Yet again, another genocide is under way. In Darfur, the Sudanese government has begun indiscriminate bombings of civilians and supposed rebels Human Rights Watch reports. The Sudanese government is committing these war crimes in blatant defiance of international law and plain human decency. And it very much looks like they are moving into what Bill at Jewels in the Jungle calls “the end game, the final solution to their problem with the black Africans occupying the valuable land over the oil and gas fields of western Sudan, in Darfur. ”

But what to do?

Jewels in the Jungle has an interesting discussion of the problem. Bill calls for a blogathon to raise awareness of the ongoing genocide.

An op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by John Morlino (HT iAbolish) calls for the Darfur activists to “Take off the gloves” and demand urgent and decisive action in Darfur.

How about 50,000 blue helmets in Darfur with a clear unequivocal mandate to protect civilians? How about an enforced no-fly zone over Darfur? How about promising the Chinese access to oil in exchange for their cooperation in pressuring Khartoum to back off of Darfur?

The BBC reports that the government of Côte D’Ivoire has resigned over the toxic waste scandal.

The Ivorian Prime Minister, Charles Konan Banny has offered his government’s resignation after a scandal over toxic waste in Abidjan.

Two people have died and several hundred are ill after inhaling fumes from toxic waste apparently dumped at sites in the city two weeks ago.
Ivorian cabinet quits over waste, BBC News, 6 September 2006, 23:00 GMT

The report also states that 2 girls died Monday from the effects of the poisoning. AlJazeera reports that three people died and 1,500 are seriously ill.

Why, on earth, does the government resign at a time when the people need it to coordinate cleanups, and assess the public health impact of this terrible incident?? Le Patriote suspects a purely political maneuver to appease upset citizens and ensure political futures.

During the night of August 20, the Probo Koala, a tanker built in 1989 and owned by the Celtic Legend Shipping Inc., docked at the harbor of Abidjan. Its cargo – a volatile, toxic blend of a petroleum distillate and hydrogen sulphide was unloaded its onto 13 tanker trucks. Under cover of the night, these trucks proceeded to dump the noxious, dangerous cargo at several places around this city of over 3.6 Million. Now hundreds of residents have been poisoned and many are critically ill.

The Abidjan local daily Patriote suggests that local officials may be implicated in this scandal, and that they may have been paid off by whoever is responsible for this horrible crime. Clearly, they had to have had some local help to be able to unload and dump more than 500 cubic meters of this toxic brew.

The thing about this that gets me more than a few local officials taking bribes, is the gall of some chemical industry plant managers or executives somewhere, deciding to dump this stuff into the sewers of a city in Africa!!!
“Yeah buddy, we got a tanker load of this shit, whaddo we do with it?” – “Oh, ya know, let’s just ship it to Africa and dump it into the sewers of some city there … no one will notice … “

And they thought that that is a good idea, and that they would get away with it?

I hope the cops, Interpol, or the WHO …. someone is going to find out who is behind this and make them explain why they did this to the parents of the 10-year-old kid who is now in a coma because of this terrible crime. Right?

(I’ll post more stories to del.icio.us/yovo/toxic_waste)

350.092 MpH (529km/h) – that is the new land speed record for a diesel-powered vehicle. Andy Green, a British RAF officer set this new landmark this morning with the JCB DieselMax. The vehicle is powered by two 4-cylinder diesel engines that deliver a peak power of 750hp and torque of 1500Nm at 2000 RPM. The engines are based on JBCs 444 engine, an industrial, common-rail injection diesel engine, which usually powers backhoes and other equipment.

In comparison, the fastest piston-engine car is currently Tom Burkland’s Streamliner, at 417 MpH (the official FIA record is 409.978 – set Aug 21, 1991 by Speed0Motive (source). The curent holder of the overall land speed record is ThrustSSC a jet-propelled land vehicle, which achieved 763 mph, or 1227 km/h on October 15, 1997. This was the first time a land vehicle broke the sound barrier.

Yesterday I decided that the biodiesel I made last weekend looked good enough for a fill up. I spent last week washing the stuff in my washtank – first is sprinkled water on it and drained the soapy water from the bottom. Then I put a bubbler in the water below the biodiesel. The rising bubbles drag water through the biodiesel, then they pop and the water sinks back down to the bottom. Kind of like Spongebob and Patrick riding the fishing hooks -up and down and up and down … and every time they pick up the soap from the biodiesel. This process gets the soap out, but it leaves water dissolved in the biodiesel, and that needs to get removed in the next step.

There are several ways to dry washed biodiesel. I chose bubble drying. I just removed the water from the bottom of the washtank and fired up the bubbler, again. I also pointed a box fan at the surface of the biodiesel. Now the bubbles of air pick up the water, and drag it to the surface, where it evaporates. After a couple of days of bubble treatment, the biodiesel had turned from murky to clear.

So Sunday evening, I drained five gallons from the tank and filtered it to 5 microns using a sock filter. Finally, I poured my first homebrew biodiesel into the fuel tank of my 2002 Jetta. I took it for a spin, and all was well. There were only about 1 1/2 gallons of commercial biodiesel left, so it is running on mostly homebrew at this point. I drove about 30 miles (50 KM) today, and I noticed no difference, compared to the commercial biodiesel.

This weekend I brewed my first 30-gallon/120 liters batch of biodiesel, using the modified appleseed reactor I built in the basement. I used fryer oil from a local restaurant that titrated at 1.6 with KOH, so it’s pretty decent quality feedstock. Saturday, Manfred came over and we did the titration, mixed the Methoxide and started the process. I had heated the oil to about 120 deg. F, and then I cut off the heater. When I started blending in the Methoxide, the temperature went down below 100 F (that’s as low as the thermometer goes) due to 6 gallons of the cooler fluid. Once all the Methoxide was blended in, and the pump was just blending the reactant, the temperature went back up to almost 120 F, which is great, as the reaction is an exothermic reaction.

I let the pump run for 6 hours, the I cut it off and let the reactant settle for about 20 hours. On Sunday evening I drained the glycerol and the I pumped the biodiesel into the wash tank. The product came out a tad soapy, and I turned up the spray washer too high at first. So when I held a light behind the wash drum I could not see a separation at all, and I thought the stuff had emulsified … pretty quickly, however, the water settled down, and I started draining the soap water out – 15 gallons so far. I could probably start bubble-washing now, but my bubble stone broke, and so I ordered new ones from Utah BD supply.

So I’ll be washing the stuff this week, and then drying it next week, and before long I should be able to feed my Jetta my first homebrew biodiesel.

For better or for worse – the Personal Computer turns 25 years today. In August 1981, IBM introduced the PC to the masses. Since then, the little beige box has changed the world and left quite a legacy.

Praise the Lard and celebrate the “Good Juice” today! It’s International Biodiesel Day – celebrate VEGPOWER!

Transesterification of a vegetable oil was conducted as early as 1853, by scientists E. Duffy and J. Patrick, many years before the first diesel engine became functional. Rudolf Diesel’s prime model, a single 10 ft (3 m) iron cylinder with a flywheel at its base, ran on its own power for the first time in Augsburg, Germany on August 10, 1893. In remembrance of this event, August 10 has been declared International Biodiesel Day. Diesel later demonstrated his engine and received the “Grand Prix” (highest prize) at the World Fair in Paris, France in 1900. This engine stood as an example of Diesel’s vision because it was powered by peanut oil—a biofuel, though not strictly biodiesel, since it was not transesterified. He believed that the utilization of a biomass fuel was the real future of his engine. In a 1912 speech, Rudolf Diesel said “the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal-tar products of the present time.”
Wikipedia: Biodiesel – Historical background

This weekend I plan on brewing my first big batch of biodiesel at home. I have all the ingredients – the only glitch is that my scale gave up the ghost :( but I’ll borrow one from a fellow biodieseler …

The use of biodiesel in Germany has increased by two-thirds compared to last year, according to press reports of the latest issue of the Wochenbericht des DIW Berlin. Germans overall drive a bit less, but the Germans who have to drive a lot, are switching to the more fuel-efficient diesel vehicles, which now represent 21 percent of the total passenger vehicle fleet in Germany. And I’d bet that more and more people switch to diesel vehicles planning to use biodiesel.

A major motivator for Germans are the fuel prices: a liter high-octane costs 1.398 Euros – that’s $6.76 per Gallon (US)! Considering those prices, I find the 3-percent reduction in average annual driving distance rather modest.

US gas price map by county
International Fuel Price comparison

Today’s Word of the Day was invented (I think) by my boss: picobuckets. We got a good chuckle out of this one during the staff meeting, when he tried to illustrate his consternation at some of the strange measurements of one of his fellow researchers.

Sixty one years ago 140,000 residents of the city of Hiroshima died when the United States Air Force dropped a nuclear bomb on the city. Three days later, the Americans bombed Nagasaki with another nuclear weapon, killing another 74,000 people. We may debate over the role of these bombings in WWII, but we shall never let these images fade away into history, because, despite of the end of the Cold War, we are still sitting on a huge pile of nuclear weapons. We cannot ever unleash this hellish technology again!

What a week: Snow and Tornadoes in South Africa and a deadly heatwave in the US. In the US, the Midwest and East Coast were cooking – New York declared a heat emergency with temperatures of up to 38°C/101F and a heat index of up to 110F/43°C. Here in Bahama it was sweltering, too, with a weekly high of 97F/36°C and over 90 percent humidity.

Rough weather conditions also wreaked havoc in South Africa and in the mountains of Lesotho last week. In Lesotho, eight people had to be rescued after their vehicle got stuck in the snow! And while New York was sweating, Johannesburg had snow flurries for the first time in eight years. On Tuesday, a tornado hit a town in Mpumalanga Province, and caused several injuries and some damage and severe flooding killed five people in the Easters Cape province.

And, of course, Typhoon Prapiroon caused death and devastation in Southern China …

According to the Global Crafts website, Volkswagen of America has backed off:

Volkswagen of America have sent a letter of apology and revoked the Cease & Desist notice. Thank you for your support, I know many of you emailed Volkswagen on our behalf.

They have also offered to work with us towards a license which we hope we can get in the name of the name of the artisans so that they can sell to and Fair Trade importer and eliminate the risk of this occurring again.

We would also like to publicly thank Peter Bloch at Lightyearsip.net who has helped and is continuing to help in this matter.
Global Crafts website, Aug. 3, 2006.

I hope they give their attack-dog lawyers a muzzle, too. Incidents like this are really counterproductive and damage VWs image.

Nevertheless: Congratulations, VWoA. Smart, timely decision.

This is a great example of elephants with sledgehammers protecting a china store: VW of America’s lawyers have sent “cease and desist” orders to the Fair-Trade importers of toys made by the Teenage Mothers of Kenya crafts cooperative:

Teenage Mothers and Girls Association of Kenya is an organization working for the rescue, rehabilitation and economic empowerment of girls and young women. Our programmes focus on helping solve the problems of HIV/AIDS infected children, their parents (often teenage girls who are single), orphans, the poor and the destitute of the community.
TEMAK website

Yeah, this sounds exactly like the type of organization on which VW wants to sick their lawyers. Make an example of these trademark-infringing teenage moms! Can you see the headlines on CNN and NPR: “Volkswagen sues Teen Moms of Kenya”

And over what? Toy cars made from wire!

These young women in Kenya thought it was a cute idea to make little VW Beetle® model cars to sell, so they could make a little bit of money support themselves and their kids. All over East Africa wire toys of this kind are popular and inexpensive fun for kids. And our own, gameboyed, interactivated, hypertained kids love the wire model cars and galimotos we buy at the local Fair Trade store.

VW should be proud that these folks chose the iconic Beetle® for their modest enterprise, and not the far more ubiquitous Toyotas. They should make an advertisement that highlights that when these women think “car” they picture a VW Beetle®!

Get a grip, VW of America. Embrace these women and give them a hand, instead of threatening their fair trade partners.

Last weekend was a big weekend for my biodiesel production project. Friday I pulled a 220 Volt/30 Amp circuit to the reactor in the basement. A friend who is an electrician emailed me instructions for what breaker and wiring to get, after I explained the project. So I cut the power, plugged in the new breaker, pulled the wire and hooked up the reactor. No biggie.

Saturday I filtered 120 Liters (30 Gals) of veggie oil and pumped it into the reactor, 20 Liters at a time, to calibrate the sight tube. That way I now know how much feedstock is in the vessel. Since I turned the water heater upside down, the heating element is a bit higher off the bottom as it would be the other way around. So the minimum fill is about 100 liters (25 Gals) for a batch. I then fired up the heater, and began circulating the oil to warm it up. I ran it for several hours to test it and to calibrate the temperature to just below 140 Deg. F. Once the oil was warm, I noticed a couple of leaks in the plumbing – nothing serious, just a little dripping. I’ll fix that this week.

Sunday I tinkered with my wash tank setup and realized that the stand for the tank is not sturdy enough. I’ll need to improve it – probably with some plywood. Also, the stand pipe leaks, because it’s not glued in yet. I’ll do that once I am happy with the setup.

This is very exciting. I am so close, I can smell my first big batch of homebrew!

To do:

• Fix plumbing
• Buy methanol and KOH
• Fix washtank
• Drying tank
• Setup for final filtering
• Prepare storage

There’s still a bit of work, but it looks like the centerpiece of my homebrew operation is in place now.

Praise the Lard!

Wal Mart is throwing the towel in Germany! Looks like they’ll sell their 85 German stores at a loss of $1Billion to Germany’s largest retailer Metro. I despise Wal Mart, and I find an odd sense of satisfaction in the news that German stubborn attitudes brought Wal Mart, the death star of retail, to its knees. I can just see Grandma Mayer slapping the bagger at the checkout on his fingers: “Those are MY groceries, young man – leave them alone! I bought ’em -I’ll bag ’em!”

Maybe stubborn consumer attitudes hurt Wal Mart, but stubborn worker attitudes really gave Wal Mart the rest. You just try telling German store workers they cannot unionize! Wal Mart sports a patronizing corporate “culture” which encourages ratting on fellow workers, frowns on dating fellow workers (not that I think that that’s generally a smart idea) and generally aims at disenfranchising its employees. This did not go over too well with the German workforce and gave Wal Mart a really negative image in the eyes of the consumer.

Seems like Germans have this funny, antiquated sense that store clerks should be competent professionals, and that they should be treated as such by their employers. Those silly Krautheimers and their attitudes!

Ah – hark the master of the moral high ground: the chief ethical executive from Royal Dutch Shell has spoken:

Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s top marketer of biofuels, considers using food crops to make biofuels “morally inappropriate” as long as there are people in the world who are starving, an executive said on Thursday.
Shell Says Biofuels From Food Crops “Morally Inappropriate” – PlanetArk, July 7, 2006

Yeah, biodiesel becomes popular and Big Oil finds its soft spot for the poor, starving masses. I would like to see them to produce a single current example where the biofuels cause hunger. Food shortages are usually caused by war, which in turn is often caused by conflict over scarce or valuable resources like oil. If any fuel is “morally inappropriate” it’s petroleum based fuel. Access to oil is the underlying reason for war, oppression and violence. Oil extraction destroys environmental resources and pollutes the earth.

Just ask the Ogoni people in Nigeria if Shell is acting in a “morally appropriate” way in the Niger delta:

Since Shell began drilling oil in Ogoniland in 1958, the people of Ogoniland have had pipelines built across their farmlands and in front of their homes, suffered endemic oil leaks from these very pipelines, been forced to live with the constant flaring of gas. This environmental assault has smothered land with oil, killed masses of fish and other aquatic life, and introduced devastating acid rain to the land of the Ogoni.
Shell in Nigeria: What are the issues? – Boycott Shell, 2001.

Big Oil buys arms for the Nigerian military, which terrorizes and kills anyone critical of the actions of Big Oil in the Niger Delta. A huge portion of Nigeria’s revenues come from oil, but the people who live in the Niger Delta, where the oil is extracted, see nothing of it. Except maybe the guns bought from it. But they are at the wrong end of the gun barrel.

Clearly it would be preferable for fuel and food production NOT not to be in competition. Pursuing ways to make fuel from waste biomass is great. We need to pursue all options that might yield efficient, renewable sources of fuels, and if Shell can come up with a way to make fuel efficiently without competing with food crops for land or resources – more power to them. But to have Big Oil make pronouncements regarding the ethics of fuel production is absurd.

No, biodiesel is not much of a spectator sport and provides only little entertainment value to most people. But when Lyle talks about biodiesel he is really funny and quite entertaining. Lyle’s humorous and insightful stories from the epicenter of the North Carolina biofuels movement made yesterday’s book reading at the Regulator Bookstore in Durham a real success. The event was well attended – roughly 40 – 50 people – and the discussion after the reading was quite lively. Just like the book, the discussion was focused less on technical issues and more on “big-picture” topics, like the regulatory environment, the status of the sustainability movement, biofuels-centered lifestyles, and the place of biofuels in the sustainable-energy toolbox for this country.

Lyle posts regular updates about his adventures and insights on his energy blog on the Piedmont Biofuels website.

Mexico’s presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (or AMLO), unlike Gore or Kerry, is not about to give up his fight for democracy and justice in his country. In light of evidence of blatant ballot-stuffing by the ruling party PAN, and considering that nearly one million votes have not been counted, the PRD’s candidate has called for massive protests in Mexico City and across the country to pressure the electoral commission (which is controlled by the ruling PAN) to order a complete re-count.

There does seem to be evidence that the ruling PAN also had help from North-of-the-Border. Greg Palast, who published many reports about the problems with the elections in 2000 and 2004, says he has evidence that the Republican-friendly voter-purgers from ChoicePoint compiled citizen files and voter lists for Mexico and Venezuela, just like they did for Florida, under the cover of a “counter-terrorism” contract with the FBI. The Mexican list was apparently provided to the ruling PAN in order to be used to “scrub” AMLO-supporters from the voter rolls for the presidential election earlier this month.

Why does the US government want to influence the elections in Mexico? Could it be because Mexico sell more crude oil to the US than Saudi Arabia:

US Crude Oil Imports (Thousand Barrels per Day)

Country 	YTD 2006
CANADA 		1,757 	
MEXICO 		1,668 	
SAUDI ARABIA 	1,422 	
VENEZUELA 	1,186 	
NIGERIA 	1,134 	
IRAQ 		666 	

source: US EIA

This may be a simplistic POV, but the US government is aggressively meddling with the internal affairs of just about each of these countries (not sure about Canada, though I would not be surprised), especially where the powers-that-be start talking about regulation and public ownership of natural resources (Venezuela, Saddam in Iraq). If the US government spent half the effort on energy conservation, fuel efficiency and alternative energy sources, as it spends on meddling with the internal affairs of these countries – let alone occupying them – this country would be a healthier place in many ways, and the world would be a much more peaceful place.

President Bush is visiting (de) Angela Merkel’s home district in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The cute, historic town of Stralsund is under siege: all cars had to be removed to lots outside the town, gutters are welded shut, mailboxes sealed, stores cannot open, and residents are even prohibited from opening their WINDOWS in July! (Remember very few German houses have A/C). And to top it off, no one knows who will foot the 20-million-Euro bill for the visit.

Way to win the “hearts and minds” of the folks in Stralsund …