Palm oil is found in many products. Although it is vegan as an ingredient, it is not obtained in an animal-friendly manner

In products such as spreads and vegan sausages, palm oil ensures a firm consistency and prevents other liquid fats from settling. In addition, palm oil is cheap because the cultivation is efficient because the oil palm has a very high yield.

The problem starts with the fact that oil palms grow in jungle areas and rainforest is cleared for the plantations, mostly illegal.
In this way, the last remaining habitats for orangutans are also being destroyed.

After a few years, palm oil yields decline.
Old areas are being given up and more rainforest is being cleared for new areas.
Child labor is also a problem in the extraction of palm oil. This is why some people avoid products that contain palm oil.

Since December 2014, according to the EU Food Information Regulation, the origin of the fats has to appear on products instead of “vegetable oils or fat”.
A boycott of the products is possible, but difficult.
In addition to food, palm oil is also found in cosmetics, cleaning agents, candles, paints, varnishes and agrofuels.

Seals have so far been of little help in making a decision.

The RSPO-certified palm oil, for example, has minimum standards such as no deforestation of primary forests and forests that are particularly worth preserving, the core labor standards and payment according to minimum standards.
However, implementation is only mandatory and there is no independent control body.

Other seals only identify a tiny fraction of palm oil.

If you want to do something about the deforestation of the rainforest for palm oil, you can write to food manufacturers and ask them to switch to other oils. But you can also do a lot yourself.

Try our chocolate and nut cream. And we also have a few vegan snacks that don’t contain palm oil.

https://www.petazwei.de/warum-manche-veganer-ein-problem-mit-palmoel-haben

And I mean…The production of palm oil is a destructive and violent business.

It’s the fault of mogul companies like OOPC, for example, that forests are disappearing at breakneck speed.

Malaysia: palm oil production

Palm oil is omnipresent in our lives – it is in our food, in cosmetics, in cleaning products and in the car tank.

44% of the world’s palm oil harvest is used as an additive for biodiesel. The rest for food, livestock feed, cosmetic products, detergents, care products and cleaning agents. The majority of products on supermarket shelves contain palm oil.

It brings huge profits to large corporations and robs small farmers of land and livelihoods. Displacements, clearing of the rainforest and extinction of species are consequences of our palm oil consumption.

At 66 million tons per year, palm oil is the most commonly produced vegetable oil.

The palm oil plantations worldwide now extend to more than 27 million hectares of land.

On an area the size of New Zealand, the rainforests, people and animals have already had to give way to the “green deserts”.

Only 70,000 orangutans are still roaming the forests of Southeast Asia.

About 54,000 animals live in the wild in Borneo and are highly endangered, in Sumatra there are 14,000 animals.

They are burned, displaced or starved in search of food as a result of the destruction of the rainforest.

Mother animals are killed by criminals, the young animals are sold and enslaved. In five to ten years, as a result of this horrific business, none of the three orangutan species could exist anymore; their habitat could have disappeared by then.

The great apes today are restricted to Borneo and Sumatra.

We can still do something about it in everyday life:

Check the ingredients carefully and strictly: Buy organic products and products with local oils (e.g. sunflower or rapeseed oil). Substances such as palmitates, glyceryl or vegetable oil can be indications of palm oil, which should be avoided.

Write to companies: The more people tell companies that they are not satisfied with or disagree with a product that has palm oil, the greater the pressure on the company.

Public pressure and increased awareness of the problem have already led some producers to stop using palm oil.

About this video:
The British supermarket chain Iceland planned to run a heartbreaking commercial on television in 2018.
Branded products such as chocolate or shampoos that contain palm oil should disappear completely from the shelves.
Iceland wanted to advertise this with a moving video.
But that was not allowed as a TV commercial.

The video spread rapidly on the Internet, more than 13 million Facebook users saw it: You can see a small orangutan turning a child’s room upside down. The girl who lives there has to watch the little monkey knock down plants, chocolate and shampoo.
She calls the monkey Rang-Tan.

He tells his story in the video: His rainforest was destroyed for the cultivation of palm oil.

My best regards to all, Venus

Greenland: enough ice melted on single day to cover Florida in two inches of water

• Data shows ice sheet lost 8.5bn tons of surface mass on Tuesday
• All-time record temperature of 19.8C in region on Wednesday
• Greenland’s vast ice sheet is undergoing a surge in melting, with the amount of ice vanishing in a single day this week enough to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water, researchers have found.
• The deluge of melting has reached deep into Greenland’s enormous icy interior, with data from the Danish government showing that the ice sheet lost 8.5bn tons of surface mass on Tuesday alone. A further 8.4bn tons was lost on Thursday, the Polar Portal monitoring website reported.

The scale of disappearing ice is so large that the losses on Tuesday alone created enough meltwater to drown the entire US state of Florida in two inches, or 5cm, of water. Ice that melts away in Greenland flows as water into the ocean, where it adds to the ongoing increase in global sea level caused by human-induced climate change.

“It’s a very high level of melting and it will probably change the face of Greenland, because it will be a very strong driver for an acceleration of future melting, and therefore sea-level rise,” said Marco Tedesco, a glacier expert at Columbia University and adjunct scientist at Nasa.

Tedesco said a patch of high pressure is sucking and holding warmer air from further south “like a vacuum cleaner” and holding it over eastern Greenland, causing an all-time record temperature of 19.8C in the region on Wednesday. As seasonal snow melts away, darker core ice is exposed, which then melts and adds to sea level rise.

“We had these sort of atmospheric events in the past but they are now getting longer and more frequent,” Tedesco said.

“The snow is like a protective blanket so once that’s gone you get locked into faster and faster melting, so who knows what will happen with the melting now. It’s amazing to see how vulnerable these huge, giant areas of ice are. I’m astonished at how powerful the forces acting on them are.”

Greenland’s melting season usually lasts from June to August. The Danish government data shows that the island has lost more than 100bn tons of ice since the start of June this year and while the severity of melting is less than in 2019 – when 11bn tons of ice was lost in a single day – the area affected is much larger in 2021.

“It’s hard to say if it will be a record year for melting this year but there is a ton of warm and moist air over the ice sheet that’s causing an amazing amount of melt,” said Brad Lipovsky, a glaciologist at the University of Washington.

“The alarming thing to me is the political response, or lack of it. Sea-level rise is like a slow-moving train, but once it gets rolling you can’t stop it. It’s not great news.”

If all the ice in Greenland melted, the global sea level would jump by about 6 meters (20ft), and although this is unlikely to happen on any sort of foreseeable timescale, scientists have warned that the world’s largest island is reaching a tipping point due to the pressures exerted upon it by global heating.

Greenland’s ice is melting faster than any time in the past 12,000 years, scientists have calculated, with the ice loss running at a rate of around one million tons a minute in 2019. Greenland and the earth’s other polar region of Antarctica have together lost 6.3tn tons of ice since 1994.

This rate of ice loss, which is accelerating as temperatures continue to increase, is changing ocean currents, altering marine ecosystems and posing a direct threat to the world’s low-lying coastal cities, which risk being inundated by flooding. A 2019 research paper found the Greenland ice sheet could add anything between 5cm and 33cm to global sea levels by the end of the century. The world is on track for “the mid to upper end of that”, Lipovsky said.

“It’s very worrisome,” said Tedesco. “The action is clear – we need to get to net zero emissions but also we need to protect exposed populations along the coast. This is going to be a huge problem for our coastal cities.”

Greenland: enough ice melted on single day to cover Florida in two inches of water | Ice | The Guardian

Regards Mark

Aid for companion animals affected by flooding in Germany

29 July 2021 Deutscher Tierschutzbund News

The storms in North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and in other regions of Germany such as Saxony and Bavaria are devastating. The flood caused great damage and also hit animal welfare associations, animal shelters and companion animal owners in the affected regions. Our member organisation Deutscher Tierschutzbund put initiatives in place to help victims.

Animal shelters that got off lightly started aid campaigns at short notice and offered other animal shelters and evacuated animal owners to temporarily take in their pets. Many private individuals also offered their support. 

Deutscher Tierschutzbund has put together lists of groups, organisations and other useful information for flood victims and their animals on their website. They also set up a hotline for animal-related emergencies as well as FAQs .

People who find animals on site as well as affected animal owners from the flood crisis areas, whose animals urgently need help, can contact the organisation. Read more at sourceDeutscher Tierschutzbund – Tiere und Menschen in Not

Regards Mark

In the videos that are circulating on the Internet, two large groups of monkeys can be seen attacking each other and terrifying commuters at an intersection.

As the monkeys continued their fight, people were seen waiting on motorbikes and cars while some tried to avoid the commotion, fearing they might get involved in the fight.

The insane incident took place near Prang Sam Yot, in front of Phra Kan Shrine in Lopburi, a popular tourist destination in the country that is home to thousands of monkeys.

Food was very difficult for the monkeys to find due to restrictions keeping tourists out of town and a lockdown that kept even most of the locals in their homes.
It appears that hunger led to the struggle between the two groups.

“Monkey fights are common in Lopburi. It’s not unusual. It’s about the power struggle, the food struggle, the fertilization of the females, “ said a spokesman for the Department of National Parks.

He said it was impossible to stop the monkeys when they attacked each other and when people started honking their horns louder to scare them away it only made matters worse.

“Several monkeys were injured as a result of this incident.  The road was covered with blood. And only when the leader of the losing side gave up did they withdraw “.

However, it is not the first time something like this has happened. In 2020, two gangs of monkeys were engaged in a fight in the same city and the video sparked a serious discussion about how to deal with animals during the pandemic.

Many had argued that tourism changed the behavior of these monkeys as they now expect to be fed by humans.

The government speaks of sterilization as a solution and wants to sterilize 500 monkeys, but capturing them is not that easy

https://wildbeimwild.com/kunterbunt/affenkaempfe-in-thailand-legen-verkehr-lahm/46834/2021/07/27/

And I mean…When monkeys pick coconuts from the trees in Thailand and stay chained to a short leash for life, it is believed to be useful and economical.

Before Corona, these same monkeys were tolerated by the locals as tourist attractions: The tourists fed the animals, paid money for photos – the city had around 6,000 monkeys under control!
Wildlife across the country annually attracts over 35 million tourists who come here every year and make up around 20 percent of the economy.

But then Corona came, the tourists stayed away, and of course the monkeys are now hungry and aggressive!
It’s about survival!
And man is looking for a solution!

Human animals wage bloody wars against their weaker conspecifics, even when they are not hungry.
In this case, however, we are not looking for a “solution”, but we are financing the arms industry on top of that.

We are also against wars wherever they take place, which is why we propose the following solution: Sterilization for all arms dealers and operators of the war industry.

My best regards to all, Venus