[lowtto]

> environmental health and the well-being of poor and marginalized communities in pursuit of profits

Heh. Isn't that too dramatic. So SEA countries are suppose to sit down and not able to sell anything? How bad is this too bad of a situation? The article failed to highlight this.

To me it feels like someone just doesn't like someone else getting too much money at selling palm oil for some reason. I wonder which other industry that benefits from boycotting palm oil.

[Spooky23]

The problem is that different food and environmental causes are fashionable (and funded) at different times in different ways, and analysts make decisions via spreadsheets while being pretty clueless about what is happening on a broader scope. When a direction is choosen, the long term impacts are rarely understood by the advocates.

You see it in the HN comments. Right now, everything here is discussed in terms of carbon outputs. All carbon, all of the time. Analysts with this bent will make an argument that palm oil is good because you get more oil density per acre.

For food, transfat was the boogeyman driving adoption in commercial food production to replace hydrogenated oils. You can't use transfat, because heart disease. Alternatives like butter or lard generate pushback, as the carbon crowd claims that cow/pig operations produce too much carbon/greenhouse gasses.

For enviromentalists who aren't carbon focused, the real horror of palm oil is the irreversible destruction of forests and the eradication of orangutans.

[mc32]

It sounds a lot like politics.

They’re against something but provide no suitable alternatives. Even if they provided an acceptable alternative to them, someone else would pipe up and mention a lot of problems with the alternative. On the end we’re supposed to somehow achieve the impossible.

These things are lose-lose.

The only real answer is to lower ave standard of living (in other words a western lifestyle needs to be recalibrated downward) and to lower total population via slowed growth -at least in high growth areas... but none of that is palatable to anyone.

[Mirioron]

>The only real answer is to lower ave standard of living (in other words a western lifestyle needs to be recalibrated downward)

This is palm oil we're talking about. The ones whose standard of living that this will reduce are the people not in the West. This is all part of international relations. Just like forest fires in the Amazon were a convenient excuse to attack Brazil politically, but forest fires in Australia are about showing sympathy.

[christiansakai]

I like the idea of lowering standard of living. Can you give me some examples?

[mc32]

Probably something akin to the ex-Yugoslavia with less repression. Though I suspect some repression would be necessary to achieve that. I don’t say that in a positive way —but I don’t think people would volunteer for such a state.

[arrosenberg]

Carbon-positive ways we could lower SoL: no more individual vehicles, no more single family housing, massive increase in taxes on electronics and fuels.

[TOGoS]

> The only real answer is to lower ave standard of living

Or we could stop wasting our resources in idiotic ways. How many people spend hours every day commuting to a job that produces no actual value to society? How much of our resources do we spend propping up the health insurance industry instead of just giving everyone healthcare?

Restructuring the economy to provide for human needs instead of profits for the bankers (who ultimately own the companies that own the companies that run the spreadsheet farm that you're commuting to every day) would go a long way towards fixing these problems without having to lower anyone's standard of living.