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A comment on A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests. Parent comment

Re:A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests by shmageggy on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @04:38AM (#25428588)
Exactly. We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example.

FTA:

> "The real problem is cost, because natural palm oil is extremely cheap...”

These kinds of statements are infuriating to me. It’s only cheap because we don’t pay for the negative externalities. If there were a monetary value associated with the forest, destroying it for a monocrop wouldn’t be so cheap. Markets are extremely useful things. We should use them.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests by vram22 on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @12:03PM (#25432173)
> We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example.

From this HN thread of two months ago:

Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert usi...

check out the influential book - The Forest and The Sea by Marston Bates - that I mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820550

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests by InfiniteRand on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @10:10AM (#25430964)
There are programs that approach deforestation from that perspective. The one that comes to my mind is REDD+

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_emissions_from_defore...

These are not uncontroversial, but I think the idea makes sense.

[ Parent | on HN ]