Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet; It Unleashed Catastrophe.
December 1, 2018 1:12 PM Subscribe
It was startlingly efficient, extremely profitable and utterly disastrous. The uniformity of the world he was growing up in was striking, like the endless plains of drilling rigs in an East Texas oil field. It was, in a way, an astounding achievement, the ruthless culmination of mankind’s long effort to extract every last remaining bit of the earth’s seemingly boundless natural wealth. SLNYT
It's worth reading the article if you think the problem is palm oil that's grown for food.
posted by ambrosen at 2:30 PM on December 1, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by ambrosen at 2:30 PM on December 1, 2018 [8 favorites]
Pretty sure the planet will be OK KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat and limonaire.
Don't conflate our viability with the existence of our planet.
posted by Max Power at 3:11 PM on December 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
Don't conflate our viability with the existence of our planet.
posted by Max Power at 3:11 PM on December 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
Thanks ambrosen. I'll RTDA instead of scanning. My bad.
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 3:12 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 3:12 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
I wish people wouldn't go "Oh ho ho, well ACTUALLY, the PLANET ie a bajillion tons of rock and stuff floating through space will be fine" when people as using "save the planet" as a shorthand way to say "Save the living ecosystem that's currently inhabiting the entire globe" ... sure it's sloppy and we should be saying "Save the ecosystem" or "save the plants and animals and humans" but it's like saying "save mankind" and people go "WHAT ABOUT WOMEN THO" -- yes they shoulda said "humankind" but you know what they MEANT and it's muddying the issue by arguing about semantics
posted by The otter lady at 4:08 PM on December 1, 2018 [36 favorites]
posted by The otter lady at 4:08 PM on December 1, 2018 [36 favorites]
ambrosen, part of the problem is food--all that grain and land going to feed cattle rather than feeding people directly or going into biofuel. For example, look at this map: https://www.maproomblog.com/2018/08/bloomberg-looks-at-u-s-land-use/
Would we need to be cutting down forests in Indonesia if we had more space here? From the article: "Quintupling biofuel production would require a huge amount of additional arable land, far more than existed in the United States. Unless Americans planned to eat less, that meant displacing food production to some other country with unused land — and he knew that when forests are cut, or new land is opened for farming, substantial new amounts of carbon can be released into the atmosphere."
posted by whistle pig at 4:18 PM on December 1, 2018
Would we need to be cutting down forests in Indonesia if we had more space here? From the article: "Quintupling biofuel production would require a huge amount of additional arable land, far more than existed in the United States. Unless Americans planned to eat less, that meant displacing food production to some other country with unused land — and he knew that when forests are cut, or new land is opened for farming, substantial new amounts of carbon can be released into the atmosphere."
posted by whistle pig at 4:18 PM on December 1, 2018
I saw this firsthand in peninsular Malaysia. Flying over it in a plane for the first time, I was all "WTF? What's with all the earth moving, are they building ziggurats?"
Much of the country is a vast palm oil farm. The hills get terraced, smaller ones flattened to fill in the valleys, and row after row of mono-culture palm. Cycle of, dunno, maybe 15 or 20 years? And then the trees are unproductive and they are burnt down or left to rot, leaving a stinky ugly empty plain to be replanted.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:06 PM on December 1, 2018
Much of the country is a vast palm oil farm. The hills get terraced, smaller ones flattened to fill in the valleys, and row after row of mono-culture palm. Cycle of, dunno, maybe 15 or 20 years? And then the trees are unproductive and they are burnt down or left to rot, leaving a stinky ugly empty plain to be replanted.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:06 PM on December 1, 2018
Unless Americans planned to eat less…
There's a really ginormous elephant in that room that they conveniently elided. We don't have to eat less, we just have to eat less meat.
Raising livestock for food is just so insanely resource intense. The amount of arable land devoted to the animals we eat is simply bonkers. And you wouldn't necessarily have to go vegetarian; we could easily make up much the needed land by simply not eating meat nearly as often.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 7:13 PM on December 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
There's a really ginormous elephant in that room that they conveniently elided. We don't have to eat less, we just have to eat less meat.
Raising livestock for food is just so insanely resource intense. The amount of arable land devoted to the animals we eat is simply bonkers. And you wouldn't necessarily have to go vegetarian; we could easily make up much the needed land by simply not eating meat nearly as often.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 7:13 PM on December 1, 2018 [5 favorites]
Cycle of, dunno, maybe 15 or 20 years? And then the trees are unproductive and they are burnt down or left to rot, leaving a stinky ugly empty plain to be replanted.
Hah, and what does this say about the west, where they have planted fields of corn, canola and soybean until there is literally no more land left to plant on, and they only grow on a cycle of 1 year.
At least other countries still have forest reserves remaining, and a 20 year cycle of crop growing stores a lot more carbon in the trees...
posted by xdvesper at 7:31 PM on December 1, 2018
Hah, and what does this say about the west, where they have planted fields of corn, canola and soybean until there is literally no more land left to plant on, and they only grow on a cycle of 1 year.
At least other countries still have forest reserves remaining, and a 20 year cycle of crop growing stores a lot more carbon in the trees...
posted by xdvesper at 7:31 PM on December 1, 2018
Worse than the forest clearing in and of itself is that they are burning the forests to save time and money. Even worse than that, they're draining and burning peat bogs. Both greatly increase the carbon release, creating greater impacts sooner than would be seen if they were merely bulldozing forests, selling the wood, burying the rest of the detritus, and then planting commercial trees.
The latter could probably be done relatively carbon neutrally given sufficient planting density and minor mitigation work, but humans by and large prefer the easiest path even if the long term consequences are dire. Evolution ensures that it is so. Only coercion, whether positive or negative, is going to change that reality.
posted by wierdo at 8:38 PM on December 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
The latter could probably be done relatively carbon neutrally given sufficient planting density and minor mitigation work, but humans by and large prefer the easiest path even if the long term consequences are dire. Evolution ensures that it is so. Only coercion, whether positive or negative, is going to change that reality.
posted by wierdo at 8:38 PM on December 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
Palm oil is my NEMESIS
Everything at Trader Joe's has it now
It ruins my skin to a level I didn't think was possible
The only thing that tops it is soybean oil
UGH
posted by Hermione Granger at 10:37 PM on December 1, 2018
Everything at Trader Joe's has it now
It ruins my skin to a level I didn't think was possible
The only thing that tops it is soybean oil
UGH
posted by Hermione Granger at 10:37 PM on December 1, 2018
People do not want to hear to eat less or no meat or to eat sustainably.
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 7:38 AM on December 2, 2018
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 7:38 AM on December 2, 2018
This BBC page has some context about food production & carbon costs.
posted by sneebler at 10:30 AM on December 2, 2018
posted by sneebler at 10:30 AM on December 2, 2018
Has anyone noticed that in the post immediately before this one, the soap uses organic palm oil. It does say it's certified fair trade, whatever that means.
posted by adept256 at 7:36 PM on December 4, 2018
posted by adept256 at 7:36 PM on December 4, 2018
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posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 1:55 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]