It is unfortunately true that at the moment there is a great deal of effort by unscrupulous scientists that undermine well known facts.
This is particularly popular in the field of global warming. An oil or gas or perhaps coal producer hires an unscrupulous scientist and they then write a paper which supports there are warped ideas and give them permission to do whatever damaging thing it is they want.
The most recent is to try to argue that coconut oil has damaged and cause the extinction of more animals than palm oil. Given the horror that many of us have felt as palm oil has gradually eradicated huge portions of the bornean and Sumatran rainforest this is a strange argument to make.
IUCN data clearly states that palm oil has threatened 5 times more species than coconut oil, so how are they making this argument with a straight face?
As a matter of record farming of palm oil has threatened 321 different species so far, coconuts are only method mentioned as a potential threat in 66 species extinction. So what mathematical trickery have they done to come to the opposite conclusion.
In truth it’s relatively simple. They have taken each crop worked out the total yield and then divided that by the number of species threatened. Because palm oil is a crop used two such a lot greater degree.
So in this case palm oil comes out with a 3.8 threatened species per million tons of palm oil, where as 18.3 per million tons of coconut oil. perhaps at this point it is also worth noting that the authors made a mistake and erroneously suggested that this number was actually 20.3 (to “accidentally” exaggerate the damage by the species you wish to be the worst does not say much for your state of mind and fairness).
There are a number of issues with this,the first of which is to assume that all coconuts are harvested purely for their oil, actually only around two-thirds are so this instantly reduces the number to about 12.2. Another foolish thing that the authors have done is assumed that this is all that is made from the coconuts- actually for every ton of coconut oil you get between 2 and 7 tons of highly valuable by-product. This includes half a ton of copra cake a valuable feedstock, half a ton of coconut shell used for fuel and other things such as water filtration, 3 tons of coconut husk used for horticultural endeavours and other things, and 2 tons of coconut water.
As such this is definitely not a like-for-like comparison. 1 tonne of palm oil basically gives you a tonne of palm oil plus a little bit of fuel for your factory.
Also their analysis is only looked at historical data. Given that coconuts have been grown for their fruits for a long time, where has palm oil is a crop that is only coming to it’s only in the last 20-years, of course the old the crop is going to have done more damage because you’re not looking at the damage done by the new crop. (this is perhaps highlighted by the fact that the only extensions they list all those back in the 1940s, they ignore all damage done to orangutans and other species by palm oil because that is only happened recently).
Even worse there analysis fails to look at what might happen with expansion if rates water continue at the current pace. Coconut plantations are barely growing at all, there for the damage they are going to be done has largely been done. Palm oil plantations on the other hand continue too much up vast areas of former Virgin rainforest and therefore their future threat is vast.
Given all this the authors foolish suggestion that the reason palm oil get such a bad rat is due to double standards should be laughed out of the room even by someone with little knowledge.
In his initial work he claims that the knowledge they have and the data they have collected is not good enough to allow them to make claims on which prop is worse, so it seems rather disgusting that the author Meijaard goes on to make the claim that palm oil is 5 times less damaging than coconut palms- given his initial position this should remove any credibility he has left (the above problems make me give him little credibility at all).
All of these problems suggest that the Journal Current Biology, which published the article needs to screen their articles far better as this was a terrible article that should never have been published, and is clearly a industry puff piece.
The article from which I had gleaned this information can be found on the mongabay website. I have also done my own research. However any views I have expressed are mine, they are commentary on this article. If the study author would like to reach out and correct anything here, I will happily read any information they have. I would love to be proved wrong though given what I had read suggest this is unlikely.
