This is the face of tragedy. Another orangutan needlessly lost…
DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS. Period. ~ RZ

Staff at a Hamburg zoo say one of their orangutans died needlessly after a visitor broke park rules against feeding animals. The animal, they claim, drowned in pursuit of a bread roll that had been lobbed into her enclosure.

An orangutan drowned in a German zoo on Wednesday after she fell into a water basin while trying to fish out a bread roll a visitor had thrown into her enclosure.

Zookeepers at the Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg rushed to Leila’s aid, but by the time they had pulled her out of the water she was dead.

Chief zookeeper Walter Wolters said a visitor was responsible for the drowning. “Leila wanted to get the roll, but instead fell into the water and drowned,” he told German news agency DPA.

Leila, who was 10 years old, had lived in the Hamburg zoo since birth. Wolters said all the zoo’s staff were very upset by Leila’s death. “We are especially devastated by her death, because orangutans are a very endangered species and Leila was a valuable breeding animal,” he told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper.

The visitor who threw the roll has not yet been identified. The zoo forbids the feeding of animals and has signs up that expressly remind visitors of the ban. Staff are now considering whether to file charges with police.

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,569266,00.html

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: July 13, 2008
Source: The New York Times

If you caught your son burning ants with a magnifying glass, would it bother you less than if you found him torturing a mouse with a soldering iron? How about a snake? How about his sister?

Does Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the Guantánamo detainee who claims he personally beheaded the reporter Daniel Pearl — deserve the rights he denied Mr. Pearl? Which ones? A painless execution? Exemption from capital punishment? Decent prison conditions? Habeas corpus?

Such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the vote of the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans.

If the bill passes — the news agency Reuters predicts it will — it would become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden.

The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated.

What’s intriguing about the committee’s action is that it juxtaposes two sliding scales that are normally not allowed to slide against each other: how much kinship humans feel for which animals, and just which “human rights” each human deserves.

We like to think of these as absolutes: that there are distinct lines between humans and animals, and that certain “human” rights are unalienable. But we’re kidding ourselves.

In an interview, Mr. Singer described just such calculations behind the Great Ape Project: he left out lesser apes like gibbons because scientific evidence of human qualities is weaker, and he demanded only rights that he felt all humans were usually offered, such as freedom from torture — rather than, say, rights to education or medical care.

Depending on how it is counted, the DNA of chimpanzees is 95 percent to 98.7 percent the same as that of humans.

Nonetheless, the law treats all animals as lower orders. Human Rights Watch has no position on apes in Spain and has never had an internal debate about who is human, said Joseph Saunders, deputy program director.

“There’s no blurry middle,” he said, “and human rights are so woefully protected that we’re going to keep our focus there.”

Meanwhile, even in democracies, the law accords diminished rights to many humans: children, prisoners, the insane, the senile. Teenagers may not vote, philosophers who slip into dementia may be lashed to their beds, courts can order surgery or force-feeding.

Spain does not envision endowing apes with all rights: to drive, to bear arms and so on. Rather, their status would be akin to that of children.

Ingrid Newkirk, a founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, considers Spain’s vote “a great start at breaking down the species barriers, under which humans are regarded as godlike and the rest of the animal kingdom, whether chimpanzees or clams, are treated like dirt.”

Other commentators are aghast. Scientists, for example, would like to keep using chimpanzees to study the AIDS virus, which is believed to have come from apes.

Mr. Singer responded by noting that humans are a better study model, and yet scientists don’t deliberately infect them with AIDS.

“They’d need to justify not doing that,” he said. “Why apes?”

Spain’s Catholic bishops attacked the vote as undermining a divine will that placed humans above animals. One said such thinking led to abortion, euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.

But given that even some humans are denied human rights, what is the most basic right? To not be killed for food, perhaps?

Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and butterflied for smoking.

My distress — partly faked, since I was also feeling triumphant, having come this far hoping to find exactly such a scene — struck him as funny. “A gorilla is still meat,” said my guide, a former gorilla hunter himself. “It has no soul.”

So he agrees with Spain’s bishops. But it was an interesting observation for a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles, kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a Brother?

Whether or not Africans had souls — whether they were human in God’s eyes, capable of salvation — underlay much of the colonial debate about slavery. They were granted human rights on a sliding scale: as slaves, they were property; in the United States Constitution a slave counted as only three-fifths of a person.

As Ms. Newkirk pointed out, “All these supremacist notions take a long time to erode.”

She compared the rights of animals to those of women: it only seems like a long time, she said, since they got the vote or were admitted to medical schools. Or, she might have added, to the seminary. Though no Catholic bishop would suggest that women lack souls, it will be quite a while before a female bishop denounces Spain’s Parliament.

But we’re drifting from that most basic right — to not be killed for food.

Back to the clearing. As someone who eats foie gras and veal (made from tortured animals) and has eaten whale (in Iceland), I don’t know why I suddenly turned squeamish when offered a nibble of primate. On reflection, I probably faked that too. When I was young, my family used to drive over Donner Pass each year to go camping, and my mother would regale us with the history of the Donner Party. Even as a child, I had no doubt that, in extremis, I would have tucked in.

On our drive back to Cameroon’s coast, my guide insisted that some of the local Fang people, well known for cannibalism in the 19th century, still dug up bodies to eat. I believed him partly because in South Africa, where I then lived, murder victims were often found missing the body parts needed in traditional medicine.

Cannibalism is repugnant to the laws of all countries. But that repugnance is not written in the extra tidbits of DNA that separate us from chimps. Quite the opposite: “pot polish” on human bones found in various archaeological sites suggests that some of our ancestors exited this world as stew. That too puts us in the “community of equals” with apes; female chimpanzees are known to eat rivals’ babies.

But when human law does intervene in this primate-eat-primate world, it is also on a sliding scale. Even animal cruelty laws have a bias toward big mammals like us. For example, in a slaughterhouse, chickens are sent alive and squawking into the throat-slitting machine and the scalding bath.

But under the federal Humane Slaughter Act, a cow must be knocked senseless as painlessly as possible before the first cut can be made.

Which raises an interesting moral dilemma for the righteous Spanish Parliament: What about bullfighting?

As in all great struggles separating man from beast: a lot of it’s in the capework. Olé!

Source: The New York Times

In Indonesia, the thirst for palm oil is decimating the rainforest habitat these primates need to survive

Photo and article by Anna Sussman
Please visit the source of this article: Plenty

Crouching low in a canoe, my sneakers and socks are quickly soaked with river water. A stocky, shirtless park ranger in blue jeans pulls the boat across the river by rope-pulley rigged between trees. When we reach the opposite shore, we climb out of the vessel and walk along the muddy riverbanks and up through the rainforest until we reach a feeding platform. There, park rangers bang loudly on a plastic bucket. They are calling the orangutans.

I have come to northern Sumatra, an island in the Indian Ocean covered with twisting dirt roads and steep green mountains, to report on the orangutans because there isn’t much time. Experts say the world’s 30,000 remaining orangutans will go extinct in 3 to 20 years. The last of the hairy apes live on the islands of Indonesia and Malaysia, where they spend most of their time in the trees, eating fruits and leaves.

Here in Indonesia, their forest home is being leveled at a rate faster than 300 football fields per hour, according to Greenpeace forest campaigner Hapsoro, primarily to make way for palm oil plantations, vast expanses of non-indigenous palms where the trees’ fruit is harvested for its rich oil. The oil is found in sundry products, from snack foods to beauty products, and is increasingly being used in biofuel production. The rainforest is disappearing so quickly that there is not enough food left for the orangutans to forage. In the Bukit Luwang national Park, they are hand fed bananas from park rangers to supplement their diet.

“The future for the orangutans is in the hands of the humans now,” said Dharma Bhodi, a park ranger at Bukit Luwang who was born and raised in this remote region. As Bodhi talks, an adolescent male orangutan hangs lazily by one arm in a tree above us. He looks down occasionally, gives a bored look, and reaches for a handful of leaves to chew. “Humans have been cutting down the forest for plantations. I have seen the places that used to be rainforest and now are plantation, you can’t recognize it anymore,” he said. “Neither can the orangutans.”

Palm oil has long been a staple in Indonesia. There (and in products the world over) it’s used in everything from soap to ice cream. Over the last year and a half, crude palm oil has become even more valuable in the global rush for environmentally sustainable biofuels: In fact, due to rising demand, the price for the oil has increased by 88 percent. Poor countries like Indonesia, the world’s leading palm oil producer, are clearing thousands of acres of pristine rainforest to plant the crop.

Plantation proponents say that palm oil is environmentally superior to fossil fuel because it doesn’t add to the earth’s over-all carbon dioxide levels. Instead, carbon dioxide created when the biofuel is burned is absorbed by the plant itself. Another boon is the economic growth for small landholders and family farmers.

Critics say those benefits aren’t worth the ecological costs of palm oil production. Destruction of rainforest to make room for plantations releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide: clearing land produces some 400 mega-tons of the greenhouse gas annually in Indonesia. Meanwhile, orangutans and other species that call the rainforest home are left searching for food, water, and shelter in a barren mudscape.

But some in Indonesia are working to stem the spread of the seemingly unstoppable palm industry. Hardi Baktiantoro founded the Centre for Orangutan Protection in Indonesia, a Jakarta- based non-profit. He, his wife, and her brother wear matching T-shirts that say “Palm Oil Kills.” Together, along with his two toddlers, they take frequent trips to document decimated rainforest areas. He takes photos while she shoots video for use on their website, in reports, speaking engagements, and direct-action events. They are trying to save what’s left of the rainforest for the orangutans.

“I find dead orangutans, they have starved to death. There is no food, no water,” he said. He tells me that on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo), more than ten orangutans are starving to death each day because of palm-oil driven deforestation. “The situation for orangutans today is very, very critical. The experts say the orangutans will be extinct in 2015. The orangutans will be extinct in next three years unless the government takes extreme action to save them. But instead they are planning convert 455,000 hectares of forest [in Kalimantan] into new plantations, mostly palm oil,” he said.

The workers on those plantations see orangutans as nuisances that trample and eat their crops. “The plantation workers have to protect the oil-palms. That is their job. To them the orangutan who is hunting for food is only a pest,” said Baktiantoro, clicking through slides on his laptop of orangutans whose fingers and hands have been mutilated by plantation workers, and others chained to workers’ dormitories.

In northern Sumatra, uniform rows of oil-palms line the roads in mile after mile of plantation. After bumping down the road in a white minivan, we pull-over and approach a husband and wife team working the trees. Thirty-seven year-old Parida picks up loose, red palm fruits from the ground and drops them into a bucket. Her husband slashes the massive fruits from the trees with a knife attached to the end of a 20-foot pole. Palm oil processing employs thousands of workers like Parida and her husband in Indonesia. Parida is clearly uncomfortable speaking with us and she smiles nervously as she goes about her work. She says she makes fewer than three dollars a day, which she uses to help feed and care for her three children. “Without the palm oil company I would have no job,” she said.

But Baktiantoro insists that the workers would be better off farming and fishing on their own land. “I never heard that workers in plantations become wealthy because of the plantations,” he said. “The profit is for the company, not for the workers.”

Back at Bukit Luwang National Park, I eat lunch at a riverside restaurant with some local tour guides. Young and entrepreneurial, these guys make their money leading European tourists to the orangutan feeding platform. They tell us that everyone here dreams of someday turning their land—low-lying rainforest on the edge of the park—into oil-palm plantations.

It is clear that any long-term solution to the deforestation problem will have to find a way to replace the substantial income generated by oil-palm. The Indonesian government has called on Western nations to help implement environmental standards for the industry. This year, some major palm oil buyers, like Unilever, the company behind Dove soap and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, announced they would not support the clearing of any new land for palm oil plantations.

At the tiny Medan airport in Sumatra, my flight to Jakarta has been delayed by four hours, so I hunker down in a metal chair at a sweltering Dunkin Donuts. As a father and daughter next to me say a prayer over their donuts, I am reminded of another suggestion: introducing orangutan-safe palm oil logos for baked goods and cleaning products. Like the dolphin-safe tuna logo, forest campaigner Hapsoro believes branding could help Western consumers weigh in on the issue with their purchasing power.

Lies, lies, lies. These greedy, heartless orangutan killers are pushing their dope onto US consumers. We need to wake up and boycott palm oil! NOW! They destroy forests and murder orangutans for lowfat margarine. Shame Shame Shame! ~ Rich

This graphic was provided to us by supporter Jenn Carvin:

Americans show growing appetite for palm oil
By Ooi Tee Ching

The US could buy a million tonnes this year, says the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, adding that so far in the first half of 2008, Malaysia has shipped more than 450,000 tonnes there

CONSUMERS in America are increasingly accepting palm oil’s health benefits, as seen in the rise of shipments to the US, according to the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC).

“Palm oil nutrition awareness is gaining momentum there,” MPOC deputy chief executive officer Dr Kalyana Sundram told Business Times in an interview in Petaling Jaya recently.

Palm oil in its natural form does not contain any trans fat and thus, is a healthy alternative fat for making bakery shortenings, confectionery fats and margarine that go into baked and processed foods like chocolates and cookies.

In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that from January 1 2010, all 88,000 restaurants in the state will be prohibited from using oil, margarine and shortening containing trans fats. Retail baked goods have an additional 1-year grace period until January 1 2011. Packaged food, however, are exempted.

In New York, all bakeries and restaurants in the city have since July 1 been ordered to stop using hydrogenated oils in crackers, candies, cookies, snack foods and deep-fried desserts. Philadelphia and Seattle are two other cities to have done the same.

The rising palm oil consumption in the US is helped, in part, by the US government’s move to mandate declaration of saturated fat and trans fat levels separately on nutritional labels from January 1, 2006.

According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), eating saturated fat and trans fats raises low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels. This means, trans fats – listed on food labels as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil – can raise bad cholesterol and lower healthy cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart attacks.

Many food manufacturers in the US add hydrogen, in the presence of a chemical catalyst, to soya oil and canola to harden them into bakery fats. Hydrogenation increases the melting point of fats and gives food a longer shelf life but it results in harmful trans fats.

The FDA warned that these artificial trans fat is so common that the average American eats about 2kg of artery-clogging trans fat in a year.

Palm oil, on the other hand, is a healthier choice for use in processed food because it is not genetically modified and does not contain harmful trans fat.

Rising palm oil consumption in the US could also be attributed to a patented fat blend that uses up to 50 per cent palm oil, discovered by Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) and Brandeis University biomedical scientists Dr Kalyana Sundram and Dr K.C. Hayes, 13 years ago.

They had since licensed US Nasdaq-listed Smart Balance Inc to market the patented blend in America.

Last year, Smart Balance posted US$160 million (RM521.60 million) in margarine sales alone. While it is not the No.1 margarine brand in the US, Smart Balance is fast eating into its rivals’ market share because the patented blend is proven to help improve cholesterol ratios.

“Since 1996, Smart Balance has been paying royalty to MPOB and Brandeis University for the patented blend. This will expire in 2015,” Dr Kalyana Sundram said.

When asked to estimate America’s increasing appetite for Malaysian palm oil, he replied: “This year, the US could buy a million tonnes. So far, in the first half of this year, we’ve shipped more than 450,000 tonnes there.

“A million tonnes is not much because it is less than three per cent of the total edible oils consumption there. There is still tremendous growth potential.”

Palm oil is richer in mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fatty acids than any other saturates, even more than the average olive oil. When it comes to blood cholesterol, palm oil is scientifically proven to be just as heart healthy as olive oil.

In Malaysia, fastfood outlets like Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King, McDonald’s Corp, Wendy’s, Kenny Rogers Chicken Roasters, Starbucks, A&W, KFC and Pizza Hut have long been using trans fat free palm oil in their food preparation. [They deserve nothing less than a full boycott!]

Source: http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BTIMES/Industries/Commodities/transfat.xml/Article/index_html

Once upon a time, there were 8-foot orangutans all over Asia. Gigantopithicus lives! ~Rich

###

LONDON – A British scientist said Monday he was anxiously awaiting the results of DNA tests on hair claimed to be from a yeti after initial examinations showed it had human and ape-like characteristics.

Ian Redmond, a biologist and expert in ape conservation, said the hairs found in the Indian jungle resembled samples collected by the conqueror of Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, in the 1950s.

“Under the microscope, they look slightly human, slightly like an orangutan and slightly like the hairs brought back by Edmund Hillary,” Redmond told AFP.

“These hairs remain an enigma. They could be a new species, but the DNA tests will hopefully tell us more.”

The hairs were brought back from India this year by a BBC journalist, Alastair Lawson, who contacted Redmond and was put in touch with a team at Oxford Brookes University in south central England.

Lawson was given the hairs by yeti believer Dipu Marak, who retrieved them them in dense jungle in the Meghalaya state of India after a forester allegedly spotted the creature on three consecutive days in 2003.

Marak believes the hairs come from an ape-like Indian version of the fabled yeti, or abominable snowman, called mande barung, which he believes stands about three metres (10 feet) tall.

Redmond and scientists from Oxford Brookes examined the hairs on Thursday under powerful microscopes, comparing them with samples taken from an Asiatic black bear, yaks, orang utangs and gorillas at Oxford’s Natural History Museum and even a hair from Redmond’s beard.

“The hairs are complete with the cuticle, and between 3.3 centimetres (1.3 inches) and 4.4 centimetres long and thick and wiry and curved,” Redmond said.

“At one point we thought they looked like they came from a wild boar. That was quite a tense moment, but when we got a sample from the museum it turned out they were quite different.”

Redmond also contacted the English laboratory that analysed the hairs brought back by Hillary in the 1950s from his Everest expedition and found they were similar in appearance.

While the microscope tests were inconclusive, the hairs are now undergoing DNA tests in separate laboratories in Oxford and Cardiff.

Redmond admitted his excitement at a potential scientific breakthrough was tinged with fear.

“My concern is that if we do find something unusual, it will be from a very small population of animals and I would want to talk to the state government and Indian government so they are not inundated with people trying to catch one for a museum.

“I want us to approach this in a 21st century and not a 19th century way.”

Source: http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=53d0de91-9681-417b-9555-b4531dbb6522

By Benjamin P. Jordan, P.E.‚ Jul. 28‚ 2008

Source: Beyond Chron

Editor’s Note: San Francisco is perhaps the largest city in America to implement the use of the alternative fuel, biodiesel. The City’s entire diesel fleet, MUNI, Airport Shuttles just to name a few, all use a blend of this more environmentally sound fuel source. The SF Bioufuels Cooperative now numbers over 200 members and alongside the SF Department of the Environment, helped the City to reach it’s goal of converting it’s entire diesel fleet to the use of biodiesel, ahead of it’s December 2007 date. Yet the Bay Area has seen the price of biodiesel rise from it’s $3.25 per gallon for B100, or “pure biodiesel” in 2006, to as high as $5.80 today. Why? Benjamin Jordan of the Peoples Fuel Cooperative, is also one of the biodiesel community’s leading advocates and co-founder of the Biofuel Recycling Cooperative, one of the architects of the successful “SF Greasecycle”, a program run by the BRC & SF Public Utilities Commission, by which restaurant grease is collected around San Francisco and turned into biodiesel. Jordan was kind enough to shed some light on the rising costs of this much needed alternative to our dependance on foreign oil and the important issue of sustainability.

What controls the price per gallon of biodiesel? It seems as though every time the price of diesel goes up so does biodiesel. Why is this when the two industries are so very different? When can I expect the price to go down? All good questions that attempt to decipher the complex road fuel industry that has traditionally been ignored due to the low prices for so long.

Biodiesel will become cheaper than petroleum diesel but it won’t be because the price of biodiesel goes down. This change will occur because the price of petroleum will continue to rise. A good place to start to understand some of the factors that affect the price per gallon of biodiesel is to ask where does your fuel come from? Was it locally produced or did it travel across the country or around the world by train, truck, or ship? What is your fuel made from: virgin soy bean, corn, canola, tropical palm oil, rendered animal tallow or waste vegetable oil and inedible kitchen grease?

The base cost of each gallon of biodiesel is the sum of raw materials costs (vegetable or animal oil feedstock, methanol, catalyst, heat), market influences of supply and demand, and taxes. Additional items that affect the final cost are transportation, distribution, permits, state regulation, and consistent quality assurance of the fuel.

Raw Materials

It’s all about the oil! Restaurants have typically been paying $40 to $60 for oil collection services. With the new demand for feedstock, biofuel producers are offering to collect for free. Some producers are even starting to pay restaurants for their grease. Waste oils, usually referred to as yellow grease and brown grease are traded in the commodities market. Market price is listed on indexes such as The Jacobson and can fluctuate significantly as we have seen recently with increases of 40% in a few weeks. Other feedstock prices such as soy beans have risen as much as 94% in the past year. The world is now facing the most severe food price inflation in history as corn, grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs. One key factor in these increases is the record cost of crude oil which recently reached a high of over $129/barrel. As the world’s main source of energy, the cost of petroleum has significant repercussions on many other resources. The importance of having a local sustainable source for fuel has never been more important. As energy costs rise, so will the cost of alternatives. The less energy involved in producing these alternatives, the better able we will be to control these cost increases.

Supply and Demand

Biodiesel is a superior alternative to petroleum diesel. Biodiesel producers are unlikely to sell a superior product cheaper than petroleum diesel. There are an estimated 10 million gallons of waste vegetable oil in the Bay Area. Those who have managed to secure a recycled feedstock have separated themselves from skyrocketing soybean prices. A few local producers have successfully managed the cost hurdles of initial investment, feedstock acquisition, permitting and overhead cost of doing business in CA. At the moment the realities are still the same, a locally produced sustainably sourced fuel costs more to produce compared to conventional biodiesel production sources and the petroleum fuel supply chain.

Taxes

Currently in California there is approximately $0.75 of tax on every gallon of biodiesel sold. While states like Texas enjoy paying no state tax, Californians pay a state fuel excise tax as well as significant sales tax. The state of California also regulates all distributors of biodiesel through a state wide alternative fuel variance program. Although biodiesel has become widely accepted and is extensively used around the country, the state of California still considers it an “experimental fuel”. This program requires distributors to keep records on everyone they sell biodiesel to and compile and submit quarterly reports. This includes the purchasers name, the make, model and year of their vehicles, their estimated usage, and information regarding the performance of the fuel.

The following taxes apply in California:

Federal Excise – $0.244 California Excise – $0.18 *Sales Tax at point of sale – varies by city and county, 8.5% in San Francisco Total (approx) – $0.75

Quality

Not all biodiesel is created equal. Special care must be taken to analyze and certify all fuel is of the highest quality and meets ASTM standards. We feel it is also important to evaluate fuel on a sustainability standard as well. When sourcing sustainable fuel, verifying quality is absolutely critical. Fluctuating feedstock quality, developing producers, new processes, and small batches are some of the factors affecting fuel quality. Constant vigilance from People’s Fuel assures that the fuel you use meets the highest quality standards.

Operating Costs

There are many costs involved in running any business. For a fuel distributor vehicles must be maintained, permitted, and insured. Commercially licensed drivers must be paid. State and local regulating agencies require ongoing reporting. People’s Fuel is a not for profit worker cooperative. Most of the labor to run the company has been and is still unpaid.

Commitment to sustainability

At People’s Fuel we are committed to supplying fuel from local sources and will not support the influx of imported palm oil biodiesel or virgin soy, canola or animal byproduct biodiesel shipped across the country using petroleum based fuels. We are deeply committed to increasing access through retail stations so more of this fuel can be sold to you. In an industry of volumes, an important cost element will be that the more people who buy sustainable biofuel, the cheaper it will become.

Hopefully this helps to demystify some of the speculations regarding fuel costs. Biodiesel is an industry in its infancy. Start up costs are significant and supply is limited. Biodiesel has struggled to establish itself as a better alternative to petroleum against artificially low costs for petroleum fuel. Many have attempted to make it in the biodiesel industry but have not succeeded. The few who have survived are struggling to make a difference in our world. With over 5 years of experience in the industry there has been no time more exciting than now. The mention of biodiesel is no longer met with the reply of “What” but “Oh, really”… and “where can I buy it?” Municipalities and even entire states have begun to implement biodiesel as a legitimate petroleum free alternative. The dedicated individuals who have shared this vision and made a commitment to sustainable biofuel do so out of the belief in locally produced energy, fuel security, green collar jobs, and a cleaner healthier future for us all.

Rethinking Energy

What are the true costs and scale of our overall energy consumption? The age of cheap fossil fuels is now behind us. Paying $10.00/g for fuel may happen sooner than we think. It is important that we be conscious of our energy consumption. To help reduce the price of biodiesel and energy in general, when possible drive less, walk more. Telecommute, use public transit, bicycle, carpool, and car share. Through our daily choices we can reduce our resource consumption. Together we can find a petroleum free option and create a solution to this energy crisis.

Quick Facts

* With 5% of the world’s population, the United States consumes a third of the world’s resources.

* It is estimated that 53% of US dollars spent on crude oil leave our country. Nationally, more than 60 percent of the oil our country uses comes from foreign sources.

* Californians use more than 16.5 billion gallons of gasoline a year. That’s enough fuel to drive a car at 30 mpg, three round trips to the sun and back. * Half of all the energy used by Californians is in the transportation sector. * Eighty-two percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and power our vehicles.

Sustainability in San Francisco and the Bay Area

Currently PFC is only suppling the most sustainable fuel available; inedible kitchen grease methyl esters (IKGME) that is as local and ecological as possible in regards to feedstock, production, distribution and quality. In San Francisco this means that restaurant oil is collected through private industries and the SFPUC through the SFGreasecycle Program (www.sfgreasecycle.org). This cooking oil is then sold to local producers for biodiesel (IKGME) production. The short list is Bently Biofuels, BioEasi, Blue Sky Biofuels and Yokayo Biofuels with other sources arriving from Southern California and Las Vegas Nevada.

The SF biodiesel community then has access through the not for profit cooperative distribution infrastructure, the PFC. The PFC purchases biodiesel from all of these manufactures and makes it available for delivery and at the pump through mobile fueling at Rainbow Grocery. As the PFC is a cooperative distribution network, our costs are transparent, established and do not fluctuate. The higher prices and reduced availability is the result when the PFC and the membership in San Francisco are not able to purchase fuel consistently and if we can, it is at a higher price. This means that increases in fuel price and decreases in availability are a result of the industry in general and the community’s buying power.

The communities buying power, or a joining of people creating a fueling network through the fueling cooperatives, will help keep oversight and prices appropriate for the fuel. Currently for petroleum, the US Congress takes care of the policing and oversight of the industry. They could do better for sure. Here locally, community awareness/involvement will be the only way to keep the biodiesel sustainable, available and equitable. Unfortunately there are many more steps for the biodiesel cooperatives of the Bay Area and the rest of California to work more closely to keep the fuel available and as cheap as possible. This is where we as consumers must play our roll and use our cooperatives to establish a supply of consistent high quality fuel from local industries.

Benjamin P. Jordan, P.E., is a Technical Consultant and provides civil engineering expertise for sustainable ecological design projects including water conservation, biodiesel production and permaculture education. He is also the co-founder of the SF Biofuels, Biofuel Recycling and Peoples Fuel Cooperatives, as well as Healthy Fuels, a non-profit organization that promotes sustainable and environmentally sound biofuels. He can be reached at http://www.biofuelrecycling.org

This story is originally from May 9, 2008
Source: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2008/05/09/2003411457

Photo Caption: Scientists from National Pingtung University of Science and Technology prepare to deliver Pipi, a pongo orangutan, from Tucheng, Taipei County, to her new home inside the school in Pingtung County yesterday. The owner of the animal had to give her away because she has become overweight. Photo Credit: WU JEN-CHIEH, TAIPEI TIMES

Orangutan moved to wildlife center after 18 years

Importing orangutans became illegal in 1999, but most orangutans in Taiwan were imported before 1999 or were illegally traded after that year

A 20-year-old female orangutan caged in Taipei County for 18 years has been moved to a wildlife animal center in souther Pingtung County because of the better living environment there, an official at Taipei County’s Agriculture Bureau said yesterday.

The center, which belongs to the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, has advanced research in wildlife animal conservation and an exclusive area for housing wildlife animals.

The orangutan, named Pipi (皮皮), had been living in a cage that was placed beside a temple on a mountain climbing path in Taipei County’s Tucheng City (土城市), the official said.

Pipi was raised by owner Lin Cheng-hsiung (林正雄), who applied for legal registration to raise the animal when Pipi was only six.

Raising orangutans is legal in Taiwan as long as the proper registration is made, the official explained.

However, too much feeding from tourists on the path and Pipi’s insufficient exercise because of the limited space in the cage have caused the animal to become overweight, the official said.

According to the official, Lin is not able to improve the current environment for Pipi although he had always wanted to do so.

Lin also worried that Pipi will end up living the rest of his life alone in the cage as he could not find her a companion, the official said.

Persuaded by Taipei County’s Agriculture Bureau and the wildlife animal housing center, Lin agreed to annul his rights over Pipi in the hope of giving her an ideal place to stay for the rest of her life, the official said.

Chen Chen-chih (陳貞志), a veterinarian who accompanied Pipi all the way to her new house, said Pipi would first be quarantined for three months for health checkups. She will then gradually get to know the center’s other six female and more than 10 male orangutans, Chen said.

Chen said the center does not rule out the possibility of Pipi’s having babies, adding that Pipi is at a suitable age for giving birth.

Lin said he intends to visit Pipi, whom he described as his “daughter.”