October 31, 2007 – Swedish petrol giant OKQ8 has ditched plans to use palm oil in their new biodiesel Eco20. We are opposed to palm oil production, which destroys native rainforest, often by burning, to make way for massive palm plantations.

OKQ8 was the first oil company in Europe to plan to launch palm oil biodiesel.

One of our campaigners, Frode, has been at our Forest Defenders Camp for the last two weeks precisely to highlight why unsustainable palm oil is bad news for forests and the climate: “OKQ8 has acknowledged that the increased demand of palm oil could lead to rainforest destruction. For the last two weeks I have witnessed and documented rainforest being cut down, drained and burnt for the sake of oil palm plantations. There is quite simply no such thing as sustainable palm oil and OKQ8’s statement is therefore very important.”

This is good news and big boost to our activists who are right now acting to stop the destruction of the Indonesian forests. Unfortunately palm oil is still used in a large number of food products and the impact of its growing use on Indonesia forests is largely unknown.

Palm oil is being promoted as a climate friendly fuel alternative and even subsidised by some governments. However the emissions from burning the forest and draining peatlands mean that palm oil is actually a climate destroying fuel – Burning of the forest and peat (mainly for palm oil plantations) makes Indonesia the world’s third largest climate polluter.

Source: http://weblog.greenpeace.org/makingwaves/archives/2007/10/swedish_petrol_giant_ditches_d.html

Please visit the source of this article: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/

Why the biofuels movement could run out of gas

By Richard Conniff
Smithsonian magazine, November 2007

I first started to think that the biofuels movement might be slipping into la-la land when I spotted a news item early this year about a 78-foot powerboat named Earthrace. In the photographs, the boat looked like a cross between Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose and a Las Vegas showgirl. Skipper Pete Bethune, a former oil industry engineer from New Zealand, was trying to set a round-the-world speed record running his 540-horsepower engine solely on biodiesel.

Along the way, he spread the word that, as one report put it, “it’s easy to be environmentally friendly, even in the ostentatious world of powerboating.”

Well, it depends on what you mean by “easy.” Bethune’s biodiesel came mostly from soybeans. But “one of the great things about biodiesel,” he declared, is that “it can be made from so many different sources.” To prove it, his suppliers had concocted a dollop of the fuel for Earthrace from human fat, including some liposuctioned from the intrepid skipper’s own backside.

Given the global obesity epidemic, that probably seemed like a sustainable resource. You could almost imagine NASCAR fans lining up for a chance to personally power Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Chevy Monte Carlo into the tunnel turn at Pocono. But biofuel skeptics were seeing warning flags everywhere.

Over the past few years, biofuels have acquired an almost magical appeal for environmentalists and investors alike. This new energy source (actually as old as the first wood-fueled campfire) promises to relieve global warming and win back America’s energy independence: instead of burning fossil fuels such as coal or oil, which fill the atmosphere with the carbon packed away during thousands of years of plant and animal growth, the idea is to extract energy only from recent harvests. Where we now pay larcenous prices to OPEC, we’d pay our own farmers and foresters instead.

Of course, biofuels also produce carbon dioxide, which is the major cause of global warming. But unlike fossil fuels, which don’t grow back, corn, soybeans, palm oil, grasses, trees and other biofuel feedstocks can recapture, through photosynthesis, the massive quantities of carbon dioxide they release. This makes biofuels seem like a good way to start bringing the carbon ledger back into balance. Other factors have made the promise of biofuels even more tantalizing.

• Ethanol producers in this country receive a tax credit of 51 cents a gallon, on top of billions of dollars in direct corn subsidies. (In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, it was $9 billion.) In Europe biodiesel subsidies can approach $2 a gallon.

• Some biofuel entrepreneurs are coining energy, and profits, from stuff we now pay to get rid of: methane from municipal dumps, wood chips piling up around sawmills, manure from livestock facilities, and paper-mill sludge that now usually ends up being trucked to a landfill.

• With a little planning, proponents say, biofuels could give us not just energy but wildlife too. Switchgrass and other potential feedstocks provide good habitat for birds and other animals between harvests.

All this, and in the minds of people like Pete Bethune, we get to keep our muscle boats too.

So what’s the hitch? Partly it’s that bit about doing a little planning. The move to biofuels thus far looks more like a stampede than a considered program to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Critics in the financial community have used words like “gold rush” and even the dreaded “bubble,” fretting that “biofool” investors are putting too much money into new refineries, which could go bust as markets and subsidies shift or as technologies and feedstocks become obsolete.

Betting the farm on biofuels has become commonplace: this year alone American farmers planted an additional 15 million acres in corn, and they were expecting one of the largest harvests in history. The share of the corn crop going into ethanol is also increasing pell-mell, from about 5 percent ten years ago to 20 percent in 2006, with the likelihood that it could go to 40 percent in the next few years.

Not surprisingly, the price of corn doubled over the last two years. This past January, angry consumers took to the streets in Mexico City to protest the resulting surge in the price of tortillas, a staple food. In China, rising feed costs boosted pork prices 29 percent, prompting the government to back off its plan to produce more biofuels. Even titans of agribusiness worried out loud that we might be putting fuel for our cars ahead of food for our bellies.

The chief executive at Tyson Foods said the poultry producer was spending an extra $300 million on feed this year and warned of food-price shocks rippling through the market. Cargill’s chief predicted that reallocation of farmland due to biofuel incentives could combine with bad weather to cause food shortages around the world. Cattle ranchers and environmentalists, unlikely bedfellows, both called for rethinking those incentives.

Not that anybody seems to have given them much thought in the first place. One problem with current subsidies is that they act as if all biofuels were created equal—while some may actually be worse for the environment than conventional gasoline. For instance, corn ethanol on average produces about 13 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline, according to Daniel Kammen, a public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. But when ethanol refineries burn coal to provide heat for fermentation, emissions are up to 20 percent worse for the environment than gasoline. Yet that ethanol still earns the full subsidy.

In the United States, state and federal biofuel subsidies cost about $500 for every metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions they avoid, according to a study by the Global Subsidies Initiative, an environmentally oriented nonprofit. We could pay somebody else to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, via the European carbon emissions trading market, for about $28 a ton.

But don’t biofuel subsidies buy us energy independence? President Bush, a former oil executive, declared last year that we are “addicted to oil.” In this year’s State of the Union speech, he set a national goal of producing 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017. The next morning, C. Ford Runge, who studies food and agriculture policy at the University of Minnesota, calculated that this would require 108 percent of the current crop if it all came from corn. Switching to corn ethanol also risks making us dependent on a crop that’s vulnerable to drought and disease. When the weather turned dry in the Southeast this summer, for instance, some farmers lost up to 80 percent of their corn.

In a recent Foreign Affairs article, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor,” Runge and co-author Benjamin Senauer noted that growing corn requires large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. It contributes to massive soil erosion, and it is the main source, via runoff in the Mississippi River, of a vast “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. (This year the dead zone, expanding with the corn crop, was the third-largest on record.) The article made the switch to corn ethanol sound about as smart as switching from heroin to cystal meth.

Biofuel subsidies might make sense, other critics say, if they favored “cellulosic” ethanol instead—fuel that comes from breaking down the cellulose in the fibrous parts of the plant, such as the corn stalk instead of the kernel. That wouldn’t put direct pressure on food prices, and might even reduce them by providing a market for agricultural waste products. Cellulosic technology is also the key to exploiting such nonfood plants as switchgrass, and it promises an improvement of more than 80 percent in greenhouse gas emissions compared with conventional gasoline. But while an experimental cellulosic ethanol plant is now operating in Canada, and several others are being built in this country, most experts say it will take years for the technology to become economically competitive. There are also political realities. “Corn and soybean interests haven’t spent 30 years paying campaign bills” for national politicians, says Runge, “to give the game away to grass.”

Even if cellulosic ethanol becomes practical, biofuels will provide at best only part of the solution to the problems of global warming and energy supply. That’s because biofuels will never match the one thing fossil fuels do brilliantly: concentrating solar energy. A gallon of gasoline represents the power of the sun gathered up and locked away by about 196,000 pounds of plants and animals. To produce all the petroleum, coal and natural gas on earth, it took an entire planet’s worth of plants and animals growing and dying over about 700 million years.

Switching to biofuels means getting our energy only from what we can grow in the present day, and that’s not much. In the course of a year, an acre of corn yields only as little as 60 gallons of ethanol, after you subtract the fossil fuels used to cultivate, harvest and refine the crop.

So let’s flash forward five years. Twice a month you swing by the biofuels station to fill the 25-gallon tank in your sporty flex-fuel econo-car. (Pretend you’ve kissed the SUV goodbye.) Even this modest level of energy consumption will require a ten-acre farm to keep you on the highway for a year.

That might not sound too bad. But there are more than 200 million cars and light trucks on American roads, meaning they would require two billion acres’ worth of corn a year (if they actually used only 50 gallons a month). The country has only about 800 million acres of potential farmland.

What if we managed to break out of the corn ethanol trap and instead set aside 100 million acres for high-yielding cellulosic ethanol crops? That’s an attractive option to almost everyone outside the corn industry, including such environmental groups as the Natural Resources Defense Council. But it would still produce only about an eighth of the nation’s projected energy consumption in 2025, according to a University of Tennessee study.

One other problem with the rush to “greener” fuels is that, despite the biodiversity happy talk, wildlife is already prominent among biofuel victims. Last year, for instance, farmers were protecting about 36 million acres through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which works to restore degraded lands, reduce soil erosion and maintain wildlife habitat. CRP land is what biofuel proponents often have their eyes on when they talk about producing biofuels and biodiversity by growing switchgrass. But farmers look at the bottom line, sizing up the $21 per acre they net with the CRP payment (to take a representative example from southwest Minnesota) against the $174 they can now earn growing corn. And they have begun pulling land out of CRP and putting it back into production.

Other countries are also rapidly surrendering habitat to biofuel. In Indonesia and Malaysia, companies are bulldozing millions of acres of rain forest to produce biodiesel from oil palm, an imported species. The United Nations recently predicted that 98 percent of Indonesia’s forests will be destroyed within the next 15 years, partly to grow palm oil. Many of the new plantations will be on the island of Borneo, a mother lode of biological diversity.

Apart from the effect on wildlife, critics say Indonesia’s forests are one of the worst places to grow biofuels, because they stand on the world’s richest concentration of peat, another nonrenewable fuel. When peat dries out or is burned to make way for a plantation, it releases huge quantities of carbon dioxide. Indonesia, despite its undeveloped economy, already ranks as the world’s third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States. When you add the peat effect into the equation, according to the conservation group Wetlands International, Indonesian palm oil biodiesel is up to eight times worse for the environment than gasoline.

Oh, and one final irony. The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that because of the way U.S. biofuel laws are written, foreign tankers loaded with Indonesian biodiesel can stop briefly at an American port, blend in a splash of regular petroleum diesel and qualify for a U.S. subsidy on every gallon. It’s called “splash and dash,” because the tankers generally push on to Europe to collect additional subsidies there. All in the name of greener fuels.

None of this means we should give up on biofuels. But we need to stop being dazzled by the word and start looking closely at the realities before blind enthusiasm leads us into economic and environmental catastrophes. We also should not let biofuels distract us from other remedies. Conservation and efficiency improvements may not sound as sexy as biofuels. But they are typically cheaper, faster and better at dealing with the combined problems of global warming and uncertain energy supply. They also call on what used to be the defining American traits of thrift and ingenuity.

And what about Pete Bethune, gallivanting around the planet in his powerboat and telling us it’s easy to be environmentally friendly in this newfangled world? I think he must be kidding. Our brief infatuation with biofuels has already taught us, with every high-priced tortilla, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Richard Conniff, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow.

Find this article at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/presence-biofuel-200711.html?page=4

Source: Greenpeace International

Please visit the Greenpeace website to learn how you can take action and join the fight against deforestation and palm oil…. be sure to check out the video updates from the camp…

Sumatra, Indonesia — Our volunteers and local forest communities have halted the destruction of an area of swamp forest in Sumatra, Indonesia. They are building five dams across three-metre deep canals used in logging and draining peatland for conversion into a commercial palm oil plantation.

Destroying the forest there would not only breach Indonesian regulations for forest protection, and an Indonesia’s Presidential decree, but would also lead to the release of large quantities of greenhouse gases.

Thick layers of peat underlie most of Indonesia’s swamp forest. Over time, the peat layer has locked up millions of tonnes of carbon. Once forests are cleared, peat swamps are drained and decompose to release the stored carbon as carbon dioxide. Forests are often also burned, prior to the planting of palm oil saplings, further compounding the climate problem.

Such is the scale of forest destruction across Indonesia that the huge amounts of greenhouse gases being emitted have made the country into the world’s third largest climate polluter, behind the US and China.

More than 30 volunteers will work for a week with people from the nearby village to construct the dams. By halting drainage operations, the dams will prevent the peatland from drying out and releasing carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas. The dams will also prevent the palm oil company from illegally burning the currently waterlogged peatland, which would otherwise further add to global warming.

“Palm oil companies are breaking the law and draining the very life out of Indonesia’s remaining peatland forests,” said Hapsoro, Greenpeace South East Asia forest campaigner. “And they are adding substantially to the problem of global warming.”

The damming is taking place on a plantation held by the PT Duta Palma company. Our on-site investigations of the peatlands, conducted from the Forest Defenders Camp in Riau, and together with peatland experts, have brought to light the flagrant violations of regulations intended to protect these areas.

This urgent problem needs a global solution. We have set up the Forest Defenders Camp on the boundary of forest clearing in a region of Sumatra.

Check out life at the camp and why it’s there:

More about the camp and updates on their weblog.

In addition to efforts to highlight and halt peatland forest destruction in this one particular area, we are also attempting to promote long-term solutions to deforestation in Indonesia.

Indonesia will be hosting the next round of international climate talks in December. Governments from around the world will gather in Bali to negotiate about extending the Kyoto Protocol – the only international agreement containing legally-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

We aim to ensure that deforestation is included in the next phase of the Kyoto agreement, extending beyond 2012. The decisions that governments make in the near future are critical for securing the financing and capacity needed by countries to safeguard their tropical forests and to allow them to make a serious contribution to global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We know it is possible to keep the worst impacts of climate change – such as extreme weather events, water crises and increased hunger – from putting millions of people at risk.

This will take a revolution in the way we use and produce energy, and a strong commitment to halt deforestation worldwide. More governments need to commit to tougher emissions reduction targets in the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol.

Source: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/indonesian-forest-destruction291007

10/28/07
By Anne Louise Bannon
Source: Portland Press Herald – Maine Sunday Telegram

[...] A new nature series from Animal Planet that is a lot more hopeful: “Orangutan Island,” premiering Friday at 9 p.m. As we all know, orangutans, the orange apes of Borneo, are highly endangered, thanks to habitat loss and poaching.

The show is premiering after the “Meerkat Manor” season finale, and will take the meerkat’s 8:30 p.m. time slot starting Nov. 9. It’s also not unlike “Meerkat Manor” in style. The apes all have names and personalities — we’re focusing on a few of them, as opposed to the whole tribe that will eventually inhabit one of three islands.

But this is a different project altogether. While “Meerkat Manor” is based on a research project and human contact is generally avoided, “Orangutan Island” focuses on orangutans who have been orphaned and raised with humans at a rescue center run by naturalist Lone Droscher-Nielsen. In an effort to help the orangutans survive, the project releases them on three islands that should be safe from the logging that has been devastating Borneo’s forests, and instead of encouraging them to become the solitary nomads orangutan’s normally are, the project encourages the apes to form communities.

I really like this show on several levels. Of course, the conservation theme is critical, and hopefully, Droscher-Nielsen’s work will encourage kids to start thinking along the lines of working as naturalists. But given the personalities of the individual apes and how they behave around each other, there are also some very interesting parallels to our human families and how we interact with each other.

There’s a lot of wealth to be mined here. Cha Cha has a hard time adjusting, at first, to being left on the island. She’s an affectionate animal and has bonded with Drosher-Nielsen. And she gets pretty depressed at first. What a perfect opportunity to talk about scary feelings with your preschooler who’s having a hard time adjusting to being in school. Or maybe to help another child develop some empathy for a frightened younger sibling.

And that’s only the beginning. The challenge is to let everything unfold naturally.

10/29/2007
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The noises emanating from Borneo’s rainforest are thrilling, but to discover what’s making them, you’ll need a guide, says Sarah Shuckburgh.In the early morning, the view from my veranda is magical. Mist hangs in the trees, forming a white veil from which only the tallest treetops emerge. Three sambar deer step daintily past a clump of teak trees close to my chalet, stretching to nibble the huge, heart-shaped leaves. Nearby, a large bearded pig snuffles in the undergrowth.

The sounds, too, are thrilling. Barking lizards grunt, a brown barbet makes a repetitive “tonk-tonk” call, and cicadas sound like dentists’ drills. From the jungle, gibbons whoop and as the mist lifts, I spot a family of orang-utans swinging through the distant canopy.

I am staying at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge in the middle of the largest surviving area of primary forest in Sabah. Today, palm-oil plantations cover most of north Borneo, and lorries laden with hardwood trundle in convoys from other remnants of jungle. But the Sabah state government has decreed a 30-year ban on logging from 2008, and in the Danum Valley, 175 square miles of lowland rainforest have been designated a protected reserve.

The field centre here is one of the leading tropical rainforest research stations in South-East Asia, and the nearby lodge is an eco-friendly guesthouse with 23 stilted huts built of local wood and stones.
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Equipped with leech socks (one-size-fits-all canvas bags worn inside trainers), I set off on sodden jungle trails with Donny, the chief naturalist guide. Towering trees, 400 years old, are surrounded by slender buttresses that create cave-like chambers. Huge fallen trunks are covered in fungi and glistening spiders’ webs. The ground is a dense mass of leaves and branches. It’s hot, and with humidity often at 100 per cent, nothing evaporates. Flies, desperate for salt, land on my sweating body.

A giant millipede curls into a ball as we approach, but I find it hard to spot forest wildlife. Donny sees clues everywhere. He points to an orang-utan nest of folded branches in a treetop. A pile of fruit seeds and scats under another tree show where the owner had breakfast. These holes in the ground were made by foraging wild boar; this flattened circle of earth, cleared of leaves, is the mating area of a silvery-grey argus pheasant; and that tangle of bent lianas was trampled by an elephant.

Donny explains the medicinal uses of each tree – one secretes resin that is used in HIV medicines, another produces poisonous sap that kills fish while the sap from a third tree prevents malaria – Donny drinks an infusion of this every month.

At the riverbank, we watch a cavorting family of long-tailed macaques on the far bank. They swing on lianas and push each other into the brown sunlit river from the spindly branches of a fruit-tree. An agamid lizard, like a 12in dinosaur, stalks by my feet. All day, leeches, blind but cunning, sense our approach, and groping from leaf tips, clamp themselves to our legs, arms, necks and backs as we pass. Only our shins and ankles are safe in their canvas socks. Donny has the answer – he strokes the leech to confuse it, and as it loosens its grip, sharply flicks it away. My leeches aren’t so easily confused, so Donny obligingly flicks them for me.

We follow a narrow path to a waterfall that thunders into a circular pool of muddy grey-green, forming a natural whirlpool bath. The canopy almost blocks out the sky, but a small blue gap admits a shaft of sunshine. A kingfisher skims over the water. This is a perfect place to cool off.

Donny tells me that he comes from the Orang Sungai tribe – the “river people”. Danum was the name of a tribal king who set off into the forest and was gone for so long that one of Donny’s ancestors was elected king to replace him. When Danum came back unexpectedly, he deferred to the new king. In honour of his bravery and his modesty, Donny’s ancestor named the river after him.

After the Second World War, when the British took over from the Borneo Company, tribal people were encouraged to give up their nomadic life of hunting, gathering and growing rice on temporary fields. Donny’s family started work on tobacco plantations and converted to Anglicanism. Donny’s Christian name was chosen by the Australian missionary who baptised him.

After our dip, we clamber up rough-cut steps to a rocky shelf overlooking the curve of the river and the lodge. Here, members of Donny’s tribe traditionally brought their dead; from this vantage point the spirits could watch over their descendants. Burying a body underground was seen as a final punishment, reserved for the most evil and criminal.

Donny’s grandfather, Nenek, was an orang tahu – a sage – whose magic could cause crop failure and even death. Donny’s earliest memory is of his grandfather. Donny, aged four, wanted a coconut and started chopping at a palm tree with a machete. Nenek told him to wait with his eyes shut. Peeping through his fingers, Donny saw Nenek point at the palm, from which several coconuts instantly dropped to the ground.

Donny’s grandfather was greatly in demand to kill members of rival tribes such as the Keniah Dayaks – formidable hunter-gatherers who could survive for a year alone in the jungle. The spirits inhabiting Nenek’s body prevented him from dying, and it was only when he renounced magic at the age of 107 that he finally passed away.

The old man had warned his grandchildren not to follow him into black magic, but to study at school and forget tribal hostilities. As he wished, today young Dayak and Orang Sungai naturalists work alongside each other at the reserve, and Donny has married a woman from another tribe.

We climb steps to a suspension bridge of slippery ironwood struts and metal cables a bouncy, wobbling catwalk 100ft up, but a brilliant place for spotting a red-legged monkey guzzling fruit in a treetop, a vivid scarlet-breasted minivet, and a noisy rhino hornbill. Emergent trees poke from a mesmerising sea of green.

Night falls suddenly and at 7pm Donny takes me on a night drive. Following the beam of his torch, I peer through binoculars (which, oddly, work perfectly in the dark) at a spotted owl feeding its young on a branch, two rabbit-sized mouse deer, a snake curled on a fern, a red flying squirrel gliding elegantly from a high branch, and a rarely sighted western tarsier, a primitive primate. Donny turns his torch off, and we sit, listening to the rainforest noises and the thundering river. The stars are hidden by looming rain-clouds and apart from the odd firefly, the night in one of the world’s most remote wildernesses is utterly, intensely, unimaginably black.

Essentials

The Ultimate Travel Company (020 7386 4646; www.theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk) can arrange a tailor-made 10-night stay in Borneo, including treks through the Danum Valley and the orang utan sanctuary at the Sepilok Nature Resort, from £2,200.

The price, which is based on two sharing, includes flight from London, private transfers, a night in Kota Kinabalu on arrival and departure, one night at the Sepilok Nature Resort, three nights on Lankayan Island and four at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge in the Danum Valley. Private jungle and forest canopy walks, guided tours at Sepilok and most meals are also included in the cost.

A two-week itinerary, starts from £2,500 per person, could end with a four-night stay at the Datai resort on Langkawi with its secluded white sand beach.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2007/10/29/et-borneo-129.xml

Please visit the source of this article: href="http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1029-carbon_indo.html">Mongabay

Indonesia could more than double its tax revenue by protecting forests and selling the resulting carbon emission credits instead of timber and palm oil, a University of Michigan researcher told Bloomberg.

Gabriel Thoumi, a consultant and fellow at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, estimates that carbon credits would generate $515 million a year in tax revenue starting in 2013 for the Indonesian government. By comparison, tax revenue from logging and palm oil is presently around $258 million a year.

Thoumi’s calculations are based on the assumption that Indonesia could sell 750 million metric tons of credits annually at a price of $11.50 per ton. United Nations-certified emission reduction credits for delivery in 2008 currently trade at nearly $21 per ton.

The $8.6 billion in annual revenue from carbon offsets would come in addition to the $5.4 billion in timber exports and the $4.4 billion in palm oil exports Indonesia presently earns.

Carbon offsets through avoided deforestation are seen as an promising mechanism to offset greenhouse gas emissions. In 2006 deforestation and other land-use change accounted for 1.5 billion tons of carbon emissions, or around 15 percent of total anthropogenic emissions, according to a study published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists and environmentalists say that avoided deforestation will delivery ancillary benefits beyond carbon sequestration, including watershed conservation and biodiversity preservation. Some argue that avoided deforestation could be a sustainable way to improve the lives of rural poor.

To date more than a dozen tropical countries have expressed interest in a $200 million forestry fund launched by the World Bank earlier this month. The fund will launch in December at the UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

Source: href="http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1029-carbon_indo.html">Mongabay

The Orangutans of Borneo: Stop the biodiesel subsidies, stop the slaughter.

It’s appalling that the European environmentalists allowed biodiesel subsidies. The idea we can burn our biosphere in the tanks of our cars, and that this is somehow better than using petroleum, is the death knell to tropical forests. In turn this is the cause of droughts due to loss of transpiration, extreme weather because tropical deforestation undermines the monsoon circulation, and even global warming both due to the thermal impact of hotter open land vs. cooler reflective cloud cover that forms over tropical forests, and the CO2 impact of removing perennial uptake as well as the massive one-time release of CO2 when the forest is removed. Tropical deforestation has more to do with climate change than burning petroleum.

Despite this strong likelyhood, if not fact, Europeans have patted themselves on the back for their biofuel subsidies, and created a world market for biodiesel that had scarcely existed. And now the genie is out of the bottle, and the last forests are burning away.

To fix the problem at this point, Europeans will have to impose punative import tarifs on any and all biodiesel, and redirect the full force of funds that had been subsidizing biodiesel, using them instead to purchase, protect and reestablish tropical rainforests. Five million square miles of tropical rainforest have been lost, and less than three million remain. Millions of square miles of rainforest must be restored, in order to avert anthropogenically induced disruptive climate change.

Orangutans are the latest victims of rainforest destruction for biofuel. Nobody should be surprised that as politically correct biofuel is subsidized, not only tropical deforestation occurs (causing climate change), but consequences also include massive destruction of biodiversity and prolific specicide. As reported on MSNBC’s report “Orangutans Squeezed by Biofuel Boom,” tropical deforestation is rampaging faster than ever. According to the report: “Encouraged by government tax breaks, many of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates as well as foreign companies are investing millions in expanding plantations and refining facilities on Borneo, which has one of the richest ecosystems in the world and is one of the only remaining homes of the orangutans.”

As we’ve repeatedly warned, biofuel is not sustainable. A human being, running on calories (products of sun, water and plants), only consumes caloric energy at a rate of about 100 watts. Our cars require on average about 25 kilowatts to operate. That is to say, meeting the nutritional requirements of billions of people literally require 250 times less farmland than meeting the fuel requirements of billions of cars and industrial machinery. That is the energy reality, and small wonder rainforests are toast. Read “Reforesting vs. Biofuel.”

Our love for wildlife and wilderness is undiminished by our contention that over-emphasis on endangered species is strangling the economic growth of American cities. If it isn’t enough that biofueled tropical deforestation is the real cause of catastrophic climate change, then perhaps the impending doom of the Orangutans and other species and ecosystems might move environmentalists at last. Stop the subsidies, stop the slaughter.

Source: http://www.ecoworld.com/blog/2007/10/27/orangutans-vs-co2-offsets/