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.
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.
Carbon taxing is, in some suitably narrow economic point of view, optimal, but it seems it's politically almost impossible to get it passed.
The other popular large-scale technology-neutral suggestion, cap-and-trade, suffers from much of the same problems. E.g. the EU ETS is mostly a bureaucratic boondoggle that achieves nothing (the price is so low it doesn't have much, if any, effect).
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.
Taxing is half the story. The other half is returning this tax revenue back to the economy by offsetting other taxes. Where it breaks down is when progressives push to spend this tax revenue on their pet projects.
If we tax “carbon,” are you going to lower my income taxes? I’ll support a carbon tax when you support eliminating capital gains and income taxes. Unless cutting taxes and spending is a part of this carbon tax plan, I will never support it. I already give over 50% of my money to governments, I’m not about to support even more.
I thought bioengineered algae oil (e.g. http://algawise.com/) was supposed to help us save the planet, seeing as it's both healthier and more sustainable than palm oil.
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.
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?
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.
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?
The headline doesn't really fit the article. Here's the bit that explains it: "Imports of biodiesel to the United States surged from near zero to more than 100 million gallons a month. As fuel markets snatched up every ounce of domestic soy oil to meet the American fuel mandate, the food industry also replaced the soy it had used with something cheaper and just as good: palm oil, largely from Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the sources of nearly 90 percent of the global supply."
Biodiesel was supposed to be good. It can be made out of a variety of vegetable and animal oils. I don't think they talked about palm oil in particular.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"The ultimate irony is that what created the U.S. energy revolution—nimble, private-sector companies using new technologies to extract previously untapped crude—keeps the United States from wielding its energy strength in the way that Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other big producers with state-owned firms willing to put geopolitics above profits do."
A huge part is not about energy. As the American Chemistry Council are delighted to tell, $200bn has been invested since 2010 in increased production from fracking for ethane and other products for plastics and chemicals[0].
Yet they still find it necessary to campaign against chemical regulations and restrictions on plastic carrier bags.
So we're still accelerating nicely towards that precipice.
> I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.
Yup, that was the one of the main reasons we bore the cost of being the world's policeman and securing global shipping routes. We're going to largely stop doing that, and turn inward, leaving the rest of the world to scramble over how to secure shipping routes on their own resulting in new alliances. The oil will start flowing to China mostly and Russia will expand its borders by force. China will be too busy trying to stop its fake economy from crashing to care.
> I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.
It's possible but I think corporate interests, rather than our energy independence, will be the driving force of US foreign policy as it had been in the past. As long as banks, oil companies, etc stand to make a lot of money in the middle east, our foreign policy won't change much.
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.
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.
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.
Can you help me understand this? I keep hearing about expansion to other planets but it seems to me that no matter how inhospitable Earth becomes, we’ll be starting off from a much worse position elsewhere.
[+] [-] niftich|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmridul|7 years ago|reply
Just curious - If cotton seed is plentiful, why is it not used to make Ethanol ?
[+] [-] rory096|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|7 years ago|reply
I don't think so. We are way past the economic incentives or the market efficiency theories.
Carbon emissions have to stop to save what can be, period.
That means outlawing.
See what's happening in France and Belgium at the moment with the "yellow jackets", a peek into the shape of things to come.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/16/gilet-jaunes-y... and https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/24/french-gilets-...
[+] [-] jabl|7 years ago|reply
The other popular large-scale technology-neutral suggestion, cap-and-trade, suffers from much of the same problems. E.g. the EU ETS is mostly a bureaucratic boondoggle that achieves nothing (the price is so low it doesn't have much, if any, effect).
So what then? Well, performance standards may not be as neutral as a carbon tax/cap-and-trade, but they seem politically much more palatable: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/16/180963...
[+] [-] lacker|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] skybrian|7 years ago|reply
Biodiesel was supposed to be good. It can be made out of a variety of vegetable and animal oils. I don't think they talked about palm oil in particular.
[+] [-] eksemplar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] izend|7 years ago|reply
I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.
[+] [-] jedberg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahern|7 years ago|reply
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/14/why-american-oil-hasnt-...
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|7 years ago|reply
Yet they still find it necessary to campaign against chemical regulations and restrictions on plastic carrier bags.
So we're still accelerating nicely towards that precipice.
[0] https://www.americanchemistry.com/Media/PressReleasesTranscr...
[+] [-] zorga|7 years ago|reply
Yup, that was the one of the main reasons we bore the cost of being the world's policeman and securing global shipping routes. We're going to largely stop doing that, and turn inward, leaving the rest of the world to scramble over how to secure shipping routes on their own resulting in new alliances. The oil will start flowing to China mostly and Russia will expand its borders by force. China will be too busy trying to stop its fake economy from crashing to care.
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeflight|7 years ago|reply
Is it really just that or maybe also the erosion of environmental protections? [0]
[0] https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/id/10665.pdf
[+] [-] thanosnose|7 years ago|reply
It's possible but I think corporate interests, rather than our energy independence, will be the driving force of US foreign policy as it had been in the past. As long as banks, oil companies, etc stand to make a lot of money in the middle east, our foreign policy won't change much.
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