The World Runs on Palm Oil, and That’s Fueling Climate Change
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/16/the-world-runs-on-palm-oil-and-that-s-fueling-climate-change.html
Each day in Indonesia, forest fires release as much carbon dioxide as the entire United States. The fires have been burning since July, thanks to a combination of slash-and-burn land clearing, flammable peat soil, and El Nino. And the worst part is, although your and my consumption habits are largely to blame, there’s almost nothing we can do about it.
Palm oil companies are largely to blame for this crisis. The larger companies usually don’t set the fires, but (not unlike the chocolate industry) they often buy palm oil from smaller landholders, who do. This makes it very hard to assign blame (there are over 200,000 small landholders in Indonesia) and hold the larger firms accountable, and it means the direct culprits are often impoverished small farmers trying to make ends meet.
Indirectly, the culprits are us. Palm oil manufacturers and their supply chains are the leading deforesters of tropical rainforests, and the primary threat to orangutans and other endangered wildlife.
So, want to boycott palm oil? Good luck. Palm oil is in everything. It’s the mostly widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet, and is in roughly half of all packaged products sold in Western supermarkets: lipstick, ramen noodles, detergent, chocolate, pizza—anything that could benefit from not melting, not sticking, or generally remaining just the right level of viscous.
Oh, and unlike most vegetable oils, it's extremely high in saturated fat.
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