The Problem with Palm Oil | Hacker News Reader

The Problem with Palm Oil

ethical.net

270 pointshispanic207 comments

I really feel like the solution here has nothing to do with Palm oil, or any other specific commodity. The solution is for rich countries to pay people in poor countries to take care of their forests. If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive. If the inverse is true, the forest will be destroyed. If we want people in less developed countries to not exploit their natural resources, we're going to have to pay them more then they could get otherwise, or the resources will be extracted and sold.

We already pay a lot of people in the west to maintain land for ecological reasons, such as farmers, so it's not an unusual thing to do.

And it's mostly not working (see today's EC reports on farmer subsidies for nature preservation).

Spoiler: the money is spend and happily pocketed by the target audience, who then find ways to do the other economically profitable thing as well.

> it's mostly not working...: the money is spend and happily pocketed by the target audience, who then find ways to do the other economically profitable thing as well.

err... isn't that the intended outcome?

The money is getting to who we wanted it to get to and it's not stopping them running their businesses and creating value. That's all good isn't it? We'd love to be able to pay people in the Amazon to protect the forests and still develop themselves economically.

Not by having them do the exact thing we pay them not to do. In the EC case, we pay them to develop bird habitat, yet that habitat doesn't get developed. If we'd pay people to not grow palm trees, we expect that there isn't some metric loophole like that makes it so that we don't achieve the goals set out.

I mean, it's a matter of clearly defining goals and KPIs of course, but that's easier said than done.

> having them do the exact thing we pay them not to do.

Well you left that bit out of your comment!

You just said they took the money and managed to make money with their land anyway while meeting the agreement, which sounded like a perfect situation!

> Well you left that bit out of your comment!

It’s funny watching people talk past each other on the internet. You actually quoted that bit of his comment above.

I thought 'the other' meant an unrelated thing, so it wasn't clear.

I said the other thing profitable, i.e. the thing we don't want them to do, I didn't say another.

> If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive. If the inverse is true, the forest will be destroyed.

More precisely: if the market value of palm oil is greater than that of healthy forest, there will be incentives to destroy the forest. That only translates to "the forest will be destroyed" where people / societies have no other values in play beyond their incentives.

Incentives matter, for sure, and using them as a tool to encourage preservation is a good arrow to consider stocking the quiver with. But something important is lost if we assume they're the only things that matter; it's essentially an acceptance of the idea there are no values besides incentives.

[edited "More precisely" conditional sentence to actually make sense, I accidentally swapped the hypothetical and asserted consequence when I typed it out the first time]

> if the market value of a healthy forest is greater than that of palm oil, there will be incentives to destroy the forest

No the idea is the opposite - if the market value of healthy forest is greater than that of palm oil the idea is people will be incentivised to not destroy the forest because it's worth more than the palm oil.

I think they just made a typo and meant to say the opposite statement.

Correct, edited the statement to actually make sense.

> people / societies have [...] other values in play beyond their incentives.

Isn't that basically just a non-monetary incentive?

Yes, but “incentives” is just a model. Sometimes the model helps; sometimes not. You can fudge the model enough so that everything fits into it, but it’s often adding complexity for no increase in clarity.

I'm using the term values to describe outcomes a person might find desirable outside their immediate sphere of interest.

You might find that you are opposed to genocide, even if it happens remotely and is no immediate skin of your nose, or that a lost child bothers you and motivates you to act to try fix the situation, even for a child not connected to your tribe or recognized responsibility. What's going on in those situations? Is that an incentive? I suppose you could work with a definition of incentive that might include it, but I think it's useful to distinguish what's going on in situations like that from situations where immediate personal benefit is more clear. One is more or less about what you want your life to be more like, the other is more or less about what you want the world to be more like.

For poor people there is very little that matters other than getting enough money to survive and maybe send their children to school.

How often does it happen that industrial-scale deforestation is primarily a response to economic survival issues among the poor?

Usually when I see industrial-scale impacts, there's incentives capital is responding too.

How much would it cost and who do I start giving money to regularly to do this?

Stop buying foods with palm oil for starters.

I contribute to https://www.coolearth.org/ which seems to be one of the best options following this approach

Although not exactly what you're describing, these guys are a fairly good option https://www.worldlandtrust.org/

This is what the UN's REDD+ program does. The program has been running for a while now with some success but there are some major challenges:

1. The program relies on enforcement of property rights and environmental regulation so that illegal deforestation doesn't increase to compensate 2. "Leakage". Forest A is protected but Forest B is then logged instead. 3. Indigenous rights need to be respected and frequently aren't. This bloke [1] for example bought 50% of the carbon rights from indigenous Peruvians who can't even read or write. 4. There are concerns about greenwashing. [2] Norway is by far the biggest contributor to REDD+ with over $2.5bn contributed... but they are also the world's 5th biggest oil exporter.

These challenges can probably be overcome with better oversight and greater commitment from the international community, but the desire just doesn't seem to be there.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121113114554/http://sixtyminut... [2] https://redd-monitor.org/2019/01/08/norways-support-for-redd...

Without oversight and enforcement of that oversight, all that will happen is fraud. There will be lots of pretty wild forest/natural lands on paper and lots of Palm oil trees in reality.

So what are the 2-3 billion people use as cooking oil. The biggest problem the world has is it's human population. Just stopping them from doing 1 thing is not going to solve the problem. We need to give economical alternates that work as replacement. Solar and wind power started getting bigger adoption once it provided an economic advantage. If Palm oil production goes down it will be replaced with canola or some other seed oil. That will result in forests being razed in some other part of the world for growing those crops. In my opinion the world needs an open sourced gmo grain crops that produce the most the most amount of oil for the least amount of land use.

I think it is worth noting palm is already incredibly productive as a crop, replacing it with oilseed crops isn't even close to using the same amount of land per amount of productivity. You would be hard pressed to beat its productivity by modifying a grain crop.

http://theconversation.com/palm-oil-scourge-of-the-earth-or-...

I actually agree with the logic of this argument but it still seems misguided. I agree with all of what you said, but I also think that the problem is still that palm oil actually is worth more than the forest. It's correct to lay the responsibility with the more developed economies imo because they're the ones identifying the problem and best positioned to solve it, but I don't think this line of reasoning has political potential. What average person is going to feel responsible for environmental ills in other countries? The French protestors whose breaking straw was a gas tax? The broader USA with its ethos of personal responsibility? We need a new strategy that isn't just screaming at people or guilting them.

> If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive.

Sadly, It does not work like that.

Alive African lions have a economic value in tourism, they are still being decimated by external companies that hire local furtives to do the job. You could send every children in poor countries at the university and Translational companies and mafias still would kill the last lions and probably a few rangers to sell its bones in the black market.

If you pay poor countries to not distroy the forest you are just building a blackmailing system. First, a lot of this money will never reach poor people. Local people will be increasily frustrated, and in a couple of years the question will be: "Keep paying me or somebody will burn the forest". We would be funding accelerating the pressure to distroy rainforests (because you are funding the people that will distroy nature at the exact second that you will quit the area).

The same is happening in Europe, with modern environmental laws and millions of euro invested in saving big predators. Norway has like 50 wolves. Spain is paying farmers for not killing big predators (being paid for agreeing to respect the law, none less!), in national parks!. We don't have stable populations of wolves in any of our national parks in fact and talking about reintroduction is taboo, even when we have evident problems with the explosion of populations of wild ungulates and invasion of national parks by cattle.

After millions of money raining over this areas, we still find decapitated wolves hanging from trafic stops or floating in public pools "goodfather style, and people more angry than ever about wolves and asking for more money each month. We had the exact same mathusalem cow killed "by wolves" four times in four different places, and being paid four times. Is a scam.

Support conservationists or environmental police instead. This will trow much better results in the end.

Another proof. The forests in Gran Canary island started burning today by multiple fires. Same as in 2019

It seems that the same people that burned most forests the last year will return to finish the job this year, or in 2021 if some trees still remain. Until killing the last tree and the last blue finch.

Is just too easy for criminals.

I am not sure to understand what your solution is.

We’re in this situation because powerful commercial entities created a market unbalance for decades, if not centuries, taking advantage of weaker/poorer countries.

Your argument seems to be come down to “let’s stop doing that”, when basically none of the parties involved in tipping the balance seem to care about the issue in the first place. What entity would you see having incentives and the power to change the current situation ?

Reading the article, it seems it’s just complicated with no clear cut way out.

As a soapmaker, I used beef tallow as a primary ingredient for a long time. More recently, trying not to use animal-derived products led me to try palm oil, as it's a nearly perfect substitute for tallow. The properties of palm oil are ideal for soapmaking, as well as many other products.

Palm oil is one of those wonder ingredients that are useful in so many ways, and I truly hope we can find a way to make its cultivation more sustainable. For now, it's most important to know where your ingredients are sourced and the local impacts of harvesting them.

What about hydrogenated vegetable oil?

It's certainly used in soap, but I've never tried it. From what I understand it's often derived from soybean oil.

Each type of oil/fat has a unique fatty acid profile that contributes different qualities to the product after saponification. Palm oil has a uniquely high palmitic and oleic acid content, both of which provide very desirable qualities to the end product.

Raw agricultural oils have a limited number of unsaturated chemical bonds between some of the atoms in their carbon chain structure.

These carbons are available for reaction with alkalies such as lye, which saponifiy each pair of target carbons by adding a molecule of water H_O_H. H_ to one carbon, _OH to the adjoining carbon. The properties of the resulting material, soap, are not very similar to the original oil, it is quite water soluble by comparison, and capable of easily emulsifying regular oil & grease as expected for water rinsability.

If the raw oil is instead reacted with hydrogen gas, one _H goes to each reactive carbon and the molecule after that point is referred to as being saturated with hydrogen. That's why they call it hydrogenated vegetable oil. Things like Crisco which are solid at room temperature and able to cook at high heat because they are hydrogenated, even though the raw oil they are made from is light and does not even solidify under refrigeration.

The lye is not very reactive with vegetable oil that is already saturated (plain mineral oil is saturated naturally).

The heavier fractions or varieties of palm oils can be solids at various room temperatures, and under refigeration the heavier waxes from olive oil often separate from the lighter fractions readily. But both of these waxy fractions are solid naturally just because they have a higher melting point, there has been no hydrogenation and the raw solid oil when melted can be reacted with lye as fully as raw light fractions can.

You are raising a very interesting point, so. I assume you sourced your tallow locally, right?

So the question is what's more sustainable. Palm oil from another continent or locally sourced tallow from farmers supplying meat locally as well. And I have no idea what the answer is, only that it is an incredibly hard question.

I assume that at the scale palm oil is used, the size of an animal industry capable of providing enough tallow would surely be far more unsustainable. The fattier animals that produce tallow in large quantities have a trophic efficiency of 1/5 or 1/6 so for every pound of animal mass they consume 5-6 pounds of plant food. That's a lot of calories wasted just chewing cud.

I though cattle were more like 1/10.

10% is the average-ish trophic efficiency in the wild. In industrialized farming we have optimized feed, antibiotic growth promotion, and lack of exercise that brings that down to 1/6 or so for cattle

The confounding variable is that the cows would have been produced anyway for food, so using leftover tallow, bone, etc is ecologically virtuous

Unless you pay for it.

The cows are produced for money. Muscle meat is one of the most lucrative products, but demand for any part of the cow incentivizes more cows.

It's possible that it would still be ecologically the lesser evil because the market value is low and what you might choose as an alternative isn't necessarily better, but it's not so clear cut as you make it sound.

And as many people have discovered, once you try to commercialize use of a 'free' resource it stops being free real quick.

Does anyone making biofuel still get their feedstock for free?

Yeah, that was my thought. Having local farms supplying local butchers and using every single bit of the animal.

It's more complex than that since if we're talking about land use or calorie production since most livestock is grazed on marginal crop land and would need to be compared to that of the palm trees.

The appropriate way to calculate efficiency might to be separate out the rendered tallow from a nutrient-weighted food output (today, we don't actually have a calorie shortage, but we are definitely nutrient deficient) and an life cycle analysis of all the inputs.

In terms of other aspects of environmental footprint, it also depends a lot on how the animal was raised. While conventional beef might be 30+ kg CO2eq/kg, full LCA has shown regenerative beef can be net negative (due to soil carbon sequestration): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019... Water footprint also is similarly nuanced and needs to be split into green/blue/grey water.

> most livestock is grazed on marginal crop land

There's a lot to unpack there. What is "marginal crop land"?

It conjures images of scrubland in the North American west or the African savanna. But more than half the cattle in the world live in Brazil and India. My understanding is that rainforests take up so many nutrients that the soil is actually very poor and unsuitable for most kinds of agriculture. So one could easily say that recently burned Amazon rainforest is "marginal crop land", and that would make this statement technically true while still being no consolation at all.

The next biggest chunk of the earth's cattle live in China, where my understanding is that they're effectively creating their own "marginal crop land" - they graze, they take up the nutrients in the soil, then they're slaughtered and their meat is shipped overseas, taking those nutrients along with them. So the soil keeps getting less fertile. Grazing is supposedly a major factor in the expansion of the Gobi desert.

The USA? I don't know. Perhaps all the biggest CAFOs are located in marginal crop land, but the grain they're feeding to the cattle is all grown on prime crop land.

Perhaps some specialty farms are creating eddies in the current, but it's hard to see much evidence that they're changing the overall flow unless we're very careful about how we frame the conversation.

In North America, cattle are grazed on grasslands which have a long-term symbiotic relationship with grazing ungulates (the buffalo, now mostly gone, an immense tragedy). Cattle are only grain-fed for the last few weeks of their lives. There's this standing myth that cattle spend their lives in feedlots and that's simply false, as a visit to any ranch will tell you. And even that feed is largely inedible by humans[0].

The analogy between modern cattle and the wild grazing of buffalo isn't perfect. There are problems with modern grazing that need to be addressed. The North American grasslands are prone to desertification if over- or under-grazed. The work of the Savory Institute is largely about promoting "regenerative grazing", not just in North America but also eg Africa[1].

Anyway, if you live in North America and eat/utilise relatively local beef, then you aren't a participant in some kind of misuse of "prime crop land".

[0]: https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/fao-sets-the-record-s...

[1]: https://savory.global

It's even more complicated than that, because large parts of Brazil are pampas or other dry lands, where grazing cattle is the most suitable form of food production.

I suspect at this point that former rainforest land accounts for most of the grazing heads, but it's difficult to find numbers.

Brazil, India and China are big countries by land area. Different parts of each country have different soils and even climates.

No idea what the GP means by marginal crop land, but yes, people tend to grow cattle on land that isn't very good for crop, for one reason or another (the most common reasons being a rocky terrain or a non-plane surface, poor soil is usually not such a reason as soil is always fixed anyway).

> My understanding is that rainforests take up so many nutrients that the soil is actually very poor and unsuitable for most kinds of agriculture.

That's a characteristic of the Amazon forest specifically (and not even all of it). The soil is poor because it's an old land with a lot of raining, that carries the nutrients away, it's not a fault of the forest. Other rain forests have different characteristics.

> But more than half the cattle in the world live in Brazil and India.

Not true.

https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...

> So one could easily say that recently burned Amazon rainforest is "marginal crop land", and that would make this statement technically true while still being no consolation at all.

The point is that cattle can be raised in marginal crop land. Palm trees cannot. Yes, we should stop cutting down rainforest for cattle and palm oil. The difference is that we can raise cattle in the tons of marginal crop land we have around the world.

> The next biggest chunk of the earth's cattle live in China

Not true.

https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...

> Grazing is supposedly a major factor in the expansion of the Gobi desert.

Supposedly? Care to provide a source for that?

> Perhaps all the biggest CAFOs are located in marginal crop land, but the grain they're feeding to the cattle is all grown on prime crop land.

Care to provide source for that?

If you really are concerned about the rain forests, then you should be against palm oil and raising cattle in the amazon rainforest. But it seems like you are just against raising cattle.

If we could consume the exact same plant calories, that would be an apt comparison. However, I'm loathe to consume such plant matter like corn cob, stalk, leaf, and other plant matter that is indigestible to humans.

It's crazy how much beef fat is thrown away because no one wants it. I just asked the butcher and they gave it to me, and I made my own tallow.

Obviously this doesn't work at industrial scales, but if you really want to be ecological, try working things out locally first with the stuff that's getting tossed.

It is interesting how that has changed over time. In the 1830's, the most valuable part of the beef animal was the hide, followed by the tallow. The meat was the cheap byproduct.

Same for pork. In the 1940's, lard was highly valuable, and pigs were bred to maximize lard production.

I couldn't exactly confirm.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.096205135&view=1u...

Sorry, I don't have time right now to read your link but I will get back to it after my event this evening.

My citation for hogs... my father was a breeder of fine, pedigreed Duroc-Jersey swine. He literally lived through (and helped lead) the switch from selecting for maximum lard production to selecting for minimum back-fat.

By the time I was cleaning barns after school, we were well into the "minimize fat" era. Which in my opinion has been taken too far, as pork now is often very dry. A little marbling would go a long way.

(Aside: I vividly recall one night, near the end of the second cup of coffee, a nasty differential equations pset that was kicking my ass. I remember to this day saying to myself: You have two options here: a) wrap your mind around diffeq, and get that engineering degree, or b) go home and clean hog barns for the rest of your life. I chose option 'a'. Powerful motivation.)

Haha well, those valuable-in-1830's parts are the parts that do not spoil at room temp and last a really long time, so that may have something to do with it.

But it is an IMO superior (health and taste) fat for cooking and its absolutely crazy that people don't gobble it up, instead opting for canola, palm, safflower, etc.

Tallow making: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1191748243429957632

(Note that this here is scrap cuttings and the leaf fat, around the kidneys, is more ideal for making large quantities, but is also often thrown away!)

Tallow slow-fried fries: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1215090611264610304

For a long time, everyone said saturated fats and meat fats were a one way ticket to heart disease. Vegetable fats took over and it’ll take a while for anything to change.

Trans fats are the real killer and bans are already in effect around the world. The FDA banned trans fats in the U.S. as of June 2019: https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/final-dete...

That seemed to happen rather quickly, at least once the evidence became overwhelming. The FDA was only a few years behind major cities like San Francisco, though some European countries were way ahead of the curve.

Red meat and dairy have significant amounts of trans fats. You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.

> Red meat and dairy have significant amounts of trans fats.

Natural trans fats [1] are made by bacteria in the rumen, and are rather different than manufactured trans fats created from seed oils with hydrogen gas and catalysts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_linoleic_acid - "The biological activity of CLA was noted by researchers in 1979 who found it to inhibit chemically induced cancer in mice [...] In 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration categorized CLA as generally recognized as safe (GRAS)."

> You're still probably better off with vegetable fats if you can help it, at least where partially hydrogenated oils are banned.

Most polyunsaturated oils are deodorized ("refined"), so customers don't realize they're eating rancid oil.

I bought unrefined grape seed oil years ago. Didn't know what to do with the obviously-rancid oil. Now I would give it to my father, so he could use it to help start his barbecue's charcoal.

Worrying about trans fats and heart disease when over half of your population is so obese it's impairing their ability to walk seems insane.

Then again, trans fats isn't the addictive high-margin industrial product... :(

Trans fats are similar to smoking in that they directly contribute to arteriosclerosis. Like smoking, obesity is a secondary concern. No doctor would tell you to keep smoking to stay trim; likewise, I doubt any doctor or scientist would suggest a diet heavy in trans fats (e.g. margarine) if for some reason such consumption would keep you trim.

I'm saying that banning addictive sugary food be a thousand times more effective w.r.t public health than banning trans fats.

Making a big show of banning one while letting the other run wild is very bad optics.

(Then again, I'm not sure how we might even go about curtailing sugars, they're just way too embedded in our culture.)

> I'm saying that banning addictive sugary food be a thousand times more effective w.r.t public health than banning trans fats.

I get that, but I don't think the empirical science supports a claim that sugar is more costly than trans fats from a public health perspective; and certainly not that it's 1000x worse. In any event, the effects of sugar are indirect and complex. For example, AFAIU a high sugar but low calorie diet isn't particularly bad for you. By contrast, trans fats have a simple, clear, and substantial causal relation to arteriosclerosis.

50 years of prescribing partially hydrogenated oils and low-fat foods was based on poor, incomplete, and sloppy science. Going forward maybe we should instead base public policy on sound, concrete, reproducible science and straight-forward regulations. Not everything needs to be fixed with government mandates, and usually shouldn't without clear reasons.

In those days, leather was very much a part of many manufactured goods. Not to mention, the primary mode of transportation was the horse, which required a saddle.

Refrigeration technology greatly increased the reach, durability, and thus value of raw meat.

Electricity and the lightbulb depleted demand for candles (and tallow).

Honest question: Why not use olive oil? Since it has been used in soap making for centuries, I'm curious why you prefer palm oil or beef tallow over what to my amateur thinking is an ideal renewable option.

Olive oil (pomace) is one of the ingredients I use in formulations. Olive oil is very moisturizing, but doesn't lather at all, and it renders a very soft bar of soap. Tallow and palm are both hard, stable lather-building ingredients.

In short, olive oil and palm oil are not really comparable. They would both be best used in some combination to yield a product with both moisturizing and lathering qualities.

I've been using this 100% olive oil (fat-wise) soap for several years, it doesn't lather quite as well as other soaps i've used but it does the job well enough:

https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/shop/product/oliva-pure-ol...

Traditionally, castile soap is 100% olive-oil based. It's often sold as liquid soap, to eliminate any disadvantages of the softness that olive oil gives to solid bar soap.

I'll have to give that a try, I used to use the Kiss My Face 100% olive oil bars before they shut down and were acquired, now their products are awful.

I've been using this [0] as a replacement which has been good but the Laurel blend seems to dry my skin more than the straight olive oil KMF bars did.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Aleppo-Soap-Hand-made-All-Natural-12-...

Is lathering important for any particular reason?

I've been using castile soap for a while now, and, while it's true that it doesn't lather as much as some other soaps, that's never really bothered me.

It ultimately depends on the person using it.

Lather is often associated with a soap's cleansing qualities, which is usually desirable. But some people prefer their soap to be more moisturizing than cleansing.

I personally find pure castile soap to be too moisturizing and not cleansing enough. I prefer a more balanced soap with a bit of both qualities.

Does it actually make the soap more cleansing, or is it just a perception thing?

My understanding was that, when companies add lathering agents to their products, it's the same as dyes and fragrances: really just there for cosmetic purposes.

Surfactant types and levels are different from different ingredients. That's what does the "cleansing" you're asking about. Not all oils and fats clean the same way. Some are better for different "messes" than others. Like wood ash makes a fantastic soap to strip grease. However, it also dries the hell out of your skin and can lead to lots of cracking.

It's all a balancing act as to how strong of a soap you want compared to damaging.

Thanks friend - I sort of assumed it was something along those lines but was curious about your thoughts as a pro.

Olive oil gives you very soft soaps, (hydrogenated) palm oil and beef tallow give you very hard soaps.

hence palmolive, presumably? Somewhere in between?

Hah, never made that connection.

But yeah presumably.

Coconut oil works very well for soaps. You can get great great results with it. I've tried (as a hobbyist maker) red palm oil and coconut oil and I found the latter much preferable. Coconut oil costs more, of course.

I use it as well in most of my formulations. It yields a high lather and is very cleansing (almost too cleansing -- it's often described as very "drying".) It's best used along with olive oil, to get a simultaneously cleansing + moisturizing bar.

So aside from the additional cost, is there any catch in using it instead of palm oil or tallow, provided you balance it out with a moisturizer like olive oil?

You might get away with just those two, but it would probably yield a very soft bar. A soft bar typically takes longer to cure (be ready to use/sell) and doesn't last as long once it's being used.

In my experience coconut oil, like olive oil, would still need to be mixed with a harder fat like palm or tallow, or hard butters, like cocoa butter. It is on the soft side of oils.

The "old reliable" recipe mixes these three in equal parts: Coconut, Olive, Tallow. Each of them imparts a quality that the others lack. Coconut = cleansing, Olive = moisturizing, Tallow/Palm = Hardness, stability

Did you watch the Seven Worlds, One Planet episode on Asia?

For anyone who is wondering how to source sustainable palm oil, there are some links to investigate oneself https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1Wbwgx6HCMbF8SrnST...

Palm oil is not sustainable, period. It’s either being grown on plantations where forest used to be or more plantations are being cut out of the jungle to meet growing demand.

Here in Europe, we destroyed our forests more than a millennium ago. Since then, we are profiting economically from all the agricultural land that destruction created. It made us rich.

But we really don't like it when other people want to do the same!

Solution?

We should fill Europe again with thick forests. Not the groomed artificial woods we have now, that really only exist because we can sell the wood after 20 years. We should destroy all our agricultural land and convert it back to dark natural forests, full of large and dangerous animals. Why do we expect the Third World to have all the the economically useless forests?

We know better now. In many places, the forests demolished for palm oil contain invaluable biodiversity. It's not that Europe shouldn't be reforested, but proper incentive structures have to be implemented to prevent further enclosure on vital ecosystems in less developed economies.

And yet, we spend all our time lecturing Third World countries and don't plant any real forests here.

It's easy. Couple billion Euros and we replicated the entire Borneo/Kalimatan forest.

THEN we can lecture others. Not before.

Europe forests are growing again, both because of increased protection and reduction in farming.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/forest-europe-environ...

> "Sorry, but we can’t find the page you were looking for"

I tried to remove google tracking bits from the url, but miserably failed. This is the correct link:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/forest-europe-environ...

edit: anyway, as the parent pointed out, not everything is great, as the new forests, even when not used for wood, are still sort of artificial. But at least there is a trend in the right direction.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Palm oil is the most efficient oil to extract by practically a factor of 2 [1]. So in the long term, if global supply increases or stays stable, if we replace palm oil crops with another crop, eventually we'll make the problem worse and face more deforestation.

[1] according to this http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html

I wish the article would go more in depth into what it would take:

>Because when done right, oil palms can yield the highest amount of oil per acre of land, and if Western countries drastically decrease their demand for palm oil, that could bring a harsh disaster for many now reliant on a Western thirst for the oil.

Your comment has a lot of assumptions.

For example if the choice is between a palm oil biodiesel powered car or an electric one, it makes a difference.

Exactly, the focus should be on reducing consumption which, like you mentioned, comes down to consumer choice and policy. less biodiesel cars means less demand means less deforestation.

Thing is, everything has palm oil in it, so reducing global palm oil demand is akin to reducing global consumption of goods.

> Thing is, everything has palm oil in it

I feel like this is unnecessarily hyperbolic, unless I'm ignorant about the true spread of palm oil in "everything."

This site [1] says that 72% of palm oil is used for food stuffs, all processed foods, which anyone can eat less of. Most of the remainder is in soap products. That doesn't sound like "everything" to me.

1. https://www.palmoilinvestigations.org/about-palm-oil.html

The only product I consume (occasionally) that has palm oil in it is soup concentrate. The trick is not buying processed food.

Even ignoring biodiesel, vegetable oils are in high demand for lubrication, and electric motors use less. Hopefully the switch away from heat engines will decrease overall demand for lubricants and reduce industrial vegetable oil consumption.

Reminds me of the Jevons Paradox.

It's so efficient to produce that it's worth blanketing whole tropics in palm oil plantations to maximize the economic productivity of developing countries... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

(I'm not a huge fan of biofuels for this reason.)

Are problems like this an inevitability of international trade among economically unequal parties? If one party offers N dollars per ounce of palm oil, and the other party desperately needs money more than anything else, how could you expect anything less than the most desperate of measures taken to produce as much palm oil as possible?

What are our options? No trade among economically disadvantaged countries at all? Devalue our currency? Paternalistic oversight?

Countries very often also keep exporting when its not 'unequal'. While richer countries tend to have better environmental policy, that can also go in the other direction sometimes.

When international trade consists only of material and not migrants

Mass wealth can only be generated in advanced economies. For the people of developing countries to benefit their countries must participate somehow in these advanced economies. With globalization they are allowed to participate only by the exchange of goods (either selling manufacturing in developed countries like China or natural resources in undeveloped countries like Congo). Before globalization, they could not participate at all.

Advanced economies like the US and EU allow immigration only in a limited capacity, and they do so in way that benefits mainly the investor class, entrepreneurs and high-skill workers. Consider the typical Silicon Valley visa, the H1-B. The H1-B only allows corporations to sponsor highly-skilled workers to take jobs that are hard to fill with Americans. Think software engineers working at Google. This kind of immigration benefits investors in Google and workers in the software industry while increasing competition for Americans in the market for high paying jobs. Excluded from all of this especially are low-skill foreign workers.

Everyone wants to be rich, and they will not stop this pursuit. As long as the majority of people in this world, those who are living in non-advanced economies, can only become rich by the selling of manufacturing and natural resources instead of their labor, then there will always be billions of people whose work effects the planet's environment in a significantly damaging way.

In no way does a H1-B benefit anybody but possibly some execs. It is exploited to drive down wages in our high demand industry. Probably the worst is that instead of taking new grads and mentoring them up there are many places that would rather contract some H1-B instead.

H1-B definitely benefits H1-B recipients.

Though they may be better off as a result of getting an H1-B, it's not clear that the system benefits them compared to other possible immigration methods.

Maybe it doesn't benefit American software developers very much, since they would prefer less supply in their industry and higher pay.

Non-Americans are still people, and they benefit a lot from this. And they often become Americans, so America benefits by gaining skilled and hardworking people who otherwise would be stuck producing less value in some worse place.

No one asked for any of this. Where is the power button on this thing??

The power button for my commentary or the power button for exclusionary immigration policy?

If you are interested in a reasonable and effective proposal to this problem I recommend you read chapter 3 of Radical Markets by Posner and Weyl. They propose that every citizen be able to sponsor a migrant themselves.

Interesting concept. Food for thought.

In the 18th century before American states were united, it was not a democracy at all but it was still considered a _free_ country because ordinary servants and indigents were encouraged to settle in the colonies where they could realistically aspire to property ownership for their descendants, and maybe even themselves, in ways that would never be possible in the Old World where everything was already spoken for generations before they came along. One reason it was called a New World.

Back then they had a different way of approaching a similar concept in one of the southern states, among cultures where slavery had an unbroken legacy since before ancient Roman times. By this point bondage was just beginning to gain a foothold on agricultural plantations because great returns can be made when they scale unpaid hard labor. Only to eventually escalate later to more greedy & cruel things which we know citizens had not seen before on this continent.

But plantations were not yet very large or numerous, and common Londoners were being tempted to sail the sea and start a new life as a colonist, where an industrious laborer or farmer could become a homesteader and _expect to be able to own a Negro within seven years_.

And they showed the math in pounds & shillings.

This went over like a lead balloon on Twitter.

And what about the worker's agency? They may not have control over the conditions of their origins but they chose to work abroad. It may not be a choice you would make but they did. Overriding the choices of those from poorer countries because the more developed ones "know better" has a rather ugly history regardless of how sincere their intentions were.

> The Guardian interviewed 66-year-old oil palm farmer, Hussein Mohammad, who decried the EU’s choice to draw down their consumption of palm oil biofuels. He says, “I have spent all my money on the palm oil farm; I’ve recently planted new trees that will last for the next 25 years and my whole family relies on this. It’s how my kids afford to study.”

I see the modern environmental movement as a continuation of western imperialism. The developed Western world especially Europe intensively developed their land and eradicated much of their wildlife, in the process of developing the richest civilization in the world. As a result, now the majority of undeveloped land and species lies in the developing world. The modern environmental movement seeks to limit how these countries can develop and what they can do with the natural resources of their countries by using Western social, diplomatic, and economic pressure on these developing countries.

> The modern environmental movement seeks to limit how these countries can develop and what they can do with the natural resources of their countries by using Western social, diplomatic, and economic pressure on these developing countries.

To what end? I think I probably agree with you. I also see using traditionally imperial methods of interstate regulation as literally the only hope to slow global warming OR to decolonialize, so I’m not sure what your point is.

except deforestation is no longer a requirement for development and really hasn't been for 100 years. Look at Japan and South Korea (67.00% and 63.20% forestation respectively). Indonesia is already down to 46.46%. Go look at Brazil outside of the Amazon. Mostly deforested already for farmland and it hasn't really brought the country into the 1st world. Agrarian societies are a dead end for development.

For Japan's case at least, it seems there was significant deforestation followed by reforestation. I think that was the case in the US as well. It seems that poor countries trash their environment to develop and become rich (see United Kingdom, United States, China). Once they are rich they start caring more about the environment and do things like reforestation and other more environmentally friendly actions.

https://www.nippon.com/en/features/c03913/japan%E2%80%99s-fo...

Deforestation is quick, easy cash. Juicy trees. Verdant pasture. Mouths to feed. So local incentives kick in and whoosh go the trees.

Exercise for the reader: Weigh this against the idea that climate change is the greatest existential threat to humanity at the moment and we must mobilize all of our efforts to counter it.

European countries should reduce their agricultural land and create forests with local species.

First world countries should stop consuming as if the planet was infinite.

Ta-da! Here you have a (obviously naïve) solution to both problems.

Forests in Europe don't really help the Orangutan.

How does helping orangutan help humanity?

But it's a two-way street. The so-called third world did not decide to deforest in order to grow oil palms and soy in a vacuum, it did it because there was huge demand for those from the so-called first world.

Yes, this is part of how Western imperialism pressures developing countries into changing their economies for the good of first-world capitalism.

Is "western imperialism" even capable of /not/ existing under those definitions? If they shun the third world entirely they are restricting their growth. If they trade they are shaping their economy to their own ends. Even if they did the unprecedented and gave away enough of their resources to even out the nations in power it would be massive interference.

Given that only way to avoid it is a horrifying and insane asshole genie answer of genocide (if one or both parties are all dead then any ongoing imperialism is impossible) it is safe to call it useless as a term and move onto actual matters of ethics and least harm.

> I see the modern environmental movement as a continuation of western imperialism.

Western imperialism is/was heavily marked by the a.) colonization, b.) displacement of natives, and c.) exploitation of local natural resources of a region, often coupled with d.) literal enslavement of native peoples. Those local resources were exploited for global trade. So whatever this new environmental movement is, it certainly isn't that, because it is exactly opposite on all points a-d). In fact, modern environmentalism has so many hallmarks of anti-globalism, anti-trade, and anti-exploitation of natural resources, that I think this characterization is almost totally backwards and misses the real lessons of what imperialism meant.

Perhaps modern environmentalism is cultural hubris, and maybe even a tiny bit racist, but it is certainly not imperialism.

To put a face on the problem, this video of an orangutan fighting to remain in its home while the forest is logged out from under it is powerful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihPfB30YT_c

Attenborough’s recent film “Our Planet” had an episode dedicated to Palm Oil monocultures and the displaced and dying orangutan. Heartbreaking. Good series if you haven’t seen it.

It's disappointing that such an article doesn't even mention the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil [1] that is set up to address exactly these problems. It's early days but you can look out for their logo on packaging.

[1] https://rspo.org/

This is one of the most useless comparisons I have ever seen:

"That’s an increase of the equivalent of roughly 36,000 Olympic sized swimming pools of carbon dioxide more per year."

Why are we measuring gas inside of a pool? Is that a lot? or a little? I don't think I've ever even seen an Olympic sized swimming pool in person!

And how does one visualize 36,000 of them??

That part is easy. It's a cube with 33 pools on each side. Duh.

At least they didn't measure it in football fields or distance to the moon.

It's also incorrect: 36000 * 2500 m^3 * 2 kg/m^3 is only 180 Gg. I think they used the density of dry ice (1500kg/m^3) by mistake.

Measuring in teragrams is also not very useful, as virtually all climate-related stats are reported in in tonnes of CO2 equivalent ("tCO2e", which ain't exactly proper SI unit formatting but is still widely used). 140 Tg of CO2e = 140 MtCO2e. World CO2e emissions are ~40 Gt/year, for reference.

The problem with palm oil is that it's an amazing product with amazing properties and is very efficient to produce but unfortunately is best produced in countries that have no qualms about razing their environment to produce it.

We used to clear-cut entire forests in Canada (and still do some of that). We destroy eco-systems for oil production. Brazil razes the Amazon to produce beef and soy. Lots of countries engage in environmental destruction for the sake of the economy. Palm oil isn't particularly bad, it's just choices people make.

In the US, palm oil is not a domestic oil, it's one that comes in chemical tankers.

Petroleum & fuel tankers are too gross, those materials may be in the same terminal, but not the same ship as palm or tallow. And they don't need to fully remove every last bit of diesel after discharge for instance before loading gasoline. They fully clean out the heavy fuel and crude carriers far less often, compatibility is usually acceptable. Ship tanks are just challenging to get really clean, depending on what has been in them.

Those developing plantations & ranches are in countries where they need our industrial chemicals, and we seem to consume their products in similar bulk.

It could be considered an uneven exchange, but that's what intercontinental commerce has been for millennia. While shipbuilding has been largely motivated by profitmaking according to value differential, buyers and sellers are both making money so they're accordingly influential.

These are the chemical ships where they have to clean out most compartments after cargo discharge anyway, so they can load something different for the departing voyage.

Chief Mates love it after they have discharged things like Benzene or Methanol in developing countries because they leave the cargo compartments and maze of on-board pipes & valves cleaner than any intentional procedure. And pure chemicals like this just evaporate. They know they can load almost anything after that.

This hits well on my biggest problem with a lot of liberal solutions to climate change: not enough systems thinking. In Europe and elsewhere, politicians got to celebrate the adoption of biofuel, and now they also get to be righteous about banning it. Given how terrible almond production is for the environment as well, I could see a similar move being made there. Who is responsible for evaluating risk in these situations? Who is modeling effects on our ecosystem when they promote $SOLUTION as panacea?

Couldn't agree more. That's why simple policies which do not dabble into the how, just the end effect, typically works better (sorry for no references, but AFAIK from my Master's on the subject it's pretty well established).

That's why carbon tax (especially a global one) is such an attractive policy. Of course, there are issues with that as well, but generally it'll probably (and seems to) have the largest and best effect long term.

Only if the carbon tax is applied retroactively, with interest, to make up for the dramatic economic inequality generated by countries who already got ahead economically by wrecking the atmosphere. Otherwise, it's just another way developed countries are using to keep themselves ahead of the rest of the world artificially with inhumane international policy.

If you're going to do that, you'll also have to figure out a way to "charge" less developed countries for all the technology the developed countries invented.

Like the cell phone: Developing countries never bothered with phone wires, they went straight to cell phones.

Obviously I think both ideas are bad, but if you're going to advocate for your idea, you need to include everything.

Baloney. If your line of reasoning held, Venezuela would be in a great place. Obviously, the differences between countries of various levels of economic development go far beyond who can put the most co2 in the air. Additionally, we are already seeing renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels. A great outcome would be leapfrogging - just like with cell phones vs landlines.

> Obviously, the differences between countries of various levels of economic development go far beyond who can put the most co2 in the air.

not really. Everything is about energy

let's say a global carbon tax comes to be. Where does the money go and who decides where it goes? Does it just sit in an account? Does the taxpayer get anything for their money?

In Canada the carbon tax revenue is given back to the taxpayers as a credit. If you pollute less than average you end up richer and if you pollute more than average you end up poorer.

Especially since the real solution is staring Europe in the face and they don’t want to do it for the same reason the Indonesians don’t want to: loss of wealth. Europe is more deforested than Asia or South America. Do your part, Europe. Give your cities back to the Earth. Plant trees there.

Europe's forest cover has been increasing for a while. Europe has 25% of the world's forests while being 6.8% of the world's total landmass.[0] Europe, as a continent, is only about 20% larger than Australia. South America is 75% larger than Europe with a lower population.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264665/world-forest-area...

Yeah, but they have two centuries of industrialization plus the preceding three centuries of forest clear-cutting to account for and reintroduction of native species. This is the alcoholic having been clean for 3 days. I'm not ready to take advice on keeping my liver healthy from him yet.

>Who is responsible for evaluating risk in these situations?

Nobody. This is one of the downsides of a democracy: the leadership changes enough that by the time long-term consequences hit those leaders are not in politics anymore. It's a bit like LLCs in that they spread the liability around on a nebulous concept of "government".

Here's a related question: what's the long-term environmental impact of solar cells and wind turbines? Let's say we switch largely to those renewables... What happens when the first batch of them have exceeded their lifetime? What about the nth batch? We recently had an article about how wind turbine blades are sent to landfills. This is unlikely to have much of an impact, but if we scale this up then will it still have negligible impact?

I rarely ever hear this aspect discussed even though now would be the time to do it. This way we won't be in for a nasty surprise in the future. But careers can't be built on something like this. So we ignore it until the next big problem arrives.

What makes these solutions liberal?

The article (as many others) fails to address the single most important question in the palm oil debate.

What alternatives are there if we are to avoid palm oil? How are they more environmentally friendly?

There probably isn't a single alternative since I think thats part of the problem here, it's a become a monoculture. Practically speaking though it can be replaced with various nut or vegetable oils, which of those are most environmentally friendly depend on the location and farming methods.

Algal oil is a potential substitute. There was a laundry detergent manufactured from algal oil instead of palm oil however there was pushback from consumers because the algae were genetically modified.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/sep/29...

Scaling algal oil production is a problem that is currently being worked on.

Palm oil effectively replaced partially hydrogenated oils in various junk foods when we learned how unhealthy trans fats were. Fully hydrogenating these oils will not have exactly the same properties as partial hydrogenation, but for many purposes it will work ok in many of these junk food applications. Fully hydrogenated oils don't have the trans fat issue, but it will require consumer education to make this point clear.

What alternatives are there if we are to avoid palm oil? How are they more environmentally friendly?

With palm oil being used for biofuel, one way to cut back on it is cut back on energy consumption.

Promote passive solar design.

Promote walkable, transit oriented planning.

Develop better public transit.

Tax the absolute hell out of private vehicle ownership.

Etc.

It might be tokenism or spitting into the wind, but I've avoid palm oil as much as possible for going on 8 years. I read ingredients before purchasing and resist the urge to shop unthinkingly.

Another thing is to research corporations who own particular brands such as this free sample of just some of the villains on supermarket shelves:

- ConAgra (which owns Angie's)

- KraftHeinz (one of the worst companies to work for)

- Sabra (supports occupation of Palestine)

- MillerCoors (including Blue Moon)

Buy local from independent shops where and when you can.

The diffuse, Tragedy of the Commons of demand leads to circumstances in other parts of the world, be it cash crops for food or for drugs (and sometimes food is the drug).

>The (not so) sustainable biofuels

I remember reading some time ago about palm oil converted to biodiesel and immediately became suspicious of the final product as anything but a chance to push the sale of palm oil.

soft oils like canola/linseed, and corn are suited best for biodiesel as their final product is at a much lower gel point than coconut or palm. To run a diesel safely at anything but sub-tropic temperatures with a minimum of waxing or smoking, you'd need gallons of stabilizers and modifiers in the mix.

the place I remember hearing this being used was Indonesia, and only at around 50% for a passenger rail line. This makes sense as its partially using petrochemical diesel as a cheap additive for gel and flow stability.

the UK and EU could improve their biodiesel uptake with better recycling practices. most of east europe is awash in high quality sunflower oil for frying and cooking, and could easily see this waste oil converted.

It's refreshing to see an article actually pointing biofuels policy being the dominant driver of palm oil related deforestation. If I remember right another problem is that India was expected to become a big palm oil producer where they are historically one of the biggest palm oil importers. This unfortunately didn't happen, somehow the upfront cost and time to production was something that was somehow difficult in India where Malaysia and Indonesia could do this. Something else I'm curious about is what effects we will see from the recent change in policy in Europe, which is busy increasing the local production of canola/rapeseed crops significantly and I suspect that will have some unintended consequences.

The world does not have to run this way. We can make other choices.

Part of the solution could be:

Walkable "first world" cities.

Better public transit.

Passive solar design.

A less is more ethos in developed countries.

Actively valuing and protecting small businesses rather than crushing them under our boot in our rush to cater to big business.

A lot of brands in Sweden started advertising "no palm oil" a couple years ago. Now it seems they replaced it with shea oil in some cases. Is that any better?

I feel like the food industry is always in a race with ethics to find the cheapest process.

In terms of climate change, palm oil seems to be a really really bad substitute for other oils. I'd support increased tariffs on palm oil, and moneys to subsidize keeping rain forest.

Yeah, I had heard palm oil isn't the healthiest for you but didn't realize that it had so many environmental implications as well...

I've been to Malaysia and seen this. It's interesting -- just row after row after row of palm trees. Otherwise it would all be jungle, but are jungles useful for local Malaysians? They're full of mosquitos and too dense to even really walk through.

They're probably useful in long term and not so obvious ways we won't figure out until it's too late.

Rainforests not jungles. Gotta talk the talk.

The people in Malaysia who I talked to used the word jungle.

I think poster means "saving the Jungle!" just doesn't have same appeal as "saving the Rainforest!"

I would assume there are ways to make palm plantations sustainable. I mean the German word "Nachhaltigkeit" comes from old treaties on forest cultivation, planting and harvesting in a way that keeps the overall forest intact. Seems we all forgot to care about the aspect quite a while ago.

The average Malaysian lives in a city and isn't greatly affected by jungles either way. There are small numbers Malaysians who live off the jungle and others who work in jungle tourism and conservation too. And other Malaysians who work on palm oil plantations, of course.

The jungle's considerably more useful than palm plantations for the animals that live there, obviously.

Do you count orangutans as "local Malaysians"? In any case, the rainforest is certainly useful to all of the indigenous humans whose home and way of life are also being destroyed. You might find the rainforest "too dense to walk through" but unique cultures have inhabited them for millennia.

You are, by the way, more likely to contract a mosquito-bourne disease in a town than a rainforest, where much higher mosquito species diversity, plus much lower human population density, equal lower prevalence of the mosquitoes that carry human pathogens.

Also it's not "otherwise it would be all jungle". It's "otherwise more of it would be jungle, or would more resemble an intact jungle in various ways". Intelligent policy on land use and allocation is nuanced, not either/or.

Yes, the jungles are "useful for local Malaysians" in all kinds of ways. But you can find Malaysians from all backgrounds battling for the preservation of their vanishing patches of forests, against the interests of the big agribusiness and timber extraction elites. The forests are treasurehouses of biodiversity and there are powerful aguments to be made on economic, environmental, ethical and custodianship grounds.

Why is it on me, the consumer, to worry about unethical palm oil sourcing?

Because lawmakers, trading blocks and international societies have failed to do a good enough job about it.

um, because you buy it, you're a typical price-sensitive non-1%er and companies produce it in response to your demand?

how the hell do you not buy palm oil?

This. It's almost impossible to source anything without it.

Buy whole fresh foods instead of prepared food.

Buy less candy and cookies.

all this got me curious and looked it up. here are a few things that often contain palm oil: bread, margarine, some cheese, ice cream, soap & shampoo, chocolate, pre-made pizza etc.

looks to me like you might want to go back to making everything yourself or know every single brand around...

What breads and cheeses contain palm oil? Don't buy them, bread should have salt water yeast flour and cheese definitely should not have oil. Don't buy margarine either, prefer butter, olive oil, or vegetable oil.

There are loads of kinds of chocolate, including very affordable labels, that do not contain palm oil. Oil is an additive chocolate to cut down on the actual chocolate ingredients. Real chocolate shouldn't have it. Chocolate flavored candy has it.

You don't have to make everything from scratch you just have to avoid the worst of the worst processed junk.

Unfortunately it will require you to become very familiar with what you put in your body. Blindly consuming, especially food, in 2020 is a bad idea for the health of yourself and the community. This is a pretty difficult task, but I also think it's insane to trust corporations in this day and age to have your health as a priority when sourcing ingredients.

The only really safe bet is to avoid purchasing pre-made items, and make your own sauces/treats/cakes etc. We cook all our own meals at home, but buy shampoo + cookies + cakes + chocolate bars (as normal people do). We try to stick to brands we _know_ don't have any palm oil, but I'd wager that almost all our produce doesn't have any in it.

Except I just checked and my peanut butter (whole earth) _does_ contain it, even though I thought it didn't... You might have a point.

I have been checking every time for several years now.

If, for instance, the jar that says "peanut butter" on the front does not say "Ingredients: peanuts" on the side, I put it back on the shelf and pick up the next one.

You can't trust brands any more, and it makes shopping an arduous and time-wasting chore. Not to mention the stupid little games manufacturers play with the ingredient list for obfuscation's sake, like adding three distinct kinds of sugar so "sugar" doesn't show up as the first ingredient. Or adding 12 different kinds of filler to a crab cake, so that "crab" shows up as the first ingredient.

If you're looking for an alternative to your known goods on occasion (not at home, store stopped stocking it or even just not necessarily knowing that peanut butter can be made from just peanuts), it's easy to get stuck looking for options.

It's easy to be dismissive of the problem and say "just get X", buy you need to know that exists, but you can make the argument for cookies, chips, sauces, dips, soaps...

Before checking every time, I only read the ingredient list occasionally, usually at home when eating it. I started to notice things, like this progression:

Ingredients: peanuts.

Ingredients: peanuts, peanut oil, salt.

Ingredients: peanuts, hydrogenated vegetable oil (one or more of: peanut oil, palm oil, rapeseed oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil), salt.

The company might run up against a supply problem, where they have to choose between a bad batch of peanuts or nothing at all, and they choose to remain in business by "remediating" that bad batch. But maybe their sales actually go up, so instead of going back to basics, they keep doing the same thing, but with cheaper oil. I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. You can make more money by trying to eat Jif's or Skippy's lunch than by catering to purity snobs.

Repeat similar scenarios for other brands of other products, every year, across the whole grocery store. Products try to stay competitive by masking inferior base ingredients with added fat, salt, and sugar, then go on to game the ingredients list, to obfuscate the fact that they replaced expensive ingredients with cheaper ones, while simultaneously reducing the package weight and upping the unit price. Those oil palm farmers don't need to worry; peak capitalism has their back. Palm oil use will continue to increase, because the marginal cost of production currently makes it the cheapest of all plant-based oils, at least until oil-algae farming technology matures.

It isn't hard. Fresh fruit and vegetables don't even have labels because it isn't needed. Meats, and eggs, spices, flour, sugar, oils, and all the other staples might have a label but I don't need to read the fine print to know what is inside because the answer is always the same: whatever is on big print on front.

When buying processed food it is impossible though. Just learn to cook and you will typically have much healthier meals. It takes more time, but there isn't an other reasonable option to be healthy in first world society.

I don't have any palm oil products either.

I make a point of _not_ buying palm oil, by reading the ingredients list as I'm shopping and sticking to brands I know behave. When reading this thread, I went and checked my cupboard only to find out that my peanut butter [0] contains palm oil. Turns out only _some_ of the peanut butter made by that company has no palm oil [1], and while I would normally buy the 100% peanut, I stuck to the same brand when it wasn't available and ended up with Palm Oil.

[0] https://shop.wholeearthfoods.com/products/whole-earth-origin... [1] https://shop.wholeearthfoods.com/products/whole-earth-100-nu...

but why just outright avoid them? I try to pay the premium for company that source palm oil responsibly, because most alimentary products with palm oil substitutes are not so good for your health or taste weird or aren't as pleasant (i.e. spreads)

How do you know that the company sources their palm oil responsibly? And what does that really mean? I'd rather avoid products which may have been produced by clearcutting Orangutan habitat than take a chance that the "responsibly sourced" labeling on a Palm Oil product actually means what I think it does.

It's on everyone. But our political and economic systems don't encourage the producers to care about the ethics of their products unless the consumers care.

Who else could it be on? You're describing ~all of the population.

If you and enough other people seek out X on the market and it's something that can feasibly be delivered at a price point you can afford, then X will be produced. Fairly basic economics.

For a commodity, something where two units are essentially indistinguishable, it's really the role of governments, and probably more of the responsibility is with the producing government. It's impractical for consumers to vet commodity suppliers.

It is not on you. There is this idea, especially in the US, that government is bad and it should never regulate anything, and that consumers are responsible of everything bad happening in the world. The reality is, it's very easy to hide unethical parts of your business from consumers, so unless the consumer does an extraordinary job, they're going to make unethical decisions, anyway. It really is government's job to regulate industries so that they're not detrimental to the society.

In other words it's on you, but via the mechanisms of cooperation through democracy to enact government actions.

Yes and no. I unfortunately need to speak US-specific because this is where I live; but at least in the US people have almost no degree of freedom when it comes to electoral democracy since there are 2 parties and oftentimes the ballots are as simple as "blue or red" and then what ends up being passed in congress/senate is not close to what people want. It's really irresponsible to push all the responsibility to the people when they have very little way of affecting how their government passes laws.

It's not on you exclusively, but, as a consumer, you have purchasing power. If you don't like the coffee your local shop serves you, you stop going there, right?

As long as everyone cops out, businesses will continue down this path of profit over sustainability. It's a fulfilling prophecy to think that things will improve as long as people decline to take action.

I realized a few years when I started habitually reading ingredients lists that palm oil was showing up in more and more foods, but it wasn't till I correlated it with an upset stomach that I purposefully stopped buying food products with it. I've been trying to cut my sugar intake, so I don't get these anymore, but one major place you might notice a difference is if you use coffee creamer. Most of the cheaper ones have palm oil. The good ones don't, and the differences on the body are noticeable to me at least.

Sometimes pragmatic choices can lead to ethical results.

Palm oil is a convenient scape goat.

Or oil on your palm.

he World Wildlife Fund writes "The (palm oil) industry is linked to major issues such as deforestation, habitat degradation, climate change, animal cruelty, and indigenous rights abuses in the countries where it is produced.

My apologies. There was a posting snafu, and all that came out was an I.

> 92 to 184 teragrams of carbon dioxide

Usually emissions of CO2 are measured in tons... This is a sneaky measurement change. wtf is a teragram? Okay, turns out it's a million tons, or as we used to call it, a megatonne. WHYYY

Because grams, kilograms, megagrams, gigagrams, teragrams, petagrams, exagrams etc.

> environmental health and the well-being of poor and marginalized communities in pursuit of profits

Heh. Isn't that too dramatic. So SEA countries are suppose to sit down and not able to sell anything? How bad is this too bad of a situation? The article failed to highlight this.

To me it feels like someone just doesn't like someone else getting too much money at selling palm oil for some reason. I wonder which other industry that benefits from boycotting palm oil.

It sounds a lot like politics.

They’re against something but provide no suitable alternatives. Even if they provided an acceptable alternative to them, someone else would pipe up and mention a lot of problems with the alternative. On the end we’re supposed to somehow achieve the impossible.

These things are lose-lose.

The only real answer is to lower ave standard of living (in other words a western lifestyle needs to be recalibrated downward) and to lower total population via slowed growth -at least in high growth areas... but none of that is palatable to anyone.

I like the idea of lowering standard of living. Can you give me some examples?

Carbon-positive ways we could lower SoL: no more individual vehicles, no more single family housing, massive increase in taxes on electronics and fuels.

Probably something akin to the ex-Yugoslavia with less repression. Though I suspect some repression would be necessary to achieve that. I don’t say that in a positive way —but I don’t think people would volunteer for such a state.

> The only real answer is to lower ave standard of living

Or we could stop wasting our resources in idiotic ways. How many people spend hours every day commuting to a job that produces no actual value to society? How much of our resources do we spend propping up the health insurance industry instead of just giving everyone healthcare?

Restructuring the economy to provide for human needs instead of profits for the bankers (who ultimately own the companies that own the companies that run the spreadsheet farm that you're commuting to every day) would go a long way towards fixing these problems without having to lower anyone's standard of living.

>The only real answer is to lower ave standard of living (in other words a western lifestyle needs to be recalibrated downward)

This is palm oil we're talking about. The ones whose standard of living that this will reduce are the people not in the West. This is all part of international relations. Just like forest fires in the Amazon were a convenient excuse to attack Brazil politically, but forest fires in Australia are about showing sympathy.

The problem is that different food and environmental causes are fashionable (and funded) at different times in different ways, and analysts make decisions via spreadsheets while being pretty clueless about what is happening on a broader scope. When a direction is choosen, the long term impacts are rarely understood by the advocates.

You see it in the HN comments. Right now, everything here is discussed in terms of carbon outputs. All carbon, all of the time. Analysts with this bent will make an argument that palm oil is good because you get more oil density per acre.

For food, transfat was the boogeyman driving adoption in commercial food production to replace hydrogenated oils. You can't use transfat, because heart disease. Alternatives like butter or lard generate pushback, as the carbon crowd claims that cow/pig operations produce too much carbon/greenhouse gasses.

For enviromentalists who aren't carbon focused, the real horror of palm oil is the irreversible destruction of forests and the eradication of orangutans.

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