The “Unity Parade” is one the highlights of the Eno Festival.

The 26th Festival for the Eno is one of the biggest community events here in Durham. The festival lasted for three days, Saturday thru Monday and it was, as always, great family fun. This year, the 4th of July weekend (US Independence Day) was a bit less sweltering hot than the last couple of years, and the turnout seems to have been very good.

The festival is a real treat of local color, lots of North Carolina homegrown artistic talent, on and off stage, lots of grassroots activism and entrepreneurship. The purpose of the festival is to raise funds for the Eno River Association, which buys up land along the banks of the Eno for preservation, creating a buffer that protects this pretty river against encroaching development.

Saturday, I volunteered at the info booth of Piedmont Biofuels and was very busy most of the day. Yesterday, Laura and I took the kids to the festival to enjoy it as a family. We just hung out all day, jammed to the music, splashed in the river, perused the crafts booths. We had a grand old time. I think that over the last 10 years we have missed the Eno Festival only once or twice.

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The first day of the Festival for the Eno here in Durham was fun and seemed like a great success. The festival was packed and gaggles of children were frolicking in the cool waters of the river. Throngs of people were checking out the crafts stands and info booths around the five stages in the West Point on the Eno park.

I spent most of the day, from 10 to 4, working at the info booth of Piedmont Biofuels, promoting the use of biodiesel and renewable fuels in general. We were very busy all day, answering many questions from “what’s biodiesel?” to “what do you do with the glycerol?” We signed up many people for our email lists and many people took brochures and wrote down website addresses for more reading up on biofuels. It was really awesome to see all this interest and discussion about energy independence, total economic cost of petroleum versus biofuels, public health and policy issues and so forth.

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Laura just called and pointed me to a story on biodiesel on NPR’s Morning Edition:

Mike Pelly, owner of Olympia Green Fuels, uses bio-diesel fuel to power his two cars. He makes the mixture from used vegetable oil discarded by Chinese restaurants and fast-food joints. Pelly tells Steve Inskeep how it works. NPR : Driving a ‘Green’ Vehicle

Our local “paper of record,” the News & Observer, published a brief item about our biodiesel pump. (2nd item on the page)

Interesting post on a Biodiesel-hydrogen-powered hummer Limo in New Mexico (and other renewable energy experiments).

BTW – talking about renewable energy … Iceland uses its abundant geothermal energy to produce electricity and heat.

America’s addiction to oil is one of her most serious problems. It is a burden on the economy because it drains trillions of dollars from this country every year. And it is the Achilles’ Heel of the economy because oil is getting more and more expensive, and eventually we will run out of oil. At that point, the US economy will collapse if it has to go “cold turkey” on petroleum.

To spread this message several organizations got together and launched a campaign to invite Americans to sign a Declaration of Independence from Oil. I, for one, am happy to sign the declaration. My car runs on veggies :)

Go ahead and sign the declaration to send a message to Cheney and Ford.

So I guess I survived the first day back at work after our awesome, two-week vacation in Iceland and Germany. We are still processing the sights, sounds and cultural impressions. Iceland struck us as a very cool and quietly very powerful place. Huge geological forces are at work here, glaciers and volcanoes shape this island. Everywhere you see hissing steam vents, boiling mud holes, groaning icebergs, vast lava deserts and massive waterfalls in lush valleys. The Icelanders are a quiet, self-reliant people whose culture was shaped by toughing it out on this remote, inhospitable rock in the Atlantic.

For five days we explored Reykjavik (the capital) and the southern coast of Iceland. We had great weather – lots of sunshine and temperatures in the upper 50s (15 degrees C). Even the most popular tourist attractions outside Reykjavik were not particularly crowded, maybe a dozen cars and a couple of tour buses at the most. And at some of the waterfalls and famous black sand beaches we saw hardly more than a handful other tourists. And this was the peak of the season!

After five days in Iceland, we continued to Frankfurt and spent 9 days cruising south-west Germany to visit friends and family. It was quite hot in Germany, and after Iceland, Germany seemed twice as crowded and hectic. We did a bit of sightseeing, too. and visited the Freiburg cathedral, the ducal palace and gardens in Ludwigsburg and the Heidelberg castle. Pretty standard tourist fare, but pretty interesting, nevertheless. And after the $10-beers and hot dogs in Iceland we did enjoy relatively inexpensive and tasty food in Germany.

The children certainly deserve mention as seasoned travellers who weathered jet lag, long drives, unusual foods and a rather exhausting pace with bravado and style. They seemed to enjoy every new little adventure, and they brought fresh curiosity to every new place we explored.

Now it’s back to the grindstone and work, work, work …. as soon as I have the time, I’ll set up a nice photo album for the trip.

Wow – back in silly-visation after 5 days in Iceland! What a gorgeous, wild raw place! Pictures to follow. After that, Germany seems twice as hectic and crowded. But the weather is great and the beer is a LOT better and more affordable than in Iceland.

Oh boy! Don’t take your greasecar into Yellowstone (via Sustainablog):

Larry Joy, a 53-year-old electrician, said the bear shattered a window on his 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit, tipped the plastic fuel tank on its side and gnawed on car hoses about two weeks ago. He said the evidence included muddy paw prints around the broken window and a pool of cooking oil on the rear floorboard.
Newsday.com: Owner of biodiesel car says smell of vegetable oil attracted bear

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.