Uh-oh. Now they gone and did it. Clint Eastwood is going to be, like, so pissed!
From the Telegraph (UK):
The Orang-utans of Borneo are facing an unprecedented threat as their habitat is destroyed to satisfy increasing global demands for bio-fuel.
As jungles are rapidly replaced by palm oil plantations, the great apes starve and are hunted, mutilated, burnt and snared by workers protecting their crops.At a rehabilitation centre run by the charity Borneo Orang-utan Survival, there are more than 600, mostly orphaned babies. Lone Nielsen, the centre’s director, estimates that for each of the 227 animals they rescued last year, five more were killed in central Borneo alone.
“There are broken bones, cracked skulls, burns, internal injuries,” said Miss Nielsen. “The plantation workers beat them because they want to catch them and the only way you can catch an orang-utan is to knock it unconscious.”
Each orphan must be raised to the age of eight by a human “mother” who teaches it to be afraid of rubber snakes and other hazards before it can be released on to an island.
The “children” engage in amusingly human antics – one of them walking with a stick like an old man. In Indonesian “orang-utan” means “forest people” and after humans they are the most intelligent primate.
In 2004 there were 37,000 living on Borneo and the only other wild population is around 7,000 on the neighbouring island of Sumatra. The palm oil crisis struck central Borneo in 2003, shortly after the Indonesian government declared it wanted to become the world’s biggest producer.
In 2004 a “master plan” was unveiled to create 40,000 square miles of plantations by 2010. Campaigners say 70 per cent of the plantations will replace existing forests. As the plan is put into effect, each year provides more orang-utan casualties than the last for Miss Nielsen’s centre.
With the world desperate for “green” fuels, demand for palm oil, which is used in bio-diesel, is guaranteed to increase. According to European legislation two per cent of all diesel must be vegetable oil, rising to 5.7 per cent in 2010 and 10 per cent by 2020.
But in the areas where palm oil is produced, environmental concerns barely register with government authorities or the companies they licence. Global prices are rising and there is big money at stake.
A common tactic, campaigners say, is for plantation firms to first burn the forest then buy up the degraded land for a pittance.
Inconvenience a few caribou; beat, slaughter and torch to death the second most intelligent primates on earth so you can pretend you’re doing something about the crisis of “climate change” pushed by Al freaking Gore.
Tomato, tomahto.
Irony, irowny.
Ah, what the hell. Sometimes you have to be willing to burn a jungle to the ground and beat its native wildlife to death with sticks in order to save it.
(h/t Mo Lane. See also, Blue Crab Boulevard)
“Saute, and simmer
The flavor can’t be beat
Eco irowny
The San Francisco treat!”
Well look, who do these Orang-utans (where did that hyphen come from?) think they are to stand in the way of environmental preservation?
They go in to these virgin forests and eat the leaves and swing from the trees and do god knows what other damage! If they’re so intelligent, then they know the proper way to behave: “take only pictures, leave only footprints”.
I have no sympathy for them. The Philistines.
But I think mostly that it’s very sad to beat monkeys.
I don’t know, happyfeet. It looks like these folks have would a way to beat the monkey(s) for profit. Nice gig if you can get it
Good grief, how much can 1,135 ape offsets a year really cost?
If they can’t afford the offsets ….. fuck-em …
It’s the administrative overhead that kills you, Kirk.
Don’t take that wrong , I was typing while Kirk was being posted , gawd that sounded awful .
Don’t we already have enough of them in zoos?
We’ve looked at the numbers, Mr. Utan, and the news is not good.
Based on the Knut focus group, we can tell you that people find polar bears VASTLY cuter and therefore more sympathetic than yourself, sir.
Therefore the biofuels win, and you, unfortunately, have to lose. So sorry.
NEXT!
— Excerpted from the dictaphone transcripts of a future AGCC worldbureaucrat.
Matthew 25:45
Orang-utan – Malay, “old man of the forest”
I’d be in favor of limited rights for the Great Apes (Chimps, Gorillas, Orangs) – no voting rights, thanks, but some human rights, like the right not to be killed indiscriminately for one. They are pre-sentient, in my opinion, and deserve their chance at growing up.
SB: necessary Marshal
” They are pre-sentient, in my opinion, and deserve their chance at growing up ”
Agree , hence the apology above .
(where did that hyphen come from?)
It means “written by assholes.”
Like the shift from “BC” to “BCE” (which doesn’t change whose “B” that is) or from the funny “Uranus” to the stupid “Uranus” (which still isn’t how the Romans pronounced it) or from “Neanderthal” to “Neandertal” (which is now even more weirdly mispronounced semi-German), the hyphen (in this latest incarnation, at least) started out as a shibboleth — an empty signal among academics that they’re not you. Now it’s leaked from the professors to their nutlickers, who are parading their hyphens and “correcting” everyone, little slivers Hegemonic Authority rattling in their pants.
Since the hyphen’s (back) out and turning common (again), they’ll soon have to change “orangutan” to something even more stupid (again). I hope it’s to “Oranj-uh Tan,” because the Fall is almost as awesome as campus apes (and their apes) aren’t.
They need to make another Clint Eastwood movie, then they’d have the respect they need to be saved. Or mutate into a giant orangutang that can demand respect while taking on the wold’s militaies.
This is terrible. Can’t biofuels be made out of waste like used cooking oil? If the local governments were smart, they’d preserve the forests and promote ecotourism, which can be very lucrative.
I saw we arm the hairy little bastards. Those plantation owners wouldn’t be quite so cavalier about burning down the jungle if the orang-utans had semi-automic 45s.
Yes.
— James Lovelock, the Revenge of Gaia
But imagine the outrage…
“USAF Bombs Amazon With Nuclear Waste” NYT
Cellulosic ethanol could be produced from waste plant material and would be better in terms of EROEI than current biofuel.
I’m on the Edwards campaign email list (I was keeping tabs on their Lets’ Desecrate Memorial Day events). I got this email a couple a couple of days ago, which in part reads:
The stranglehold of the special interests has to end. That is why we are fighting for One Americaâ€â€and why Elizabeth and I are traveling across Iowa this week.
We are using B20 biodiesel, a cleaner fuel, to run our busâ€â€and clean money to fuel our campaign. My campaign runs on money from people like youâ€â€not from D.C. lobbyists or political action committees.
Help keep our bus running on cleaner fuel and our campaign fueled with clean moneyâ€â€donate what you can to help us raise $100,000 by Sunday.
http://www.johnedwards.com/clean/donate
Oil and gas aren’t perfect, but I’ve always said that a nice little pumpjack is usually much less disruptive of wildlife habitat than a wind farm or biofuel plantation, especially when you consider watts/acre.
Reached for comment, the Librarian said only, “Ook.”
– Man….you can’t let up for a minute around here…..I leave for a few hours to earn a living, and someone starts a thread on spanking the monkey….I miss all the fun…..speaking of monkies….where’s Luis…He could explain all the reasons why bio-fuels are the hope for the future….Maybe we can figure out how to barbacue offsets, in place of real food…..
“It means “written by assholes.—
OK – so who was the Ur-anus?
BREAKING … Donald Rumsfeld resigned.
here’s the actual letter… no sign of the words vertiginous and/or pettifoggery, which is kind of disappointing.
Doesn’t anyone know anything anymore?
You don’t “beat your monkey”… You “beat your meat” or you “spank your monkey”..
Christ! Get your metaphors straight! You screw up and innocent apes die.
tw: right condemns…. killing Orangutans that is.. not pocket pool.
– Heads up everyone…. NEWS ALERT
– The Utah minimg saftey commission, and mine owner Murrey about to hold another news conference momentarily to announce that 6 minors are missing.
“Comment by mojo on 8/15 @ 3:13 pm #
I’d be in favor of limited rights for the Great Apes (Chimps, Gorillas, Orangs) – no voting rights, thanks, but some human rights, like the right not to be killed indiscriminately for one. They are pre-sentient, in my opinion, and deserve their chance at growing up.”
But they ARE smarter than your average Democrat.
Of course they can, but do you produce enough used cooking oil to fuel your car?
…
Good one Jeff, this is something I’ve beaten on repeatedly. TANSTAAFL applies here as everywhere and the consequences of ramping up biofuels will be paid mostly by wildlife.
Manbearpig is not pleased.
*Good one Jeff, this is something I’ve beaten on repeatedly. TANSTAAFL applies here as everywhere and the consequences of ramping up biofuels will be paid mostly by wildlife.*
Don’t even get me started on the corn shortage due to ethnaol, which a client of mine describes as “gunky crap that will destroy your cars engine”
Also, I swear to god my turring words are not actually words. Like everytime.
As an addendum, if killing a few hundred monkeys would shut Al Gore up forever, I’d seriously consider it being a fair trade.
Not since I seriously cut back on fried foods.
“Of course they can, but do you produce enough used cooking oil to fuel your car?”
You would if you had deep-fried orangutan for dinner every night.
……..golden crispy
“Orang-utans home destroyed for bio-dieselâ€Â
The circle is complete.
“Of course they can, but do you produce enough used cooking oil to fuel your car?”
Not personally, but with our fast food culture, can’t we harvest enough waste oil to make a substantial dent?
Hasn’t anybody ever read Murders in the Rue Morgue? Issue each of them monkeys a straight razor, and see if anybody tries to beat ’em up.
Okay, so we only beat 99% as many orangutans to death. Some would say that’s progress.
For Christ sake, organgs are apes; they are sentient beings, and they deserve protection. So this is one of those laff riot posts intended to skewer the hypocrites. In the meantime, does it occur to you, even slightly, that you can try to help these creatures?
I say we send all the orangutans to fine liberal universities and get them each at least a Masters in the Minority Studies speciality of their choice . That way when the villagers come with their sticks, the monkeys can give them a solid dressing down, slice them with their razor wit and bombard them with a barrage of 50 cent words.
Who needs fists and guns to defend themselves when they have big mouths and long words?
tw: Carnegie’s joys … Dale picked that one himself
I think Ouroboros just found Ward Churchill his next teaching job.
oh, how funnny, you ever seen the last of the 33333
ourobououos: you are an assh0le. plain and simple.
orangss? The last pf the lemurs?
You know, Cynn.. Years ago I was a Special Forces NCO and I found that immensely gratifying because I felt that I had some tiny measure of power to personally do something to fight the evils of the world. To “Liberate the Oppressed” as the motto goes.. whether actually deployed or training for some later deployment…
But the years have passed and I’m a middle aged guy in the civilian world now.. My buddies and I gather every morning over coffee to review the news, rage over the injustices everywhere we look (and it goes far beyond monkeys in Borneo) and to offer up our thoughts as to how we’d fix it if we were world leader for a day. But then, lacking any real insight as to where to even begin to fix the worlds problems, we retire to our individual cubicles to slave away at our pointless monkeywork jobs for the remainder of the day.
So in all seriousness, Cynn, enlighten me.. Where do I start? What can I do beyond voting for politicians that will say anything to get elected then forget they have any responsibility to the people or the world once elected ?
There’s all kinds of energy but no direction. No leader.. What can I do to fix this mess?
tw: Nazareth presented … Wow.. just Wow
never mind me I seem to have screwed something big tim.
“Not personally, but with our fast food culture, can’t we harvest enough waste oil to make a substantial dent?”
Short answer? No. MacDonalds is greedy as hell, and everything in their store is delivered by diesel burning trucks. Daily. If they produced enough oil to even make a dent in just what is burned by those trucks, they would have already been doing it. Bio-diesel is this generations snake oil.
I would like to see a list of the investors in some of these plantations, though. How many carbon credits do you suppose is subsidizing this?
Cynn,
You need to sit down and run the numbers on biodesiel production. By my back of the envelope calculations using the most optimistic numbers for the highest yield crops and a low-ball estimate of current fuel useage, we’d have to plow under the entire state of Oregon to plant it with soybeans to meet California’s yearly automotive fuel needs. Care to guess what the Enviromental Impact Stamement on that would look like? (Not to mention what the current residents of the state might have to say about the matter…)
for what it’s worth, it seems like someone is impersonating me.
first of all, Ouruboouous that was not me who made the last couple of inomprehenisble comments. I don’t know who did it, how, or why.
According to new research Oil (the old fashion evil kind) is not a fossil fuel of any kind. It is produced as calcium carbonate which is sedimentary rock, iron oxide which is a component of igneous rock, and water are combined under the pressure that exists within the Earth’s mantle.
This means that far from being a finite resource, the Earth is grinding out new oil deposits all the time. Some is probably belching up under your feet as we speak.
Try telling the greenies this. Nobody sapient or semi sapient has to die if we just follow a BAU plan.
Cynn,
So someone’s makin a funny at your expense..
No problem.. I’ve been called far worse than an asshole..
but it’s Ouroboros… not Ouruboouous or ourobououos… It’s the snake thing that eats it’s own tail. (ok, I guess O-U-Bore-Us would be acceptable as well..)
“Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.”–The Sacred Scrolls
Rob,
Reached for comment, the Librarian said only, “Ook.â€Â
It is to laugh!
Timo
TW: roared o’conor : gaelic outrage?
To paraphrase the Boston Globe’s notorious Mary Jo Kopechne article– “if the orangutans were still alive today, they’d be thanking Al Gore for saving the biosphere through his advocacy of alternative fuels…”
So, to avoid drilling in the ANWR wasteland, we’re deforesting the jungles and killing the great apes. Life is full of trade-offs. That’s not one I’d make, but nobody’s asking me.
Who would have thunk it? Manbearpig hates Apes!
Meh. No need to feel bad about this. Just sit back at your desk, sofa, or what have you, relax, and think happy thoughts. When you get home, say 2 Hail Mary’s, an Our Father, and sell yourself a couple dozen carbon off-sets.
Not only does Biodiesel have the capacity constraints (acreage and transport logistics) to realize enough volume to displace hydrocarbon fuel, the economics plain do not work without a government hand out. In this case a $1/gallon tax credit to “incentivize” production and refinery construction.
Like most governmental ham-handed attempts to meddle in the free-market, this incentive has spawned the most unintended of consequences that (quite literally) ranges on the bizarre.
Because the refineries being built – close to the raw material like soy or imported palm oil are situated in the Mid-west or Gulf Coast, the finished product has a hard time reaching the areas of need, in this case both coasts. Because there is no pipeline network a la for gasoline and heating oil from the refineries to the end users. So most of the product (especially coastal produced) has been exported to Europe.
The market not being one to let any opportunity to idle has turned Biodiesel into a top export product thanks to the tax credit. Further more product from asia has been coming into the US, blended with hydrocarbon diesel and re-exported to Europe (To get the tax credit, one takes 100% BD and adds at min 1% regular diesel to make it 99% organic) since the legislation did not anticipate this loophole. So american taxpayers have been financing biodiesel consumed in Europe. Since the EU (not to outdo us in being greener) has its own tax credit for upto 95% organic diesel, the smarter traders have been double-dipping both here and there. It got so perverse that some huge fuel traders were loading tankers of EU produced BD bring it here making it 99%, capturing the credit and taking it back to make it 95% and taking the credit over there. The market exists soley to exploit the tax arbitrage. Period.
This loophole has been addressed in the latest energy bill the passed the house and is in conference. However eliminating the tax credit for diesel exported or non-native has made all these $100 million refineries worthless (or at least IRR very very poor) now as they still can’t get their product beyond 100 miles of their plant for domestic consumption before transportation erodes margins and can’t export it to make some money either.
Thank you Al Gore and Congress for a beautiful case study on how meddling in the free market has unintended consequences and perversions that have no benefits for the intended target. Congress would have been better off sitting in Caracas watching a government ruin an economy than wasting money and energy on this green fuels clusterfuck.
[…] … to make a global cooling global warming climate change omelet. The Orang-utans of Borneo are facing an unprecedented threat as their habitat is destroyed to satisfy increasing global demands for bio-fuel. […]
Oddly enough, I’m sitting a few short miles from the last spot where someone tried to prove that. Drilled a well into Precambrian rock up in the Owl Creeks in search of that non-organic oil and found.. nothing. Of course, I got paid well for my part in the permitting process, so please, try again!
this is terrible they should at least consider the habitat not only of orangutans but also other wildlife that are living there.