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Comment by frafra | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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 ;-)

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