Comment by deadghost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadghost | Hacker News Reader

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Just eat your nutella. Just Indonesia is 260M people, approaching the population of the US. Palm oil is the cheapest and most widely used oil in all of South East Asia. From what I'm told, Palm is very efficient and produces a lot of oil and isn't necessarily bad. The issue is corrupt governments failing to preserve their people's natural heritage as plantations encroach on nature. I doubt a few Europeans cutting down on nutella will make much of a difference when the people in SEA consume huge quantities of it themselves.

I checked out the orangutans in Sumatra and you can see the palm plantations encroaching into the jungle. Locals told me they consume a lot of the river water and makes the entire area warmer. Although the area had the fortune of being a natural reserve, I still saw trucks grabbing aggregate from parts of the river that were not included. Oh and if you were in SEA around 2 years ago, the ridiculous haze was from people burning wetlands to plant more palm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_haze

so your argument is: 1) guns don't kill people, people do. 2) some other people are worse so just keep doing the bad thing

I'm also quite puzzled about your conclusion of buying palm oil while also stating many of the negative effects.

What you are saying is that there is no point of trying to improve anything because it will have little effect. With that attitude surely no changes will be made.

You are right that it's more efficient to produce palm oil compared to alternatives. But that's not really a good argument when the production is done the way it is in these corrupt countries.

> What you are saying is that there is no point of trying to improve anything because it will have little effect. With that attitude surely no changes will be made.

The implication could be that the energy spent convincing people to not eat Nutella might be better spent on other strategies for solving the problem.

I personally have no idea what the best approach is -- I just wanted to point out another plausible interpretation of the comment.

As for Catsmull, he may be coming from a problematic context but that doesn't mean he doesn't have valuable insight.

Shit... I was editing two comments at once and that last paragraph there was supposed to go in the other comment.

I was in Singapore for a week of the Haze. I was kind of amazed it was allowed to happen, but the local take (as told to me anyway) was that Indonesia was way too powerful for Singapore to force them to do anything they didn't want to do, and the corruption was such that even fighting the fires effectively wasn't something they particularly wanted to do... and forget about stopping the planters from burning recklessly in the first place.

Not sure if that's accurate but that's what local folks told me.

It's a mix of corruption, poor governance and a powerful palm oil industry in Indonesia. If the USA was next to Indonesia they would have power to influence but Singapore, despite it being a successful country, do not have much power to influence big Indonesia.

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