“Biofuel use ‘increasing poverty’
A palm oil plantation in Ivory Coast
Palm oil is one of the biofuel crops stirring controversy

The replacement of traditional fuels with biofuels has dragged more than 30 million people worldwide into poverty, an aid agency report says.

Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world’s soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.

The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change.”

What I find frustrating about such reports and the race to jump on the biofuel bandwagon is that we have completely missed the point of using biofuels. Growing crops, particularly food crops, to produce fuel makes no sense. In fact, corn isn’t even a particularly good source of biofuels. What makes a lot of sense is recycling wastes to produce biofuels.

Biofuel recycling in Olympia, WA at “The Reef“. Photo by DreamsJung. Used under creative commons licensing.)

In 1995 I saw this documentary, “Fat of the Land” about a group of women travelling across country asking greasy spoons to donate they frying oil to fuel their van. It was a fabulous mix of grrrls in 50’s dinner dresses and grrrls in getting greasy mixing chemicals. The lesson of the movies is that there are a lot of resources that go to waste in this country. Making better use of those resources makes sense. Hopefully since “Fat of the Land” was made there have been reforms in what happens to used vegetable grease and more of it is being recycled into biofuels. I haven’t done the research to know how many companies out there recycle waste cooking oil, but if you are interested, here’s one company in the Bay Area doing it – Blue Sky Bio-Fuels.

Bio-fuels can be a part of the solution but only if we do them right and recognize their limitations!

(photo by Richard Mason)

Luckily, the blogosphere has been filled with useful tips and local resources to help with bicycle commuting, since last week was the 13th Annual California Bike Commute Week, sponsored by The California Bicycle Coalition. Green Living Online offers tips for a spring bicycle tuneup, especially useful for those of us who aren’t hardcore enough to bicycle through the winter rains and snow. Anna, of bitchinspin, recommends BikeRoWave, in Berkeley to East Bay bicyclists who don’t feel up to doing their own tuneups. LAist provides a photo essay of the ups and downs of Bike to Work Day in LA. Green LA girl points to the Transit Authorities website which gives tips on combining biking with transit.

If you live someplace a little less flat than LA you might want a little help from a hydrogen bike. Another interesting idea is a solar powered bike, created by Canadian entrepreneur, Peter Sandler. Electrical bikes have been around for a number of years, so there are lots of options out there. The folks at Optibike claim to make the finest electric bike in the world and I tend to believe them since folks in Boulder have some of the most challenging terrain in the world.

If you missed Bike Commute Week or aren’t in a position to by a $5000 electric bicycle, you can still get out on weekends for a leisurely trip. Or get crazy and participate on June 9th in World Naked Bike Ride, pointed out to us by Chris at Beer Activist.

But does Yahoo! walk the talk? It appears to be trying to do so. Yahoo! provides this information on its environmental services, most of which are pretty bland–a way to search for green goods or buy eco-friendly cars, for example–but way down at the bottom of the page we learn that Yahoo! is going carbon-neutral. And that’s a good thing, because Yahoo! apparently uses a lot of energy. On its carbon-neutral page, the company claims that “Yahoo! going carbon neutral in 2007 is like shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, like pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.”

Yahoo! also provides employee incentives for greener commuting:

Some of the services that we provide to our employees include shuttles equipped with Wi-Fi that connect with local transit stations in San Francisco and the East Bay, 25% transit subsidies, bicycle racks and lockers, showers, carpool matching, preferred parking for carpool and vanpools, 25% vanpool subsidies, and a monthly rewards program for employees who come to work without driving alone.