Dark side of a hot biofuel

Every morning, the cage doors swing open and 34 orangutan orphans climb into the outstretched arms of their human mothers.

Grabbing at wrists, tugging at elbows, these baby apes cling to the young women like Velcro, happy to be free of their cages, to play in the dappled sun of the nearby forest for a few hours.

It's primate day care, a scene that seems choreographed for the Animal Planet channel. But this spectacle of one hominid helping another is more than entertainment. It is a genuine reflection of environmental collapse.

These rust-red fluff balls were born in the wild, in the steamy, lime-green rain forest of tropical Indonesia. Today this jungle is being leveled and its great apes captured, killed and orphaned to grow palm oil, a plantation crop refined into biofuel for environmentally conscious consumers in Europe and the United States.

We live in a world of wanna-be-green commerce, of guilt-ridden citizens eager to protect nature, shrink their carbon footprints and free themselves from Middle East oil. But not every new fuel and eco-friendly product soothes the planet. Some are saddled with environmental baggage of their own, with not-so-obvious links to pollution, climate change and deforestation.

During the past year, supported by a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, I have reported on two such cases: a gourmet line of "conservation-based" Starbucks coffee that was grown on a plantation in a threatened Ethiopian rain forest and a petroleum substitute fueling U.S. cars that was strip-mined from Canada's boreal forest.

Nothing captured my attention like the orphaned orangutans of Indonesia. Here was a new generation of primates with no forest to explore, no mothers to mimic. Yet they clowned around at my feet, nearly stole my backpack and played tug of war with a stick. Other endangered species don't do that.

As symbols of environmental change, orangutans are hard to beat. But their struggle is more than a tale of paradise lost. It is also – through the logging of Indonesia's great rain forests and the resulting massive release of carbon into the atmosphere – a story with a broader connection to the warming of the Earth's atmosphere and mankind's role in triggering it.

By coincidence, my November visit came just ahead of the largest global climate gathering in years, a United Nations conference in the Indonesian resort community of Bali.

As delegates from nearly 190 nations met to lay the groundwork for a global warming treaty, another climate drama with worldwide implications was unfolding 400 miles to the north across the pale blue Java Sea in Borneo and farther west in Sumatra.

Where a rich rain forest once stood, storing carbon in its roots, branches, trunks and soil, vast fields of oil palms stretched across the landscape, displacing native people and leaving some of the world's most majestic creatures – from Sumatran tigers to orangutans – without a home.

"There is no greater curse for orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra than palm oil plantations," said Biruté Galdikas, one of the world's leading primate scientists, who lives in Indonesia but spends part of the year in Los Angeles, home to her nonprofit group: Orangutan Foundation International. "People who buy palm oil have orangutan blood on their hands."

Growing taste for palm oil as fuel

For more than 30 years, Indonesia's oil palm plantations have fed a global market for vegetable oil, most used in everyday food products from cream cheese to candy bars, cookies to hamburger buns. As concern about climate change and oil prices has grown, interest in palm oil as a green, renewable fuel has soared.

The trend began in Europe a decade or so ago when governments began subsidizing companies to blend soybean, palm and other vegetable oils with diesel to reduce carbon emissions. Since 2004, biodiesel production has more than doubled in Europe to 4.9 million metric tons.

Now biodiesel is catching on in the United States. Last year, the nation's largest biodiesel plant, supplied in part with palm oil, opened in Washington state. In 2007, 15 million gallons of palm oil were offloaded in Southern California, where it helped power cruise ships and semi-trailer trucks.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Tom Knudson, (530) 582-5336.