The obvious answer is some of the Land used to grow soybeans and corn for animal feed.
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AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 4 hours agoGlobally, palm oil occupies approximately 19 million hectares (about 47 million acres) of land.
Despite supplying over one-third of the world’s vegetable oil, this footprint is remarkably small—using less than 10% of the total land allocated to all oil-producing crops worldwide.
Where are you suggesting to find another 500 million acres of land, a tad more than the size of Alaska, without environmental impact?
Einskjaldi@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
By that logic though, imagine how much land we could reclaim for other purposes (including reforestation) if we shifted more existing farmland towards palm oil.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
That’s not where palms grow.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 minute ago
so we’ve gotten a shitton better at aero- and hydroponics. can we grow the right palm tree in a greenhouse yet?
i’m in the california bay area so palm trees are more of a wealth indicator than a “hey they grow here” thing. but they’re everywhere because people want to signal that they’re wealthy, even if they aren’t.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 54 minutes ago
True. So reforest the land instead.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 minutes ago
we make them. with environmental impact because you can’t exist without it, but we do what we can to minimize it yes. We got a shitton of land out in texas that is being used as oilfields. get some environmental remediation out there first to make it suitable for farmland, use some of the grassy areas as well, and there’s a good quarter of that chunk at least.
and I’d bump that up to like 650million acres, because we’re not using prime farmland to get this oil. yields will probably be less.
but like, the room to grow this is there.