
Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet - inostia
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/magazine/palm-oil-borneo-climate-catastrophe.html
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niftich
While the 'unintended consequences' story is powerful, the article undermines
its credibility by suggesting at first that palm oil's use in US biodiesel is
a significant contributor to this clusterfuck, but only halfway through does
it admit that US biodiesel is chiefly made with corn and soy, ostensibly
leaving less of these oils for the US food industry -- forcing imports of
other oils.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
rory096
This is why taxing carbon is better policy than patchwork regulations.

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

~~~
lugg
What?

That doesn't make sense.

Not all countries need to do it. Just most.

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

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

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

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

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

[https://imgur.com/a/sNWFP3k](https://imgur.com/a/sNWFP3k)

~~~
usaar333
Because the US is so high absolutely. Should it get an award just because
natural gas got cheaper than coal?

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

~~~
lugg
You think fracking is clean?

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

Yikes.

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

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

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

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

~~~
chemicalnovae
And where do you think oil coconuts are grown?

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

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

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

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

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

------
scythe
Palm oil is a great example of the Jevons paradox:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
acct1771
Why not?

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

~~~
acct1771
Those first two can be done passively, or on the go with solar power.

------
neverminder
In UK rain forest anti deforestation TV ad "Rang-tan" was banned for being
"too political" \- [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/how-the-world-is-
wakin...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/how-the-world-is-waking-up-to-
palm-oil-in-the-wake-of-banned-iceland-orangutan-advert-a3992311.html)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
macspoofing
Did you give Alaska a chance?

