Palm oil once destroyed orangutan-filled rainforests in Southeast Asia. Now, the industry is cleaning up its act.
In the last two decades, palm oil has become an environmental boogeyman, an ingredient that conscious consumers should try to avoid.
The oil, found in everything from baby shampoo to ice cream, earned its bad reputation. Over the last 30 years, palm oil companies leveled acre upon acre of trees in Southeast Asia, which were full of life and carbon. The demand for this ingredient, now the world’s most common edible oil, undoubtedly has fueled two of the most urgent crises of our time: climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
But the story of palm oil is changing — seemingly for the better.
Over the last decade, the amount of deforestation caused by the industry has actually declined nearly every year in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer. And in 2021, it hit a 22-year low. Malaysia has seen a similarly positive trend, experts say, indicating that companies are now cutting down fewer trees.
“I don’t want to sit here and say that the palm oil industry has suddenly become shiny green and sustainable, but it’s mostly stopped deforestation,” said Glenn Hurowitz, the founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, an environmental advocacy group.
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Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images
The industry has a horrific legacy, no doubt, and it’s still wrecking some forests in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Yet it’s not the villain it once was.
This, of course, is good news for the wildlife of Southeast Asia, and for our climate. It’s also a reason to feel less guilty when indulging in doughnuts or creamy peanut butter. But more importantly, the story of palm oil may hold lessons for other industries that still stock our grocery stores with forest-flattening foods.
How palm oil destroyed the environment
Palm oil, which comes from the fruit of oil palm trees, is something of a super ingredient. It has little odor or color. It doesn’t spoil easily. It contains virtually no unhealthy trans fats. And it’s incredibly cheap to produce.
These characteristics helped palm oil rise to dominance, wrote journalist Paul Tullis, who called it “the world’s most versatile vegetable oil.”
In the ’90s, big food companies were looking to replace trans fats in their products like margarine; palm oil offered a solution, Tullis wrote. Around the same time, cosmetic companies wanted plant-based alternatives to synthetic and animal-based chemicals. This industry, too, saw promise in palm oil.
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Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images
With help from governments and international banks, which saw palm oil as a way to alleviate poverty in parts of Asia, production skyrocketed. Nearly all of the growth was in Indonesia and Malaysia, partly because the climate is suitable and the government backed industrial-scale plantations. (The oil palm tree is native to West Africa).
Between 1995 and 2005, global palm oil production doubled. By 2015, it had almost doubled again. The world now produces more than 75 million metric tons of palm oil a year. For comparison, we produced roughly 3 million metric tons of olive oil in 2020. Palm oil and its derivatives are now in as many as half of the packaged products in supermarkets and 70 percent of cosmetics.
These staggering numbers came at a huge cost.
In the last two decades, Indonesia lost nearly 25 million acres of forest, an area larger than the entire country of Ireland. Roughly a third of that deforestation was caused by palm oil, according to a 2022 study. In Borneo, an island split among Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the palm oil industry caused roughly 40 percent of deforestation between 2000 and 2018, or roughly 6 million acres of forest loss. That’s almost five times the size of Delaware.
When the forests fall, so do hugely important ecosystems that influence the entire planet. The jungles of Indonesia and Malaysia are home to a stunning array of plants and animals including orangutans, tigers, and the world’s largest flower, the stinking corpse lily. Wet forests known as peatlands — many of which have been drained and replaced by plantations — also store massive amounts of carbon, which can escape into the atmosphere when they’re destroyed.
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Jefta Images/Future Publishing via Getty Images
A rare successful campaign to make a product more sustainable
The destruction of forests didn’t go unnoticed. In the last two decades or so, advocacy groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth published report after report linking palm oil in our everyday products to environmental harm.
These groups (and journalists!) helped out palm oil as dirty. And ultimately, that helped provoke change within the industry.
According to Mighty Earth’s Hurowitz, 2013 marked a turning point: Late that year, he and other advocates helped convince Wilmar — one of the world’s largest palm oil companies — to limit deforestation in its supply chain. The company didn’t need to clear forests to grow palm, Hurowitz argued, because there were plenty of already-degraded lands.
A year later, most other major palm oil companies had followed suit.
Other forces helped transform the industry, as well. A couple of years earlier, Indonesia stopped granting new permits for palm oil development in primary forests and peatlands, in part to reduce carbon emissions. In the last decade or so, technologies to monitor deforestation, such as through satellite imagery, have also improved dramatically, helping watchdogs hold palm oil companies accountable.
“We can now see deforestation in near-real time,” said David Gaveau, a landscape ecologist at TheTreeMap, a research organization, and lead author of the 2022 paper on palm-driven deforestation. “It’s not the Wild West it used to be.”
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The Washington Post via Getty Images
While it’s hard to say exactly which efforts were most effective, recent analyses suggest that at least some of them worked.
A study published in 2019 found that palm oil deforestation in Indonesia peaked in 2009, and then steadily declined — meaning, fewer trees were cut down — in the years that followed. Gaveau’s study found a similar trend: The conversion of forests to palm oil plantations has fallen every year between 2012 and 2019. Experts said Malaysia is following a similar trend.
Things are also looking good more recently. An analysis by TheTreeMap found that in 2021, deforestation linked to palm oil in Indonesia hit its lowest point in more than two decades (though it rose slightly in 2022).
So, is palm oil sustainable now?
No, not exactly.
Most palm oil in our products was grown on land that was once forest, and little of it has been restored back to its natural condition. “The palm oil industry has an enormous legacy of destruction that they have not addressed yet,” Hurowitz said. “We’ve had great success in stopping deforestation and not as much success and persuading the big palm oil companies to heal the damage.”
(Some groups are trying to restore old palm oil plantations to forest or make new plantations more environmentally friendly.)
And while deforestation tied to the industry is way down, companies are still razing forests for palm oil. Last year, roughly 47,000 acres of forests were cut down in Indonesia and replaced with palm oil plantations, according to TheTreeMap. That’s a little more than three times the size of Manhattan.
Some experts also worry that the drop in deforestation may have more to do with the price of palm oil — which started collapsing in 2011 — than with corporate or government policies. When oil is cheap, it often doesn’t pay to expand production.
This is concerning because the price of palm oil has, in the last few years, bounced back.
So far, however, the story remains positive, and the rise in palm oil prices has yet to drive a spike in forest loss. “The initial sign that [the] deforestation rate continues to be low suggests that we may be observing a decoupling of palm oil production from forest loss,” Kemen Austin, a palm oil expert and director of science at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said by email. In other words, growing palm oil production may no longer require cutting down trees. “We may still need another year or two to be able to quantify that with confidence, but its certainly a good sign,” she said.
There are other reasons to believe that deforestation related to palm oil will remain a success story. In December, the European Union agreed on a landmark law to prevent companies from selling palm oil and a handful of other commodities in the European Union if they’re grown on land where forests were recently cleared. (The EU represents a relatively small part of the global palm oil market.)
Progress in palm oil is not enough for the world’s forests
Today, curbing global deforestation is less about palm oil and more about cleaning up other, more destructive products. “The change in the palm oil industry is a massive success, and the tragedy is that has not been sufficiently replicated in other industries,” Hurowitz said.
The main one is beef. It’s a far more devastating to the world’s forests than any other commodity. Indeed, between 2001 and 2015, cattle caused roughly four times as much deforestation as palm oil, globally.
Hurowitz and other advocates are now focused on translating what worked for palm oil to the beef industry, which has a massive footprint in the Amazon rainforest. Mighty Earth, for example, identifies influential corporations, such as the meatpacking firm JBS or the supermarket Carrefour, and then tries to pressure them from multiple angles to change.
“We’re trying to create the kind of perfect storm of pressure on the meat industry that worked so well in palm oil,” Hurowitz said.
As for what you can do as a consumer: Try as you might, you’re probably not going to cut palm oil from your diet or beauty products. It’s just too widespread, like plastic or corn. What might help, however, is eating fewer burgers.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Bright and early on the morning of January 24, 2023, as Riz Ahmed and Alison Williams named the Oscar nominees for Best Actress, the results were, more or less, as expected. Cate Blanchett for Tar. Michelle Williams for The Fabelmans. Ana de Armas for Blonde — the Academy loves a depiction of a real person — Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Andrea Riseborough, for … To Leslie?
Most people who’d heard of the movie knew of it because of a strange grassroots campaign that seemed to emerge out of nowhere a week or two prior, when everyone from Charlize Theron to Howard Stern seemed to start posting on Twitter about the film, a small indie that had opened in October in a few theaters to critical acclaim but relatively little fanfare. Suddenly, if you followed a lot of celebrities, praise for Riseborough’s performance was everywhere.
On Oscar nominations morning, it turned out that this was enough to get Riseborough on the board. Some observers complained, noting that previous favorites for the slot — Danielle Deadwyler in Till and Viola Davis in The Woman King — appeared to have been knocked out by the groundswell of support.
We have no way of knowing if that’s true, but it doesn’t seem impossible, since both Deadwyler and Davis have had widespread support in various guild and critics’ awards over the past few months. Nonetheless, the Academy announced they’d be opening an investigation into the tactics of Riseborough’s campaign to see whether they violated the rules of the Oscars. On January 31, they announced that Riseborough would keep her nomination but that “tactics” were being “addressed with the responsible parties directly.”
And those intimations about dicey tactics are a little surprising, if you know anything about how Oscar winners are made.
Let’s back up. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences — that is, the industry group made up entirely of people who work in the industry (but no journalists or critics) — gives out the Oscars, and the group is made up of distinct “branches.” There’s a branch for cinematographers, another for writers, another for directors, and so on. Each branch votes on nominations in its own discipline, ultimately picking five nominees. The exception is Best Picture, which has 10 nominee slots and is voted on by the entire membership, which numbers around 10,000. After nominees are announced, everyone gets to vote in every category.
The idea here is noble: You know your craft, so you’re best suited to pick the five options from which the broader membership will choose the winners. Simple, right?
Except the Oscars have never been simple, for a lot of reasons. The American film industry is mostly based in Los Angeles, which is a company town. That means everybody knows everybody — not just knows, but marries, divorces, drinks with, sees at bake sales, hires and fires and hears rumors about. Exceptions abound, of course, but it’s a bit like choosing winners among your very extended family. No wonder the whole thing can feel like a popularity contest.
Another wrinkle is that the prospect of choosing “the best” art is categorically ridiculous. Some things are better than others, sure. But taste is inherently subjective — what I like you might hate — and when you’re operating on the technical level of most movies, judgments of “best” boil down to taste. The endless awards season has its reasons for existing; recognition for one’s work can go a long way toward establishing a career. But the fiction that a group can vote to choose the best of something is silly, laughably so.
But the main issue with choosing the Oscars is simply that they’re not a contest of craft at all. They’re a contest of politics. I don’t mean that they’re “political,” though the long, long history of Hollywood is one of Washington and Hollywood meddling in one another’s business. (Anyone who says movies were better when they were “less political” has made up some Hollywood in their head with no resemblance to the real one.)
What I mean is that campaigning for an Oscar is almost exactly like campaigning for president — except it happens every year, and less is, admittedly, at stake, though it might not feel that way to the nominees. This is so true that when I wrote about it several years ago, I found political consultants were as knowledgeable about the process as awards strategists (and more open about it, too).
Yet there’s one big difference. When you’re campaigning for president, all bets are off. You can relentlessly knock on doors, call and text and email constituents, and outright ask for their vote. In American politics, it’s perfectly fine to be a candidate who walks up to someone on the street, hands them a flier, and says, “I am Alissa Wilkinson, I’m running for president, and I’m asking for your vote.”
But there’s a strange skittishness in the Academy around such bold displays of campaigning — if anyone notices. Andrea Riseborough doesn’t appear to have been knocking on doors personally, but To Leslie director Michael Morris’s wife, the actress Mary McCormack, reportedly beat the bushes on her behalf. Variety reported that she emailed friends in the Academy, asking them to “post every day between now and Jan 17th” — the last day of Oscar nominations voting. It was a low-budget campaign for a low-budget film, but it may have violated the Academy’s injunction against direct campaigning. Reportedly, she also held a small gathering at her home (something the Academy doesn’t allow, in certain parameters, without an accompanying screening).
What’s ironic, as many have pointed out — like Riseborough’s co-star Marc Maron and actress Christina Ricci — is that while many movies don’t have such an overt campaign (or, at least, not one we know about), there’s plenty of campaigning going on. As I wrote:
The bottom line is that, no matter what narrative your film is part of, you have to ensure that Academy members will see your film, connect to its story, and remember it come voting time. The more opportunities there are to do this, the better. And so during Oscar season, there are screenings with cocktails and Q&As. There are dinners. And breakfasts, and luncheons, and teas, and cocktail receptions hosted by celebrities and influencers.
Stars and Oscar hopefuls show up for meet-and-greets and make surprise appearances at screenings. They appear on podcasts and do video tours and make the rounds on late-night comedy shows, and a lot more.
(Perhaps most ironically, the modern-day template for campaigns that cost millions of dollars and sometimes employ dirty tactics was created, more or less single-handedly, by none other than Harvey Weinstein.)
In the end, the question is whether a movie that visibly violated the campaign rules should be punished, allowing the Academy to maintain the polite fiction that much more expensive campaigns with less overt (but still obvious) tactics should be permitted to continue.
And all of this points to what seems to me like a bigger issue. The American presidential election system has been hopelessly mediatized and increasingly hysterical. The hype-and-fear cycle begins years ahead of the actual election, as if it’s an epic live sports showdown and not a sober civic ritual designed to produce justice and fairness.
The Oscars are, in fact, a live showdown, and if you think they’re about justice and fairness then you may want to buy this bridge I’ve got down in Brooklyn. But the Oscars cycle does have a negative effect on the movies, regardless. As I’ve written, the hype cycle, the endless “will it win an Oscar?” questioning, the informal campaigning begins about a month after the Oscars and continues all year. By September’s fall festival cycle, the “frontrunners” are all but established, making it hard for any surprises to break through. The question of whether a movie is “Oscar-worthy” can subsume the movie itself, making it hard to talk about it as a work of art. It’s all about its awards potential, and films get swept up in the vortex.
If the Academy were to put a tighter rein on all campaign activities — not just grassroots campaigns that are a little too obvious for its taste — it might not solve that problem. But it could also work to level the playing field, allowing more films to enter the conversations and even be seen by more people. Maybe it wouldn’t lead to a movie business less hellbent on awards-grubbing — but wouldn’t it be worth trying?
NASA has a plan to “skip a generation” of passenger aircraft design to fight climate change.
After more than 50 years in production, the final 747 is taking to the skies. Boeing delivered the last 747 ever built to Atlas Air on Tuesday. Aviation enthusiast John Travolta was there and said the plane was the “most well-thought-out and safest aircraft ever built.” Richard Branson said “farewell to a wonderful beast” in a Reuters interview, bemoaning the high fuel costs for transatlantic flights on the jumbo jet. Airlines had a similar attitude, as slowing 747 sales reflected higher demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient planes. In fact, sustainability is on Boeing’s mind as well.
Air travel is a massive contributor to climate change, and it’s getting more popular. Flying accounts for up to 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and as more and more people fly, the United Nations expects carbon dioxide emissions from planes to triple by 2050. A transatlantic flight produces about a ton of CO2 per passenger, which amounts to about half the carbon footprint a person would produce by eating food for a year. The Boeing 747, which can seat over 500 people, is the third-largest plane in the sky, so you can imagine the environmental cost of keeping the so-called “Queen of the Skies” flying.
This isn’t the end of the 747 — existing planes could remain in the air for decades — but it is a pivotal moment for the future of aviation. A couple weeks before the 747’s big send-off, Boeing and NASA announced a major partnership, the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, to produce a wacky-looking single-aisle plane that promises to slash fuel consumption for commercial aircraft. The new aircraft looks like a giant glider with long, skinny wings propped up by diagonal struts to reduce drag. It’s called the transonic truss-braced wing concept, and if widely adopted could transform sustainable air travel as we know it.
Unlike cars, you can’t simply bolt a battery onto a plane and make it electric. (Making an electric vehicle is more complicated than that, but you get the point.) Improvements to airplanes happen in small increments over the course of decades. Typically, a single-digit reduction in an aircraft’s fuel consumption would be meaningful. Boeing says the innovations in the new truss-braced wing concept will amount to a 30 percent reduction. That’s exactly the kind of leap NASA wanted to get out of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, which Boeing won.
“If you think that, or have the perception that, aviation hasn’t been working on sustainability or environmentally friendliness, that’s a bad perception because every generation of aircraft that’s come out has been 15, 20, 25 percent better than the one it replaces,” Rich Wahls, NASA’s sustainable flight national partnership mission integration manager, told Recode. “What we’re trying to do now is skip a generation.”
The big idea behind the transonic truss-braced wing concept is an update to the aircraft configuration, or the plane’s architecture. Unlike the low-wing design that dominates the commercial aircraft configuration today, the new Boeing design has wings that stretch over the top of the plane’s tubular body. This reduces drag, but it also allows for a wider variety of propulsion systems, from bigger jet engines to exposed propellers. It’s also fast. The “transonic” part of the concept’s name refers to its ability to fly just shy of the speed of sound, or around 600 miles per hour.
NASA likes this idea so much it’s investing $425 million into the project under a Funded Space Act Agreement. Boeing and other partners will chip in an additional $300 million. Once Boeing builds a full-scale demonstrator aircraft, NASA says it will complete testing in the late 2020s, and if all goes well, the public could see the new technologies in commercial aircraft sometime in the 2030s.
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NASA
If you squint your eyes, though, the new transonic truss-braced wing concept looks an awful lot like the commercial aircraft you see on runways today. That’s not a bad thing. For one, it’s not a radical redesign — unlike, say, the very odd-looking blended wing X-48 — that might scare off passengers. The similar design also has some benefits for the manufacturing process. But at the end of the day, new aircraft configuration alone won’t make these next-generation planes greener, according to Brent Cobleigh, project manager for NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project.
“Lighter-weight materials, better aerodynamics, better propulsion systems, more direct operations,” Cobleigh said, “you need all of those together to squeeze as much efficiency out as we can, to make the biggest impact.”
Because, again, it’s really hard to make airplanes more efficient. And aircraft configuration is just one piece of the puzzle. More efficient propulsion systems and cleaner jet fuel are the other two moving parts that need to fit together. Further down the line, we’ll see designs for hybrid propulsion systems that use both jet fuel and batteries to power a plane. Fully electric planes are already taking to the skies, although it will be decades before we see big battery-powered passenger aircraft. In the near term, hydrogen increasingly seems like a viable replacement for the fossil fuels we currently put in planes. Rolls-Royce and easyJet successfully tested a hydrogen-powered jet engine, the world’s first, just a few months ago.
What we’ll see before those big breakthroughs are more incremental improvements. Just a couple weeks before the NASA-Boeing announcement, for example, Rolls-Royce showed off a new UltraFan propulsion system for plans, which it says offers a 25 percent jump in efficiency and can run on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, which is a biofuel derived from waste material. Although it’s not a conventional fossil fuel, SAF still spews carbon into the atmosphere, and it’s also in short supply. Some commercial flights already use SAF mixed with conventional jet fuel, and United did a demo last year with a flight from Chicago to Washington, DC, powered by 100 percent SAF. An innovation like SAF certainly is a move in the right direction — what you might call an evolutionary change — but it’s not what’s needed to make air travel as green as it can be.
“The revolutionary change would be to change the energy source, like, if you change to hydrogen or if you did hydrogen fuel cells,” explained Marty Bradley, a sustainable education educator and consultant who worked at Boeing when the company was exploring early truss-braced wing concepts. “That would be that big jump.”
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