Great news: the first real biodiesel pump in Durham is ready to roll!

Leif and the crew from Piedmont Biofuels today installed the pump and plumbed the tank expertly. Then they filled the tank with the “good juice” and I had the extreme pleasure of being the first customer to pump six gallons from our 500-gallon juice box. :-)

Big, huge thanks to Lyle, Rachel, Leif and the whole crew at Piedmont Biofuels for their support and expertise!

So now you all can head on over to the Piedmont Biofuels website and sign up as members of the coop:
http://biofuels.coop/membership.shtml
Then contact Marc and/or myself and we can get you set up to start pumping biodiesel in Durham.

When Dr. Bush exhorted the benefits of renewable fuels recently, I was suspicious. This snake-oil salesman of a president has put one over the American taxpayer so many times, I am not inclined to take anything he says at face value. Point in case: the biodiesel tax incentive could potentially damage the nascent biodiesel industry because the incentive is written in a way that leaves the small and mid-size biodiesel producers, who care most about the product, out in the cold. One of them, Kumar at Fueled for Thought has a detailed analysis of how this tax incentive shoots the biodiesel industry in the foot:

1. The incentive for pure biodiesel (B100) is a corporate income tax credit, which has the greatest benefit for very large corporations
2. The more accessible tax incentive is tied to bio-petrodiesel blends
3. The incentive prefers first-use oil over yellow grease products, although recycling used grease is an essential benefit of biodiesel
4. The incentive destroys the balance of supply and demand for biodiesel, which creates opportunities for bankers and other thieves to speculate with a product they don’t understand or care about

Biodiesel is still an early-adopter market, largely unregulated, or rather self-regulated. I’m not a free-marketer, but here is an industry that was doing well on its own, growing by leaps and bounds, thank-you-very-much. Then those big-government Republican (and Dem) wheeler-and-dealer types came in and started messing with it. Not because they give a damn about the technology, saving the earth from choking to death or relieving our landfills from tons of grease. No, they smell money.

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Considering the Chinese government’s record of dealing with public health issues (SARS!), I had been wondering about all these reassurances from Chinese officials that “Everything is OK. Don’t worry. Just a couple of dead birds …”

But if there is no reason to be alarmed, why has China rushed to shut down all its national parks, sealed off Lake Qinghai, and ordered the vaccination of millions of poultry across vast areas of western China?
China bird flu could ’cause mayhem’ BBC News

This commentary at Recombinomics paints a scary picture of what may really be going on in western China: a phase 6 pandemic of H5N1!

Reports coming out of Qinghai suggest H5N1 infections in humans and birds are out of control, with birds distributing H5N1 to the north and west, while people are being cremated and told to keep quiet.

Reports from Chinese language papers detail over 200 suspected infections in over two dozen locations in Qinghai Province. In the most affected 18 regions, there are 121 deaths, generating a case fatality rate above 60%.
Final Phase 6 Bird Flu Pandemic in Qinghai China?

The folks at Effect Measure are also worried about the situation in Qinghai, but they don’t think that a news blackout has been imposed:

It is too soon to jump to conclusions about what is happening here. The suggestion there has been a news blackout is worrisome. China is especially sensitive about such charges because of the SARS episode so I think this is unlikely, but we just don’t know at the moment. We will keep our eye on this.

I think it is time that the Chinese government provides some clear, credible evidence of what is going on in Qinghai. The implications of a highly infections virus on the loose with a human death-rate of 60 percent (or higher) is not a Chinese problem. It’s a global problem.

Our juice box is almost ready. All that’s missing is the flowmeter and some biodiesel and we’re ready to fill’er up.

Marc got help from Filiberto, who runs the garage we’re sharing the space with, and Filiberto’s assistant Celso. They picked up the tank with the forklift, picked up the forklift with the tow truck and drove it across the gravel parking lot. Then they backed the truck to the platform and set down the tank. No sweat!

Next week we’re meeting with Lyle and Rachel from Piedmont Biofuels to figure out how we might run this little operation, get the juice, do the accounting, and so forth. My goal is to make this as simple as possible, so that we can be up-and-running in short order.

As the Abuja meeting between the RPT and the opposition concluded, not surprisingly without any tangible results, news broke yesterday that the opposition candidate of the last “election” in Togo had fallen ill:

Emmanuel Akitani Bob was flown on Thursday to a hospital outside Paris, where he is being treated for neurological problems, doctors say.
…
He was evacuated after talks in Nigeria aimed at solving the political crisis.

A medical source in Togo’s capital, Lome, said Mr Akitani Bob had a stroke that paralysed the left side of his face and his left arm.
BBC NEWS | Africa | Togo candidate ‘suffers stroke’

Considering the man’s age and the stress of his position in the last few months, this is not totally shocking. But I can very well imagine the rumors that may be circulating in Togo, right now.

Update about Francois Boko:
Steve Grogoza, a Naples, Florida lawyer, returned Peace Corps volunteer, and friend of the interior-minister-turned-dissident Francois Boko, posted his account of the events surrounding Boko’s attempt to stop the elections.

When the Togolese regime found out about Boko hiding in the German embassy, the the Goethe Institute in Lomé was torched by RPT thugs, destroying a very nice cultural center, library and information resource for the folks in Lomé.

According to Grogoza, Boko is now in Paris and has plans to travel to the US.

Recently I embarked on quest to launch a biodiesel distribution coop in Durham, and the project made a great step forward today. I teamed up with Marc of Forests of the World who has been working on plans to start a biodiesel production plant in Durham. To get the distribution coop started, we are planning to rent a 500 Gallon tank (below) and space on this site in Durham on Ellis Rd. Today we got the platform ready and now we just have to find a way to move the 600 pound stainless steel tank across the gravel lot and onto the platform. The owner of the site has a forklift, but it cannot run on the gravel. We could set it on a trailer and the attach pulleys to the awning and hoist the beast up there.

The advantage of setting it up on the platform is that we can use gravity to distribute the biodiesel and avoid purchasing a pump. There are two places in the area that can deliver biodiesel with a tanker truck. Then all we need to do is open a valve at the bottom of the tank and fill’er up! The site is also in a good geographic location in the Triangle. It’s maybe a half-mile from one of the main freeways in Durham that connects to two Interstate Highways – I-85 and I-40. It is a 5-Minute drive from downtown Durham and 10 Minutes from Research Triangle Park.

An interesting feature of this site is that there are also other tanks literally lying around that could be cleaned up and added, if the demand is great enough. And of course there are these huge 10,000 Gallon tanks in the back, that could be restored to working order and used for biodiesel. Lots of growth potential. But first we have to get this 500 Gallon tank up and running.

Over at Au Village, my friend Agbessi has posted some of his horrific experiences as a student in Togo, at the Universié du Benin in Lomé. I saw the tension between the students and the “security” forces myself when I was in Togo.

Akila is trying to get used to his glasses …

Maggie went to a wedding in the D. R. of Congo:

i have been pretty timid about whipping the camera out just anywhere, so i asked virgine if it would be alright to take some pictures and she gave me the go ahead. as SOON as i had the camera out a woman from the crowd grabbed me and pulled me up next to the family of the groom, so i could have access to take pics of anything i wanted… as long as i took a picture of her as well and promised to send it back. i nodded and promised and will hold to it.

Ethan has some insights into the workings of the Global Voices aggregator.

Uh – oh! I hope this is not the Kiss of Death for biodiesel. Hark the shrubman:

“Biodiesel is one of our nation’s most promising alternative fuel sources and by developing biodiesel you’re making this country less dependent on foreign sources of oil,” [President Bush] said.

“Americans are concerned about high prices at the pump and they’re really concerned as they start making their travel plans, and I understand that,” the president said. “I wish I could just wave a magic wand and lower the price at the pump. I’d do that. But that’s not how it works.”
Bush urges development of alternate fuels, AP via BusinessWeek, May 16, 2005.

Indeed, Mr. Prezman, that’s not how it works. Thanks for pointing that out! We know you understand about travel plans. You travel a lot. And you make travel plans for others, too. We understand that. And, I guess, no one told you that biodiesel is not about lowering the price at the pump. It is all about reducing air pollution and cutting down the waste of that precious crude in internal combustion engines. We understand that you don’t understand that.

George Bush has a track record of praising ideas, programs, people and then turning around and cutting funding for them. Molly Ivins documented this phenomenon in a column last year: Bush’s Kiss of Death. Considering this administration’s ties to the oil (fossil not veggie) industry, I need to see serious action before I believe a word of this. I mean, the secretary of State had an oil tanker named after her – the MS Condeleezza Rice!

Here we go: I finished the new dress for this blog. It’s just the WordPress default theme with new graphics. I am not much of a graphic artist, but it’s good enough for now.

The hardest thing about amateur graphic design is to resist the PowerPoint effect. That’s what happens when the VP of Marketing has too much coffee and decides to use every single animated transition effect in Powerpoint for the next marketing strategy presentation. Push from left – wipe right -uncover from top – checkerboard, disolve, blinds vertical, wheel clockwise, …. or even worse: the random trasition setting. We have all seen those. They make me seasick.

Photoshop is equally seductive. I sit at the computer and get sweaty hands, thinking “must. resist. texture. effect.” My vision gets blurry, yellow spots dance on the computer screen, then I loose control of my mousepad … and apply …. a …. dropshadow!

With all the fancy, flashy features: textures, drop shadows, liquify, distort, noise, pixelate … I find it takes a lot of self-control not to go completely overboard on graphic effects. But especially for an amateur it is important to keep it simple. I did my best to resist.

Today is World Fair Trade Day and we spent a good part of the afternoon at One World Market in Durham, where Laura works. To celebrate, they offered refreshments and snacks, and they had Fair Trade quizzes and contests with prizes. The point of Fair Trade Day is to educate people and to “promot[e] fairer trade with marginalised and small scale producers in the majority world.”

The Fair Trade movement is globalization at its best. It focuses on the human connection in global trade and ensures that when I purchase a product that improves my quality of life by its beauty and function, I also know that it improved the life of the person or family that produced it by putting food on the table, helping to educate the children, or purchase products they need. Usually, this exchange also has educational value. I learn about the community where the product was created and the producer learns about the needs in the target markets, usually via sales feedback from the wholesale middlemen.

The integrity of this relationship is critical to the success of the Fair Trade concept. The buyer has to be able to trust the seller about this relationship. That’s why the middlemen have to be certified by an organization like the The International Fair Trade Association or the Fair Trade Labeling Organization. The Fair Trade Resource Network has a great FAQ about Fair Trade and the standards and principles.

So if you buy for example a Persian rug for your living room and you care whether the people who made it were working in good conditions and paid a decent wage, or whether they were chained to the loom in a dim sweatshop and paid with a bowl of rice, then Fair Trade is for you.

Recombination or mutation, that seems to be the big question regarding the avian flu (H5N1) virus in Viet Nam. In yesterday’s edition of the journal Nature, Klaus Stöhr reports that the WHO has not received enough samples of the virus to judge the genetic changes it has found in the few availabe samples.

With so few samples to work on, it is impossible to judge how worried to be, says Klaus Stöhr, coordinator of the WHO’s flu programme. “It’s as if you hear a noise in your car engine, but you keep driving, not knowing whether it’s serious.”

Of the six human samples that the WHO has received from Vietnam, several contain a mutated version of H5N1. But that is not enough to indicate a broader change in the strain, says Perdue. It is also impossible for the agency to link this mutation of the virus to possible changes in how pathogenic and transmissible it is in humans.
The WHO isn’t being sent samples of deadly H5N1 virus., Nature, 11 May 2005

The WHO interprets the changes in the H5N1 virus as mutation, but Recombinomics argues that it may be a result of recombination, which is more troublesome because it means that the the H5N1 changes by acquiring genes from other viruses, which means it could easily acquire the properties of a human flu virus. That, in turn could allow it to start spreading like the human flu, but with the mortality rate of the avian flu. With the H5N1 mortality rate for humans well over 50 percent such a virus has the potential of killing millions of people all over the globe.

The WHO and the public health authorities in S-E Asia need to get their act together. This is an issue that goes far beyond worrying about the economic impact on a country or region. This is about making sure that in ten years there is an economy left in Viet Nam at all, and the rest of the world.

After the so-called elections in Togo on April 24, the opposition decried the fraud, the stuffed ballot boxes, the disappeared ballot boxes, the stolen computers, the armed raids of opposition offices, and the general intimidation of the electorate. Shortly after the election, the opposition website diastode.org published a confidential document in which European Commission delegates quote an unnamed RPT source as saying that the actual results of that “election” had probably been closer to 30% Faure Gnassingbe and 70% Bob Akitani. IRIN reports that these document have been verified and that roughly 34% of the voters on the voter rolls were fake:

IRIN obtained confirmation from European diplomatic sources of the authenticity of the documents, …

“Observation by diplomatic missions….on voting day highlighted the lack of reliability of the electoral rolls, an apparently widespread system of fake pro-Gnassingbe votes and numerous cases of the military snatching ballot-boxes ahead of the count,” the document said.

It noted that there were 900,000 phantom voters on Togo’s electoral register nationwide, which increased the roll-call by 34 percent. Half of those fictitious names were found in areas of Togo said to favour Gnassingbe’s ruling Rally for the Togolese People (RPT).

According to the document, the percentage of voter cards handed out in RPT strongholds was between 80 and 95 percent, while only 41 percent were distribute.
TOGO: Diplomatic documents surface citing fraud in April poll, IRIN, 6 May 2005

So why does France support the Gnassingbe regime, and why does the ECOWAS turn a blind eye toward such blatant abuses? I believe it’s because neither has an interest in change and progress in Togo. France, or the Françafricaine, has a well-established, very profitable relationship with the Gnassingbe clan. And ECOWAS is only interested in stability – at any cost.

It’s about time. Germany is finally ready to dedicate a major memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe today joins Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Museum and many other places of remembrance. In plain view of the Reichstag building, where the German parliament deliberates in the heart of Berlin, this memorial contributes to the important task of keeping alive the memory of those dark years and the shameful, horrific persecution and butchery of millions of innocent people, perpetrated supposedly “in the name of the German people.”

We will not forget.

We must fight hatred and terror today, and we must stop the violence perpetrated on the innocent today. We must speak out for the rights of every human to live in peace and dignity. To be able to do that we must be able to face the horror of the past.

When I left Germany 11 years ago I spent the last night at my Grandfather’s. He lived near Frankfurt and my flight left early in the morning, so he was going to drive me to the airport. My grandfather was of old Prussian stock, stubborn, proud and very conservative. I had never heard him talk much about the war; It was very clear he was very bitter about it. Years ago, my mom told me, he had written down his war experiences, but one night, in a fit of depression, he burned the papers.

So that night, in 1994, I was very surprised when, over a bottle of Bergsträsser wine, he began talking about the war. He reminisced about his adventures in arctic Norway, the march on Paris, the brutal east front and the heat of North Africa. He told me about run-ins with the SS he had had. He spoke of the Nazis with what seemed genuine disgust. He complained that those young, reckless SS officers had no respect for the values of the German Reichswehr, he said he was committed to. And he spoke of the horror of war, and the death and destruction the Reichswehr and the other armies spread across Europe.

My Grandfather’s war stories that night may have been shaky on historical accuracy, but they were an honest reflection of this old man’s desire, almost 50 years after the German surrender, to find some value, some meaning in this horrible experience. And maybe even to extract some honor or dignity from the defeat. This was the voice of an old man who was wallowing in self-pity, who never learned to move forward, never learned from the trauma in his life, and pass on lessons from his experience to a new generation. But it was also the voice of a generation buried under historical shame, crushing defeat and personal tragedy.

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S&P downgraded to “junk” status two of the largest automakers in the world, Ford and General Motors, because these companies have been thoroughly mismanaged:

… decades of management miscues … led Standard & Poor’s yesterday to cut the credit ratings of both the world’s largest car maker and Ford Motor Co. to junk-bond status for the first time. GM and Ford, once icons of American manufacturing, have blundered over issues ranging from design, vehicle size and fuel economy to union contracts and meeting the challenge from rivals such as Japan’s Toyota.

“They have a pretty bad track record on guessing the market,” says Thomas Stallkamp, 58, who was president of Chrysler Corp. before it was acquired by Daimler-Benz AG in 1998 and is now a partner at the New York buyout firm Ripplewood Holdings LLC. “They went with the sure bet, and the market moved around them.”
GM, Ford Stumbled to Junk on Designs, Unions, Japan’s Challenge – Bloomberg.com

Their marketing departments have brainwashed many Americans into a bigger-is-better attitude on personal transportation. They completely ignored the fact that we will run out of oil eventually. Now it is becoming increasingly clear that we will run out of oil sooner, rather than later, and we might be hitting world-wide peak oil before 2010. Even the heavily subsidized gas prices in the US are steadily increasing. With the gas price over $2.20/Gallon (55 cents/liter), SUVs are becoming a much less popular choice, despite the slick, macho ads on cable TV.

So the dino-fuel-guzzling SUV’s follow the fate of the dinosaurs, and they are dragging down the greedy, short-sighted companies that created them:

A broad, sustained, long-term strategy was missing, says Ian Beavis, 52, a former Ford marketing manager who launched the Lincoln Navigator SUV in 1997 and is now a consultant at the Shop LLC, a marketing firm in Long Beach, California.

“Short-term profits, that’s all that was driving it,” he says. “Everyone looked at how much they were making on Navigators and Expeditions and said, `Oh, my goodness, we can make more of this.”’

And why are short-term profits all they care about? Because the executive “compensation packages” are tied to short-term goals. The focus on the next quarterly earnings statement in corporate America has spawned some of the worst corporate scandals in history, and it has laid the groundwork for massive economic collapse, once we hit peak oil.

A few reports have emerged that paint a dire picture of the escalating violence in south-west Togo. Particularly the mountainous area known as the Plateaux, roughly between Kpalimé, 80 miles/120KM north of Lomé, to Atakpamé, 110 miles/170KM north of Lomé. Thomas Hofnung at the French Libération spoke by phone with a reporter in the regional center Kpalimé, who describes atrocities committed by the military as well as by militant opposition supporters. He reports that a gendarmerie official in Adéta (north of Kpalimé) had been beheaded, and that five civilians were killed in retaliation.

Agbessi told me last night that he called friends in that region, who confirm these reports and paint an even worse picture. They report that the military arrested teachers and clergy, and rounded up a number of kids at a High School. Several people he knows had to flee or hide, for fear they might be arrested.

The increasing level of violence in that part of the country, and the descriptions of the killings, lead me to believe that the local, traditional militias known as Asafo may have been mobilized. During the strike of 1990, these militias killed or chased out all government representatives in the area and took over. These guys are fascinating and scary. Even the soldiers are scared of them. The bloodshot eyes in the painted face of an “active” Asafo stare at you from a corner of the human soul that few of us can bear to face.

As painful as it is … remember!

The hollow wail of the traditional Jewish shofar cut through the air of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in southern Poland on Thursday, signaling the start of a huge march in memory of the Holocaust.

Some 20,000 people from around the world, Jews and non-Jews, set off under grey skies on Thursday to make their way from the main camp to Birkenau, where at least 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jews, were exterminated by the Nazis.
March of Living Marks Holocaust – Deutsche Welle

[NOTE: this was originally posted on Global Voices Online, a project at the Berkman Center at Harvard. Check out their daily roundups of blogs across the globe. Global Voices is a fantastic resource, if you’re interested in world wide blogging.]

By Jurgen and Agbessi .

It’s official: Faure Gnassingbe has inherited the family business from his daddy, Gnassingbe Eyadema: ACME Dictators Inc. – Exploiting Togo since 1967. Like father, like son, Faure was installed by a military coup on Feb. 6, the day after Eyadema died. After some international pressure he pulled back and performed a perfect bait-and-switch maneuver. He retreated, called elections, and then used the de-facto single-party state apparatus to pull off an Eyadema-style fake election, complete with stolen ballot boxes, army raids on opposition offices and fire bombed cultural centers. Dad would be proud.

So what is really going on in Togo? Don’t ask the journalists. The BBC, AFP and Reuters all reported reliably about the crisis. But they provide very little background. The regional media are mostly concerned about the crisis spilling into the neighboring countries. The Togolese media are too close to the fire for clear-headed analysis. The ruling RPT’s rag just sings the Eyadema – uh, I mean Faure – song. The opposition’s LeTogolais has more depth, but still tows their party line.

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Hardly surprising: Togo’s constitutional court, anointed by the the ruling RPT, announced that the the RPT’s “candidate” Faure Gnassingbe will be Togo’s new ruler:

The opposition, desperate for change after 38 years of rule by Gnassingbe’s father, refused to concede defeat on Tuesday.

“The results are unacceptable, we are going to mobilise the population because we have no other option,” Jean-Pierre Fabre, leader of the main UFC opposition party, told IRIN. “Our only option is to resist by all the means available to us constitutionally.”
Father-son transition made official as thousands continue to flee – Reuters Alertnet, 03 May 2005

So Baby Eyadema is going to take over the family business. The billions of dollars Eyadema squeezed out of this poor, troubled country for his clan apparently are not enough.

The military is brutally terrorizing the civilian population in Togo and thousands are fleeing to Benin and Ghana.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said that more than 9,000 refugees had been registered in Benin and around 7,500 in Ghana. Many of the most recent arrivals were from Be, said Rafik Saidi, the agency’s regional representative.

Many of the refugees claimed they were harassed by security forces in Togo and some were suffering from bullet wounds.

The government last week put the casualty toll at 22 but a spokesman for the six-party opposition coalition, Yawovi Agboyibo, said this weekend that 106 people had died and hundreds had been injured.

At the offices of Togo’s Human Rights League, one man told IRIN that his brother had been shot dead at 10 p.m. on Sunday “by men in fatigues”. His wife and four children were beaten up so badly that one daughter was in hospital and his 14-year-old son could no longer see.

“We don’t know why, they said nothing. They just stormed into the house. Now my brother is in the morgue,” said the resident of the Lome suburb of Baguida, who did not want to be identified.
TOGO: More than 16,500 flee as edgy Lome awaits official poll results – IRIN, 2 May 2005

It would appear as if the military is intentionally stirring up this conflict ahead of the announcement of the official “election” results. The RPT must love all the footage on CNN and the BBC of screaming opposition protesters with burning barricades in the background. That way they can be seen as “restoring order” when they shoot unarmed civilians.