A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests | Hacker News Reader

A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests

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173 pointswilliamsharris136 comments

People don't cut the rainforest to produce palm oil. They cut it to make money and improve their livelihood in a political environment that places no value on rainforest. If palm oil prices drop tomorrow to zero, those people will become even poorer, the value of the rainforest will remain zero, so they will cut it even further to plant the next best profitable cash crop not yet made obsolete by technology.

This is a common pattern among green initiatives, trying to solve things by creating poverty and scarcity, expecting people far away to happily plow in manure so that they can buy a pair of jeans made from organic cotton at the latest pop-up fashion store.

Survival is the most powerful force driving the human race forward. If you want to save the rain forest, there is a very simple trick to it: make sure the economy in the area is able to create 1000$/month environmentally sustainable jobs. At that labor price, survival farming and destroying the habitat does not pay, the palm oil farms will not find labor and will close down.

Since in economic reality that's not at all a simple trick, we can suplement it with political measures, things that give value to the rainforest or strongly penalize its destruction: international agreements, subsidies and tariffs, sustainable tourism etc.

But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival.

> But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival.

A couple of years ago I attended a talk on lemur conservation, and this was one of the key points they brought up. Habitat loss from slash-and-burn agriculture is a huge problem for lemur populations, but from a conservation point it's not effective to visit Madagascar and tell people not to do it. To the Malagasy you're just a rich tourist telling them off for living without offering any help.

So instead they focus on education. Two of the initiatives they mentioned were teaching people more effective methods of cultivating food (such as setting up fisheries), and providing them with plans for more efficient wood-burning stoves.

Good idea in general, but the details matter. Teaching people how to make efficient wood burning stoves could fall prey to the Jevons Paradox.

Ideally you would enable some other type of stove. They may lack the infrastructure for natural gas or propane, of course. But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance.

> But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance.

In a perfect world, yes.

But this is the problem with conservation work in poor countries. 1.7% of US energy generation comes from solar [1], so going to Madagascar and saying "hey, you should be using solar instead of chopping down trees" rings a little hollow.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I can also understand why a developing country might not take kindly to environmental regulations. Developed countries destroyed the environment for decades, but now want to restrict others from doing the same. It might feel like they crossed a bridge, then burned it behind them.

They get the benefit of all the hard work developed countries have done before them. Many countries have skipped right past land lines for instance and gone straight to cellular.

Should they also be forced to go through all the innovations and advances developed countries have in order to utilize them?

It seems to me it's perfectly OK to tell smaller countries times have changed get with the program, but we have to do it in a compassionate and understanding fashion as the OP mentioned.

Yes and no. People said the same thing about wireless phones 20 years ago.

Solar in a country with poor infrastructure means distributed generation becomes possible. Most places in the US have robust power grids, but even then conservation and point generation is the cheapest way to add marginal capacity!

That should be a guiding star of policy. Electricity is an almost magical force that opens doors.

IMO people are people. I’m fortunate to live in the US and be able to have the education and opportunity to use my abilities in a productive way. My grandfather was probably smarter than me in IQ terms, but drove a garbage truck and shoveled coal to support his family. (He taught himself calculus on that truck to help my uncle study.)

There are millions of people like my grandpa. If we figure out how to elevate them to their potential, we all benefit.

That statistic is for solar electric generation. A better alternative would be solar water heating, which is cheaper to install and more efficient.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating

Don’t forget all the rich-world subsidies for solar that bid up prices and make them less economical for those that can’t afford to subsidize.

how would subsidies on solar energy end up raising its price?

If the US gives 50% rebates on panels for US installation, the manufacturers of the limited good (panels) will charge more money because they can.

If you’re Madagascar, you’re SOL.

You might argue that subsidies create an industry of overproduction that’ll eventually crash the market, but that’s definitely not the initial state.

Just as if you’re a gas station and the government gives you a subsidy for every litre you sell, you’ll use some of that subsidy to pay more and sell for less in your local market and still have higher margins than your competitor.

For cooking, parabolic mirrors might work quite well. A bit bulky and dependent on weather, but very powerful, low maintenance and cheap. You could still use the efficient wood stove in the rainy season.As long as you don't burn it faster than it regrows wood is a fantastic CO2-neutral fuel that they already have access to.

These guys have ovens and roasters: https://lytefire.com/en

Rocket stoves can use pretty much any dry woody detritus, though not whole logs. They aren't useful for baking, but much nicer for boiling and pan frying.

Exactly. We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example.

FTA:

> "The real problem is cost, because natural palm oil is extremely cheap...”

These kinds of statements are infuriating to me. It’s only cheap because we don’t pay for the negative externalities. If there were a monetary value associated with the forest, destroying it for a monocrop wouldn’t be so cheap. Markets are extremely useful things. We should use them.

> We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example.

From this HN thread of two months ago:

Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert usi...

check out the influential book - The Forest and The Sea by Marston Bates - that I mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820550

There are programs that approach deforestation from that perspective. The one that comes to my mind is REDD+

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_emissions_from_defore...

These are not uncontroversial, but I think the idea makes sense.

This point was also made in David Attenborough’s recent climate documentary: the point is not about palm oil but about rainforest protection. If there is no protection, and if people can’t make a living another way, the forest will be cut for whatever makes money. The most tragic example i’ve seen is rainforest turned into those wood chips they put around potted plants. Is that a high value commodity? No. But it makes >0 money and if the value given to the wild forest is zero, then it will happen.

The solution should be fairly simple. Give wild forest a >0 value by paying people for keeping it wild.

I mean of course it's not a new idea and apparently it's very difficult in practice but it seems like the obvious response to that logic.

That would mean paying millions of "backwards" tribal communities millions and possibly billions of dollars which we can't afford (/s) - Governments everywhere

Unfortunately, unless they're a voting group the government can maintain control over, nothing will be done. On the contrary, we have government ministers and bureaucrats around the world likely engaging and actively playing a role in the deforestation of rainforests.

Unfortunately, the situation for many people living "there" (in Malaysia and Indonesia, primarily) is that their land is taken from them by palm oil conglomerates, and then they are forced into low-wage labor on the plantations. They went from self-sufficent to conditions that look like forced labor. The AP presented extensive reporting on this 3 months ago: https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-slavery-asia-malaysia-o...

Isn’t loss of rainforest in Indonesia now due to large agrobusinesses cutting it down to build enormous plantations of palm oil trees? Deforestation in Madagascar is largely driven by dirt-poor subsistence farmers cutting down neighboring patches of rainforest in order to plant rice (and also Chinese firms logging precious woods for the furniture industry), but I thought Southeast Asia was a different case.

The massive palm oil plantations of Malaysia and Borneo are not being planted by poor locals, but by wealthy landowners.

But the point is, poor locals are productively employed earning more than they would doing something else.

(additionally, small farmers make up 40% of Indonesia's palm oil production)

https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...

That's one way to look at the problem ( we need to get people to stop destroying rainforest by giving them their livehood), another way is that once there is no value in destroying the rainforest, people will stop doing so.

In this regard, coming up with a palm oil substitute is very valuable, because it takes away a major reason to destroy the rainforest.

And now, since they can no longer drill the rainforest for a ( relatively easy) living, they have to drill their brain, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Big South East Asia countries are generally cursed with natural resources[0], they have oil, timber and whatnot, and yet their GDPs dwarfed compared to Singapore and lag behind in virtually all the indexes measuring good living like corruption index, a tiny SEA country with absolutely zero natural resources.

Stop people from destroying the rainforest comes first before giving them their livehood, not after.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

That's pretty much what has happened with the coal industry though. Coal is only used as a fuel because it is cheap, not because we need it [0]. And it's cheap because of goverment subsidies and political power, to continue providing coal miners in Wyoming earning $20/hour a job.

[0] ...as a fuel. Yes there are other industrial uses of coal, but it is mostly used as a fuel.

Depends on the type of coal.

I’m sure the coal we’re burning for heat isn’t the kind good for steelmaking which has a much higher value/ton.

The resource curse also exists in software. I've seen so many comments that try to justify excessive RAM usage with "RAM is cheap". It's only "cheap" if you don't waste it. Otherwise your consumption will increase to match whatever is available even if the additional value the additional consumption provides is close to zero.

Clearly you did not read the OP's comment very well

Even if you make the rainforest value 0, the land is very rich and fertile, so if the native plants have a value of 0, they will be removed and replanted with cash crops of some kind unless you resolve the economic reality

So you're saying that Malaysia and Indonesia should become tax havens?

The massive corruption and whatnot in these places is precisely what allowed Singapore to thrive (apart from being lucky enough to be located at a strait). Singapore essentially eats away at their GDP to sustain itself. Almost all of the tech scene in Singapore is largely talented folks from Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, etc. moving away because SG has a lower tax rate and a very lighthanded bureaucracy.

If corruption in these places was to vanish and doing business made easy (via free zones for instance), Singapore would return to stagnation.

Just wanted to plug https://www.coolearth.org/, which takes this approach

I've been donating to this organization for several years. For the amount of money they raise, they seem different from other conservation-focused charities in working with people on the ground to find means of income that drive conservation economically. It's a thoughtful model that isn't just helicoptering money in (like direct giving), but actually getting involved with communities and raising their standard of living.

If it's individuals doing the cutting, this would be a correct diagnosis. My understanding is that it's rather large corporations in weak legal regimes that are the main driver of this. Incentives for them may be different.

Theoretically yes, most of the time has nothing to do with locals. Local reservations were kicked away after fighting with government forces and interests affiliated with the respective government. If they had to give a larger payoff to the government party to save their land they would need a bit more than 1k. Locals can simply not create an economy of scale to support sustainably and consistently the palm oil conglomerates, we are talking deforestation the size of countries.

An ecologist Willie Smit and his foundation worked on something called the village hub, which is very cool! It started with harvesting juice from sugar palm trees and then goes through a whole plethora process that makes use of it in wide varieties of ways. [1]

1. https://youtu.be/xtWp84htc18

Judging from comments from the rest of the thread, it looked like big palm oil plantation owners are doing this, not small time locals.

E. F. Schumacher's work and writings such as his highly influential book, Small is Beautiful, about Appropriate Technology, are relevant here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful

Mentions of him on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

One by me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635882

He was influenced by Gandhi, among other people. Gandhi had done a lot of work on appropriate technology, like on charkhas (hand-operated spinning wheels), khadi (indigenous handloom cotton fabrics), in India, with a view to self-sufficiency of the people, apart from (but also related to) his more well known work on the non-violent feeedom movement which resulted in India's independence from Britain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

Such work started decades ago. If people research what has been done in their fields in the past, they can sometimes avoid rediscovering or reinventing a lot of wheels.

I agree with your comment, and it highlights for me a challenge I have seen in cleantech VC. For VCs coming from tech, there is often an implicit assumption that new product innovation is the solution. When dealing with climate change, however, new product innovation is often secondary to policy solutions.

If palm oil farming becomes less profitable, then local people will transition, and some of them will transition to ecotourism or other forms of economic activity that are less damaging. I'm not sure that you need to sound so negative about developing artificial palm oil.

Jane Goodall has made the provision of supports and options for local people one of the core parts of her conservation efforts for chimpanzees and other wildlife.

I agree with you. We must focus on the underlying problems. I still think this helps underline our biggest problem. Our planet just can't support this many humans. We are selfish destructive creatures and demand will only go down with less of us. It is true with pollution, our oceans, our air, etc.

This is just not true. The massive demand is artificially produced because of the logic of our economy. People don't need a whole new wardrobe and new smartphone each year but there are few long-lasting options on the market. People shouldn't have to own two cars per household so everyone can get to school and work on time but cities are designed to encourage the sale of cars. This is the underlying problem. We could make the world a lot less wasteful and easily support all the human life in a sustainable way. It just requires a drastic political and cultural shift. But we are told that humans in their nature are going to be this way -- even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary -- so that you never demand that things change. So please stop reinforcing this idea.

Palm oil is a nightmare in our food chain. It is horrible for the environment and horrible for the body (an aspect totally ignored in this article). And yet it has become near ubiquitous. Living in a big European city I can for instance buy 30+ types of margarine at my regular supermarket. But every single one is full of palm oil. Even supposedly healthy ones based on olive oil (looking at you Bertoli) are to a large degree palm. Even the bio/organic shop has nothing. It's nearly as bad for chocolate, spreads, cakes, veggie or non veggie charcuterie, ... Anything that's not a standardised/pure product is just palm.

2 years ago it was perfectly possible to avoid palm. Today I basically don't see any chance. Even organic and supposedly ethical products are full of palm, just under the pretense of some certification that sums up to 'the forest was killed 10 years ago so we are now able to call ourselves sustainable while the problem is shifted somewhere else'.

Our food systems seem fundamentally broken. Unless I buy basics at the local market and cook everything from scratch I basically have to eat palm, glutamate, bamboo fibre, gelatine and whatnot other waste every day.

Palm oil is mostly used as a replacement for butter. It is cheaper, no less or more healthier, and probably more environmentally friendly (because butter requires a lot of cows, that produce greenhouse gases, and they also need to be fed on crops, which fields are often created by destroying forests, etc.).

Palm oil is not the devil. We are just using a lot of fat (and sugar) almost everywhere. Even extra virgin olive oil is bad if you use too much: it is liquid fat, and it has more of it compared to butter (because butter has water in it :-D)! Using it for your pastries would not make you healthier.

Just use the right oil/fat in the right quantity.

I totally disagree with your climate change rhetoric here. Even if butter generated a greater effect on climate doesn't mean that swapping rainforest for monoculture plantations is more environmentally friendly!

I miss the "save the rainforest" focus on environmentalism in the 90s. I think it was more emotionally compelling for social action.

> I miss the "save the rainforest" focus on environmentalism in the 90s.

Yes, I agree with you very strongly, and I would love to know more about how many others are out there, especially professionals in the conservation field, that share this concern. The modern obsession with long-term planet-level climate change threatens, unless we qualify it, to be a terrible thing for short-term habitat conservation. And short-term habitat conservation is everything: extinction is for ever. Human suffering is very sad, and we will do our best to alleviate it, but nevertheless we as a species absolutely must not cause extinction of other species on Earth. That is for eternity and transcends human concerns. Wild animal species have extremely specific habitat/vegetation requirements. I think that a generation is growing up that does not understand this: they think that planetary atmospheric concerns are the be-all-and-end-all of conservation concerns, they think that all trees are the same and all birds smaller than a pigeon are the same; they think that reforestation is a solution regardless of species composition of the replacement trees. They seem to be prepared for their great-grandchildren to live in a future where we have averted large-scale economic hardship and suffering but sadly lost the Earth's remaining rainforests during the 21st century. That is not an acceptable future. But currently, the world's governments and super-governmental organizations are, when it comes to environmental issues, entirely focused on climate change. They are not saving the rainforests.

Yay, I'm not the only person who thinks this way.

What's troubling, to me, is that "saving the rainforest" or nature conservancy in general is much more appealing to political conservatives than climate change. In theory, it is much easier to get large companies and nation states to take actions to protect lands than to reduce consumption.

But that's where the philosophy of environmentalism can diverge. Are humans capable of being part of nature? Or are we a cancer on the system? An enormous number of people are very misanthropic these days, on principle.

It's frustrating, also, because consistently-- when people get richer, they care more about preserving nature.

This suggests a natural harmony between economic growth and environtal protection. That idea is very offensive to some; but the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of optimism.

I think that you need to explain your idea there a bit more carefully otherwise yes, it does sound questionable. I am an open-minded person and certainly not someone who objects simply because something appears to violate some sort of left-wing dogma.

But, for example, in the southern Amazonian areas of northern Brazil, deforestation is carried out by logging companies and ranch owners, and the ranch and logging company owners mostly come from richer areas of southern Brazil. So local people are poor, and the people from areas with higher GDP are the ones doing the deforesting. At the very least you need to explain why what you said isn't contradicted by obvious examples like that.

The point is you are cutting down the rainforest anyway. Most dairy is produced on factory farms that feed their cattle soy and corn and other monocultures.

Soybeans and corn don't replace rainforest. Palm oil does. No?

Deforestation of the rainforest is also driven by soy cultures and grazing. This is why my comment was not a "I just care about emission" thing as you were assuming.

AFAICT, palm oil was a replacement for trans-fat-containing partially hydrogenated oils, which were causing an unfortunate amount of dying in consumers of the cheap and highly processed foods that contained lots of it.

It could be a replacement, depending on from what you need to prepare. It is usually a good candidate in many recipes where you need a mostly-solid fat. Both palm oil and butter have a high percentage of saturated fatty acids so butter can just be replaced most of the time. Extra virgin olive oil is not a good replacement in those cases for example, even if it is perceived as "more healthy" generally, but it can be the wrong choice if you are frying (and you would lose most of its taste, so it is an expensive waste). That is why I really do not understand "organic / full corn / honey-instead-of-sugar / olive-oil-instead of butter" pastries. It is still a lot of sugar and fat, so you should not probably eat a lot of that. Just eat it a bit less, use the right ingredients and enjoy ;-)

> horrible for the body

That's a bit of an exaggeration. It's quite high in saturated fatty acids, but not anywhere near as much as, say, coconut oil.

> buy 30+ types of margarine

Why buy margarine in the first place? Why not actual butter? Or fats like peanut oil, coconut oil, olive oil, .. ?

> glutamate, bamboo fibre, gelatine

What's wrong with any of those? What you put in your body is your choice, but this just sounds like FUD to me.

Most of the people are ignorant about the things and fat they put inside their body (that includes me). Please check this video on Vegetable Oils: The Unknown Story by the author of the book "The Big Fat Surprise" [1][2].

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY

[2]https://www.amazon.com/Big-Fat-Surprise-Butter-Healthy/dp/14...

Palm oils advantage is it doesn't separate. It replaced partially hydrogenated oils as the way to make peanut butter that doesn't separate for example, but doesn't kill you like partially hydrogenated oils do, as far as I know.

Why buy margarine in the first place?

Margarine seems to be more prominent outside of the U.S. There's usually only a few brands of margarine on American grocery shelves but in Canada there's a whole wall of margarine next to a small shelf of butter. It seems very strange to my American eyes.

Perhaps they are vegan, since the rest of their comment seems to lean in that direction (and it doesn't sound like they enjoy fake foods otherwise).

I disagree about the health aspect. It's very unclear at the moment what the right proportion of saturated/unsaturated/polyunsaturated fats is and the nutrition science on this subject is horrible (partly because the palm oil, soy oil, etc. producers are keenly interested in getting their products billed as healthy). In the US most fast food is made with poly-unsaturated oils (e.g. canola/corn/soy oil) and those foods seem quite unhealthy.

The evidence is pointing very strongly towards saturated fats being bad and towards an imbalance of unsaturated fatty acids towards omega-6 in the common western diet.

These are not novel discoveries, this is mountains of research done over the last couple of decades. Cut down on saturated fats and tilt your balance of unsaturated fat more towards omega-3.

The reason why fast food is unhealthy is not because of the specific oils used (and all of the ones you mentioned are much better than the trans fat nightmares we used to deep fry in). It's unhealthy because it's super heavy in calories, and because they're almost entirely carbs and fats and low-quality protein, and almost completely bereft of vitamins and minerals and fiber. The fat+salt+carbs combo keeps you from being satiated until you're stuffed full.

Focusing solely on the fats used during cooking is myopic. You have to look at the whole picture.

I've looked at the evidence and don't think it is as solid as you do. It also is hard to reconcile the recent trend away from saturated fats with diets that we know are healthier than modern diets, e.g. French cooking that uses lots of butter, a saturated fat. Or Mediterranean cooking that uses lots of olive oil, which is one of the more saturated cooking oils (it also is fairly high in unsaturated fat). I think there is more going on here than the nutrition studies indicate.

I certainly agree about trans-fats. I would never suggest they're healthy. I don't think satiety is the full story about why fast food is unhealthy, nor just the lack of nutrients. It seems to be actively bad. And I'm obviously not focusing on only the fats used during cooking, but I was responding to a comment about palm oil, not about nutrition in general.

Edit: I'm not convinced saturated fats are healthier, either, but I think the science here is very sketchy and generally of low quality.

The diet is only a small part of a given lifestyle, so we can't just boil down the French or mediterranean lifestyles to simply a (stereotypical) diet, rather than looking at all the factors.

It matters how much of that stereotypical food you eat, and the totality of the ingredients.

Plus how sedentary people are, how many snacks they eat outside of meals, hobbies, work, and a whole host of other factors.

The general scientific consensus is pretty clear that saturated fats are unhealthy, trans fats are the worst, and dietary cholesterol seems to not impact serum cholesterol. Science marches on,

I've noticed that I tend to get minor acne-like breakouts on my face from a few things (like pre-packaged chocolate chip cookie dough, as well as several other products) - enough where I looked through the ingredients to try to isolate the cause. Palm oil is my top suspect, but I haven't found anyone else talking about these symptoms with Palm oil. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

Aren't some kinds of palm oil actually good for health?

Palm oil is not unhealthy. Th reason it's bad is because the cheapest way to produce it is to destroy rainforest to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. UK consumers managed through campaigning to force the industry to source 50% of palm oil from non-tropical origins. When the worlwide demand for tropical palm oil drop enough, tropical deforestation will drop.

the health angle comes from the proportions of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated fats presented in the mix, but so does the mechanical angle that makes one mix more useful than another in recipes, i.e. spreads and biscuits; the saturated fats that are responsible for soft spreads and buttery biscuits are also the one that are bad for health.

on the other hand palm oil is just a collection of acids, primarily the saturated palmitic acid, but while the naming stuck because it was firstly isolated there, most oil and fats contains a similar set of the same fatty acids in different proportions; pure butter contains like 15% of naturally occurring palmitic acid, and olive oil contains likewise 5-10% of the stuff.

so well you can take any kind of oil, dilute or reinforce it with saturated / monounsaturated fats, and change it's healthiness in proportion of the rest of the recipe, but in doing so you also change their mechanical properties.

> the saturated fats ... are bad for health.

Citation needed. Isn't this a decades-old myth?

It’s recently in dispute, but calling it a “myth” seems strong as it was the medically agreed upon stance for decades.

I would be interested in hearing the dissent here. To call it a myth would imply that it is intrinsically wrong, but is that proven fact or just newly popular thinking?

The medical establishment still maintains that saturated fats are less healthy than unsaturated fats as standard advice.

there's an abyss between "saturated fat are evil" and "eating a stick of butter every day is great for your health" but apparently the forum is looking for a science based dichotomy, which cannot exist because nutrition is all about daily intake - hence why my original post topic was about proportions and only tangentially related to saturated fat health, and why I carefully avoided to answer to the clear bait: notice how the same poster is claiming two post above that palm oil is good for health, but he doesn't provide any citation, instead pretending that everyone else does the homework for him.

The largest buyer of palm oil is India [1], and the largest use case for palm oil is as cooking oil. If we want to pursue a replacement for palm oil, we need to solve for that specific use case on a technical level.

Cooking oil (simplifying greatly) is just a heat transfer medium from the stove to all surfaces of the food being fried. Like a catalyst, ideally it should not be consumed in the process.

If we can develop a benign heat transfer medium that is infinitely recyclable in cooking, that should be a real replacement for palm oil.

[1] https://scroll.in/article/967186/as-worlds-largest-importer-...

Somewhat tengential, but one of the driving forces behind India's cooking style (simmering stuff for a long time over a relatively low heat) is due to their lack of combustible fuel. A lot of cooking was (is?) done using cow dung for fuel. This results in a slow, long burn but doesn't reach very high temperatures.

In frying, the oil is purposefully consumed. In "heat transfer" cases, water-frying can be done. I do it all the time. Keeps calories low though it's less tasty and satisfying. Also easier to clean!

The problem with water-frying (boiling?) is you can't get to the critical temperature (140C+) for Maillard reactions needed to brown the batter.

I am by no means an expert in food science, but it's something I've wondered for a long time. It'll be great if we never have to throw away used cooking oil (when it isn't consumed of course, like when making fried chickens).

I don’t know what the solution is or whether the article’s alternative is viable. But please do try and avoid buying products palm oil. It’s absolutely devastating and we will not get the land or the millions of species that we’re losing back.

I once flew into a tiny airport in Borneo, from above it looked like a neat lush jungle, but as we descended the horror of millions upon millions of neatly lined up palm trees stretching for hundreds of miles became clear. The tiny scrap of jungle left was condensed around the river and all the large fauna had gathered there to escape. It’s tragic and the scale is unprecedented.

I don’t know if not buying palm oil will stop them, but at least it sends a message that we need alternatives and raises awareness about one of the most visceral impacts we humans have on the earth.

Encouraging the use of products that don't contain any oil is indeed good for the rainforest.

But be careful, the way you phrased it could encourage people to use products that use another vegetable oil, which requires even more hectares to produce (palm oil yield is 5 times higher than the next highest oil yield), and could lead to even more deforestation.

At least for Europe (and I assume the US), crops for canola/safflower/olive/corn/etc. oil are grown locally and not on deforested rainforest land.

> please do try and avoid buying products palm oil.

If you want to make that lifestyle choice, then you do your thing, but be aware that this pretty much means never eating out, either. Loads of fast food establishment and restaurants today are using palm oil because it is such a cheap solution. You see those huge bulk containers of palm oil at the local hypermarket for a reason, those aren’t for household use.

I think that's a sacrifice worth making; Avoid fast food in general and any other similar restaurants that think little enough of their customers to just use the cheapest possible ingredients. Choose quality over quantity, please.

> Avoid fast food in general

OK, but be aware that that means not just avoiding mega-corporate chain restaurants. It could mean having to give up supporting the local ethnic-food joint run by a humble immigrant family who are just trying to make a decent life and put their children through school, and who may be using quality ingredients in terms of veg, but who are still using palm oil because nowadays everyone is.

Honestly, I can't take responsibility for how other people choose to run their business and which corners they choose to cut. To be more blunt, it is not my responsibility to prop up a business model that I disapprove of.

I prefer to eat at restaurants where I know they will not compromise on quality, so I accept that I have to pay extra for that, hence I eat out less often than I otherwise would have. On the flip side, every time I do eat out, I get amazing food.

On the occasions where I do eat fast food, my preferred places also fit the quality criteria outlined above. If a place doesn't do things in a way that agrees with me, I refuse to support them.

> I prefer to eat at restaurants where I know they will not compromise on quality

The problem is that a customer couldn’t really tell that, short of a tour of the kitchen. There are plenty of restaurants where you will be convinced that they do not compromise on quality because the veg, the bread, etc. is superb, but at the same time they are using palm oil because (again) lots of restaurants today are.

While you are busy boycotting palm oil, I would suggest you also stop flying if you are concerned about species extinction (unless your flight to Borneo was absolutely essential). Sorry if this sounds sarcastic. I don't mean it that way. Just couldn't help but notice the irony in your post.

I'm glad you wrote this - flying at scale is terrible for the environment.

However it doesn't mean eating palm oil is ok. Whataboutism is even worse for the environment, there is always something you can do better and life has many facets. The danger of your comment is that people use this to justify not doing anything while continuing to fly and act irresponsibly, and pretend that they have some kind of moral high ground.

Even a small change like one individual not eating palm oil can be the first step towards a sustainable planet.

We are bothered by deforestation and diminishing biodiversity yet we fail to put monetary value on rainforests. Let's make Brazil one of the richest countries in the world for what they have and they will make sure not a single tree is ever cut down.

Ecuador was asking for $3.6B so they could afford not to dig out their oil and save one of the richest ecosystems in the World. The World pledged just $200M. It's a sad lesson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasun%C3%AD-ITT_Initiative

You cannot just use alchemy to create matter. Here they use sugar to synthesize palm oil. Then where does the sugar come from? How would it be sustainable to have massive sugarcane plantations instead of massive palm tree plantations?

The palm oil land is being cleared from rainforest and has a limited growing range. Sugarcane, not so much.

>The palm oil land is being cleared from rainforest and has a limited growing range.

I don't know where people got the idea that oil palms are limited to a tropical rainforest climate, but it's not true. Palms are dry-weather crops; that's why they're all over California. Historically, the largest oil palm producer was Nigeria; only a small fraction is a rainforest climate and those areas are urbanized anyway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#/media/File:Koppen-Gei...

It simply happens that Indonesia and Malaysia hold a significant fraction of the world's rainforests and are developing high-productivity food crops in response to rapid population growth on the shores of the Indian Ocean and of course a popular will that demands economic growth.

There are thousands of different palm species, not all of which produce the oil palm fruit, which is the starting point for palm oil. The main palm tree species that produces oil palm fruit is Elaeis Guineensis. This species can only grow within 5-10 degrees of the equator.

There are many palm species in California, but they do not produce oil palm fruit.

Perhaps it would be efficient to to GMO palm tree that grows in wider range. Or make a yeast that can produce oil from garbage, that would be pretty useful.

So where the sugarcane for oil's land comes from? Current land for sugarcane is to produce sugar.

A substantial part of the global sugarcane crop is used to make ethanol for fuel. The world's biggest producer, Brazil, uses the majority of its crop for ethanol. (65% as of 2019, the most recent number I could find [0]).

Wikipedia's "Sugarcane" article quotes a 2005 source to claim "solar energy-to-ethanol conversion efficiency is 0.13%". It might be slightly better now, but it's not going to match the 20% or more of a modern photovoltaic system, which could be used to power electric vehicles instead (an ideal use of solar energy, because electric vehicles need batteries anyway so there's no base load problem).

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/cofco-sugar-ethanol/cofco-ex...

Why is palm oil in everything these days? What did we do 10/20/30 years ago before it was ubiquitous? Has the need to bulk up products with palm oil arisen because of population growth, needing to stretch out yields more?

The yield per hectare of palm oil is 5 times higher than the next most productive edible oil crop (rapeseed).

Note that there is nothing wrong with palm oil itself, it's just that the cheapest way to produce edible oil on Earth, is to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. Replace palm oil with another vegetable oil, and the effect on deforestation will be even worse, as we would need even more land to grow the replacement. Even Greenpeace is not calling for a boycott or palm oil.

Presumably 1 ha of tropical forrest > 1 ha of temperate-climate forrest, that is if the replacing crop would be a temperate-climate one.

>What did we do 10/20/30 years ago before it was ubiquitous?

We used partially hydrogenated vegetable oils: aka trans fat. It's a texture/spreadability thing for junk food and baking. Use of trans fats accelerated after the 1980's declared saturated fats harmful and they took its place. It didn't work out so well and now palm oil is phased in to replace it.

Population growth is probably somewhat of a factor. Oil palms produce so much oil that they are one of the most productive food crops as well as leading the pack in oil production -- competing with rice or potatoes in calories per acre. As another poster noted, the largest consumer is India where it's used for cooking.

Palm oil plantations are common because of the massive yield of the oil palm in the tropics. The only thing that comes near it is sugarcane. So it seems unlikely that you will economically put the palm plantations out of business with the process described.

Those issues were discussed at length in the article. Not that it contradicts anything you say though.

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I would love to buy food without palm oil, but right now it just seems impossible. A workable alternative is desperately needed. Regulators have very little incentive to tax palm oil (not the importers’ problem, exporters happily take money and don’t care about the environment). Hopefully a replacement could make taxing the original work.

At least here it's certainly very possible to avoid palm oil. Read the list of ingredients and don't buy anything with palm oil as a listed ingredient. Always read the ingredients and the nutritional information.

Yes, that means going without pre-baked pastries, frozen dinners and similar products. I think that sacrifice is worth it.

I thought palm oil was already one of the most efficient oils in terms of land and water usage? And can be grown in sustainable areas.

Surely the issue isn't the oil itself, but that poor farmers are seeing the rainforest as free farm land and will cut it down to make a profit.

If you replace one oil with another, won't poor farmers still do the same?

Most of palm oil plantations here in Indonesia are owned by large corporations. The "poor farmers" who till their own land usually plant rice, fruits, veggies, coffee, cacao or spices instead, and their farmland is actually close to their villages instead of deep within the cut-down rainforest.

> Added to that is the aversion of consumers in many markets to eating anything that might contain an ingredient derived from genetically modified microbes.

Which is exactly why those of us who care deeply about natural habitat conservation from a scientific point of view wish that the public were more influenced by scientifically-minded conservationists and less influenced by organizations like Greenpeace, who oppose GM on a basis that can only be called flimsy hippy ideology.

So, they'll ferment "food waste"? Sure!

If this catches up, I can see them mostly fermenting grains or sugar because collecting and fermenting food waste is more expensive.

So, instead of cutting down forests for planting palm trees, you cut it down for planting corn.

> A palm oil alternative

You mean... any other vegetable oil, like it used to be?

An important part of palm oil is burnt in western cars to provide a "green alternative" to oil. How ironic? Plantations have grown as a consequence...

Also palm oil feeds many families in SE Asia. Boycott is not a solution.

> Also palm oil feeds many families in SE Asia. Boycott is not a solution.

Does it really? Palm trees are not exactly grown by small scale artisan farmers.

No, but many workers get paid meager (but slightly livable for their area) wages we would likely see as/refer to as modern "slave labor"

Is it a pretty thing? Not even slightly. However, this lets them/their family survive. Take it away, native workers will die/turn to even shittier methods of survival.

According to [1], small farmers represent 40% of Indonesia's palm oil industry.

[1] - https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...

I think the EU was set to ban the use of palm oil for use in biofuels this year. Also, biofuel is/was "only" 50% of the EU's total palm oil consumption. And for other coutries, it's a lot less.

Something I think many miss in the comments here is that even if you completely wiped out natural palm oil usage today that rainforest is still going to get cut down tomorrow.

It will simply just be a different crop, hey they might even raise cattle or buffalo or grow canola instead just to spite the West.

It's painful to watch people think that palm oil is the environmental problem when it's merely the symptom of far deeper issues that are much harder to solve.

Lecturing some family living in poverty to not cut down trees on their land is a bit rich if you look at the history of deforestation in the states and Europe in the last century, to that farmer you're trying to put out of business all he sees is hypocrisy and gatekeeping, not moral duty.

It's a political problem, which needs a political answer.

Some things should be heritage sites for everyone on the planet. How such a status is achieved and maintained, that's the political part.

Excuse me, what would save rainforests is to stop this expansion of soy and cows by Bolsonaro in Brazil, and so on.

People throughout those latitudes are burning down rainforests for bullshit reasons!

The amazon rainforest is not the only forest on earth. Watch the latest David Attenborough documentary if you'd like a bit more understanding of how forests are destroyed and replaced with oil palm trees, in a way it is worse than the amazon because this is justified by profit motives whereas the amazon was a poor leadership decision.

It is however the most important remaining area of tropical forest on Earth, because of its size and the fact that large pristine areas still exist. That's not to say that conservation issues in the Congo basin, tropical SE Asia, Borneo, Papua New Guinea etc are not as important. But I think you should be cautious about making a statement like that about Amazonia.

Money is no bullshit. It must stop make economic sense.

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