Absolutely true. However one could imagine a world where Trump never ran for President in 2016, or even better was never born at all. Even imagining that some other Republican won in 2016 its hard to imagine it could have gotten as bad as the current Trump reality. But I’m not too informed about the 2016 republican candidates. Would love to get filled in on this.
Since oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments it really comes down to which land we value the most. By using 3 hectares in Europe we could save 1 hectare of land in rainforests. What is worth more, 1 hectare rainforest in Indonesia or 3 hectares of native woodland in Europe? It’s not really clear cut. One could argue that 1 hectare of rainforest is more valuable because of the higher biodiversity. However there is not one natural answer to this question and ultimately subjective.
Oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments. Environments that when left undisturbed would be tropical rainforest. Decoupling palm oil from deforestation is therefore very hard. Certified sustainable palmoil is simply from farmland that the farmers have proved not to have been deforested recently but that same land still has the potential to return to tropical rainforest after restoration.
Regarding America specifically probably only Hawaii could support it. But land there is scarce and is used for much higher value crops like fruit crops. Harvesting palm oil is also quite labor intensive since the fruit bunches are harvested manually. It therefore does not make economic sense to grow it in countries with high wages.
There is not a pig breed out there that is all lard. However there is a huge difference between pig breeds regarding the procentage. Back in the day when palmoil was not available and lard was used the pigs we had were much fatter and fed a diet higher in cereal grains and lower in soy. When lard went out of fashion there was suddenly a huge oversupply of the stuff and we shifted their diets but more importantly shifted breeding efforts to ever leaner pigs.
This makes it harder to say exactly what environmental impact lard would have if we shifted back to using it as one of our main solid fats. I would argue that lard right now could be seen as a byproduct. In my country a lot of the lard is currently used as a feedstock for biodiesel which, when you think about it, is absolutely insane considering we at the same time import copious amounts of palm oil. You could even see it as us currently making biodiesel from palmoil by proxy. Which is not ideal.
But let’s say we could make the shift back to lard. We would get slightly less biodiesel but at the same time we could shift to a cereal grain heavy diet for the pigs and go back to those old breeds. Soy yields far less than say corn yields. Fatty pigs could therefore be less land demanding than lean pigs are to raise. I can’t exactly say if the demand for land would go up or down in the final equation but theoretically we could end up actually needing less land when also taking account the less land we would need for palm oil. But the main obstacle here is that people simply don’t want to eat lard anymore. It’s “icky” for the modern consumer. Which is ironic as we still consume it in sausages as one of the largest ingredients, but the consumers won’t accept it in baking products anymore.
In the end lard is just the carb in cereal grain converted to fat via a pig. And cereal grains are plentiful and very high yielding. Is using corn to produce fatter pigs, pigs that we would still raise anyway for the meat, really be worse than using the same corn for bio ethanol? It’s worth a thought. I would be very interested in seeing a full life cycle analysis of the land use and environmental impact such a shift would lead to.
Hi I made the original comment. After I posted I saw that the thread was a repost and that all the comments were on the original thread. Seeing as the original was already quite old and thinking the repost would not take off I just deleted my comment and moved on. So I was very surprised to see this replied to later. I would undelete it if I could.
Well I can reply back anyway. You gave a very detailed description on how wealth inequality appears and you explained a lot of basic economic theory. It’s a great comment but I don’t think we actually disagree. My point is not that wealth inequality is a non-issue. Of course it’s a huge issue. But these headlines which say that the top x% has as much wealth as the bottom x% are close to meaningless for two reasons. One is that a huge amount of people have 0 wealth without necessarily being poor or having a low standard of living. This can be because of having student loans or from voluntarily not saving. It can also be people who are too young to have meaningfully saved anything. How many of these people with zero or close to zero wealth are actually poor? I don’t know so these metrics don’t say anything to me. Say 20% of the world population has 0 or negative wealth. Then I can say that the homeless man with 1 dollar in his pocket has more wealth than the bottom 20% of the world population. Would be a true statement but ultimately meaningless.
As income inequality is the true source of wealth inequality I prefer discussions about that. But if wealth inequality specifically is to be discussed, which it has all right to be, then a metric like the “top x% wealthiest own x% of the world wealth” is much preferable. A metric like that is actually understandable immediately and says much more about how unequal the wealth distribution is. The metric in this headline I see as sensationalism.
Oh and by the way land can absolutely be both rented out and sold. In many countries renting land is the main way to expand your farm as owners seldom want to sell their land. I work in agriculture so I often give agricultural analogies. Sorry if it wasn’t easy to understand. Though I admit I don’t know the specifics in Laos.
I would also argue that a great asshole has the potential to turn his asshole supporters into even greater assholes with time.
As an example I would say whoever ran the QAnon conspiracy changed a lot of people. On the QAnon casualties subreddit there were lots of people writing how their family members who beforehand were just “normal” republicans suddenly turned into absolutely bat shit insane conspiracy theorists after falling down that rabbit hole. Without that external exposure they would never have ended up in that state.
Crazy religious cults are often intentionally designed like this. Scientology for example had the whole aliens thing hidden from new initiates. You had to be part of the cult for a certain amount of time before learning about those “inner parts” probably because if you started out day 1 with the whole aliens bit people would see the bullshit for what it was but exposed gradually they accept it.
I think a lot of that also applies to the maga movement. I think we can all agree that Trump was always bad. But I also think most can agree that its only gotten worse with time. As trump gets more and more insane his supporters, who refuse to admit they were wrong about him, have to constantly double down and accept and support whatever he is doing, constantly turning his supporters views worse with time.