[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.