palm oil in it. It’s not that hard, not much more expensive, and more pleasant than a heart attack.

Is that really the only other option?

I believe we are already at point of no return and our grandchildren will live in mostly sterile world compared with what we have now. Probably only external expansion to the Solar system can save tiny bits of wild life they will have at that time.

Can you help me understand this? I keep hearing about expansion to other planets but it seems to me that no matter how inhospitable Earth becomes, we’ll be starting off from a much worse position elsewhere.

There's no understanding it because it doesn't actually make sense. Lasting solutions to earth-scale issues like climate change must ultimately be social solutions (regulations, taxes, treaties, and ultimately alignment of incentives). Terraforming Mars seems easier than developing social solutions to some people, so that's what they fixate on. But trying to spread into the solar system because we're afraid of having the hard conversations about social solutions is a gross misapplication of imagination and resources.

The fact that we're using "hard conversations" as a euphemism for large scale violence is a wry comment on just how hard those conversations will actually be.

I don't expect that colonization of Mars or other distant places will save "us", but it might well save many of those who go. There are lots of ways in which places on Mars are less hospitable to human life than places on Earth, but if things get really bad on Earth, the surrounding weather will not be nearly as bad as how other people are reacting.

It will take a really long time before any off-planet colony could be self-sustaining. Just think about how long the supply chains for even the simplest things needed for repairs are. Until then Earth is either fucked due to climate change or we have a local solution to the problem.

There's also the more strategic aspects of interplanetary exploration. Namely: rendering those places conceptually impractical as a doctrine of area denial.

Area denial isn't just about land mines. It can mean fomenting political unrest among the constituents of a standing, stable, and sustainable Martian colony, so that it's suddenly an unappealing alternative to solving Earth's problems. Don't go there, it's the Salem witch trials and the holocaust all at once. Stay here and fix the biosphere instead.

I think the point, or at least a parallel point, is that if we have the technology to terraform Mars, then we likely have the technology to terraform earth back to a more habitable environment.

Eventually the situation will be come obvious enough that it can no longer be ignored by half of the West, and most of the developing world.

When that happens, and a solution to the problem becomes a global priority, it will be solved in one manner or another.

> it will be solved in one manner or another

The closer we get to that point, the worse it will be for those further from resources (political and financial).

Exactly. That's why I think people fantasizing about Mars instead of investing in fixing our current social/media/political situation is a severe misapplication of resources. I'm looking at you, Jeff Bezos.

We humans usually don't focus our resources on a single issues. Have you ever heard we have to stop spending money for cosmetics because right now we have to fix amazon deforestation? And even then, we usually don't go all in on a single plan but want backups. Mars might be one of those. A tiny one we barely invest any resources into. NASA is ~0.5 percent of the US budget. Cosmetics would be easily 3x that.

I'm with your GP on that. Not terra-forming, but a small mars colony will prove Humans are able to live independent from earths ecology. That we have the necessary technology and just have to scale it up. That will be hard enough on potentially short available time frame we have to react, so doing the R&D now in form of a government financed space program will probably buy us necessary time.

That doesn't mean the colony has to be independent of earths economy. Decoupling mines and factories from earths ecology will be a lot easier than doing so for e.g. food production.

But yeah, that will be painful and I'd prefer mankind to find ways to keep our current environment intact.

Just to quip on your first point, we did a decent job (especially during the first and second world wars) of aligning ourselves, though the purchase of bonds and the like, on spending money on "guns".

It's laughable to even think I'm ever going to HAVE kids.

Blade Runner 2049 was not supposed to be a documentary

It's not. The first Blade Runner was set in 2019, where LA had a population of 106 million (from the original voice over by Harrison Ford). That was the 80s apocalyptic view of our time as an overcrowded and polluted hell where people have to crowd into massive cities for survival.

If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare.

2049 was a continuation of that alternative future, which had flying cars, off-world colonies and strong AI in the form of synthetic, fleshy humans. IOW, nothing like the actual future, to date.

"If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare."

Isn't it amazing how all the past predictions of environmental doom have been wrong?

because of massive political/economic/agricultural/etc shifts to avoid those outcomes.

if nobody ever made an issue about banning CFCs do you think the ozone would be better off today?

It is. Elrich's population bomb was an earlier example that has been wrong so far. I recently re-read Whitley Strieber's Nature's End, published in 87. Although a fictional account of the future similar to the Blade Runner movies (in terms of environmental impact), it embodied the idea at the time that the Earth couldn't support several billion humans. Set in the mid 2020s, the northern forests were dead from acid rain, the Midwest was a desert and the Amazon had mostly burned down. 7 billion humans had completely decimated the biosphere.

So I'm a little skeptical whenever the latest doomsday predictions roll around.

I think that it's the predictions of doom that call attention to the risk, and allow us (or have done so far) to avert the crisis just in time.

[Citation needed]

Neat belief.

No matter how badly we screw up the Earth it will still be much more hospitable than any other place in the Solar System.

I hope you are right. I'd still rather live some place else in the solar system. This place is getting kind of crowded for my taste.

Did you give Alaska a chance?

Sure. It will just be like living in a parking lot with some potted plants, instead of living in a forest. We won’t die, just most of the biodiversity.

Well maybe a billion or two of us will die. Probably not us.

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