Plutocrats Hate Trains, They Want Subsidized Private Jets! Hate Them Back! Cut Pluto Subsidies! Night Trains!

Hey, there is only so much money to go around! All the money should go to plutocrats! No taxpayer money for public trains! All the money for private jets! If plutocrats took the train, even private extra luxury “wagon lit”, they, the elite, the world government, would have to come in proximity to multitude of common people! Plutocrats can’t stand common people, because common, vulgar people are not philanthropists, those common low lives can’t help people, they can’t even help themselves, and must be taken care of all the time, just like pigeons, by the philanthropists who own the planets… So the least philanthropists should have is private jets, to travel in style….

Yes, plutocrats must travel private, among their equals to enjoy the planet privately, as per their exclusive nature. That means private, exclusive air travel. Private jets employ more than one million people in the USA, contribute to more than 1% of CO2 emissions, and receive gigantic subsidies. When a billionaire jets around, it‘s free for him, her and their hard owning family! Common, vulgar taxpayers pick up the tab for their superiors. In exchange the superiors shall finance some woke movements here and there: the cost of social peace…

Europe and the USA invested enormously in trains in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Trains were used to transport We The People and remain the main transporters of goods in the USA. 

But then the plutocrats took over all the subsidies you could possibly imagine, and they destroyed the train networks, including inner cities electric lines which existed even in the inner San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles… Trains subsidies disappeared, but private jets got enormous subsidies. A modern electric train (or maglev), major city center to major city center, is faster and more convenient than planes for trajectories less than 800 kilometers (500 miles).

Once the ecological and overall cost numbers are plugged in, the train becomes competitive even for passengers, from San Francisco to New York (with new lines). Right now, New York salads in winter come from California by train…

Trains in the Briançon station. Briançon is the highest city in Europe, and also the most isolated, from all the very high mountains in all directions, often for hundreds of kilometers. Its easiest access from Paris is by night train (complete with beds). Several of the world’s largest ski resorts are around Briançon, including Montgenèvre, the world’s oldest ski resort, opened in 1907 (still expanding, with 70 lifts and 400 kms of runs; the fifth largest ski resort in the world…).

For two decades or so, there was only one night train left in Europe, the Paris to Briançon line. The French central state tried to close it. The region Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur saved it.   More than one hundred miles of the line is single track through the high mountains. The line survived because the easiest way to Briançon is along a 200 kilometer valley along which Hannibal’s army suffered enormous losses. Hannibal’s international army got crushed by boulders from great heights… Other ways to get to Briançon  involve steep passes above timberline. With the night train one steps in at 8pm and the train arrives in Briançon, at 7am, after a good night’s sleep. No extravagant security checks. One can get inside the train two minutes before departure. No going to the airport, confronting traffic jams: the train station is in the center of Paris.  Any other way to go to Briançon is hazardous and haphazard (the high speed train across the Alps in valleys to the north, from France to Italy, is indefinitively cut by a rock avalanche…)

Train travel is ecologically correct, but it is NOT subsidized… whereas air travel is heavily subsidized. First of all, there is no tax on jet fuel. Secondly airports are enormously subsidized (by central government, regions and local cities). Third states provide for air traffic control, security, etc. 

For decades unsubsidized trains had to compete with heavily subsidized air travel. 

All over the world, electric trains could be used much more. An optimized electric train could go from the left coast to the east coast of the USA… In ten hours. But in California plutocrats  sabotage high speed rail….  

The French high speed train operator quit: during the time it started negotiations with California, it was able to start negotiation, build and complete a high speed line in  Morocco

The truth is, plutocrats want luxury air travel only in the USA, private and subsidized! Train, rubbing shoulders with common folks, is the enemy! 

Plutocrats have infected the planet. Macron gave the Legion of Honor to a number of extremely wealthy white males, whose single merit was wealth. One of them is David Rothschid, Macron’s ex-boss at Banque Rothschild. Macron did the Deep State trick of going from highest position in government financial inspection to private tricks organizing mergers and acquisition.

Plutocrats are destroying this planet with the wrong economic activities, at their service, whom they use taxpayer money for. The COP28 in Dubai convened that fossil fuels have to be given up, something that everybody knows, but that was an information operation to hide further investments in what they claim they want to quit. If COP28 wanted progress in the CO2 crisis, it would have announced massive research investments in new energy (say thermonuclear fusion where progress is now just a question of research activity to figure out details, that is, a question of money).

Bringing night trains all over Europe, subsidizing the ecological economy and stripping subsidies to plutocrats and their fancy toys should be the new directions, instead of forcing We The People out of cars…  And promoting wind farms at sea of dubious sustainability, let alone telling a growing country like France that she will have to spend 30% less electricity in ten years, as  the idiotic PM, a woman of prestigious diplomas and haughty socialism, but no common decency, or basic intelligence, planned to do.

Instead I suggest that the French PM be kicked out, just like the presidents of US woke universities (woke is an ideology invented in France which the French PM adheres to…)

Night trains back, private jets out… A night train between Paris and Berlin has just been reopened… From little gestures like that, genuine progress will be made… And not to be neglected, the arrogance of plutocrats will be brought down a notch.

Want to save the planet? Bring down the rule of plutocracy!

Patrice Ayme

Alien Plutocrat Got US Billions, He Wants More. Because He Is Evil, And Want You To Admire Evil, While You Suffer. Instead, US Should Seize His Tax Free Island!

PLUTOCRACY AT WORK: STRANGLING WE THE PEOPLE TO ENRICH ITSELF SOME MORE, Sadistically!

LIVE AND LET GREED: Branson, Obama, Harvard, Xi: the eternal return of evil greed…

Those who enjoy money or power get quickly used to their presence and will use them to insure they keep the better life to themselves. And they will do anything to do that: as they steal you, and they will feel morally justified to steal beings so inferior, they can’t even defend themselves…

Thus when 350 billions dollars (~4% of normal GDP) became disponible to help small businesses bereft of revenue, Harvard University didn’t hesitate to grab nine million. This was clearly a violation of the intent of the law: helping otherwise bankrupt businesses. Harvard endowment is $40 billion (yes, $40,000 million). Harvard is very far from financially bankrupt, it’s just mentally corrupt.

Trump said “I want Harvard to pay that money back, OK? They have to pay it back, I don’t like it. This is meant for workers, this isn’t meant for one of the richest institutions, not only, far beyond schools in the world. They got to pay it back.” Harvard replied it had already spent the money, and used it well, to rescue its own needy folks! [1] .

Plutocrat, Evil-Rule Branson strangles a masochist submissive US president, who doesn’t mind being manhandled… as long as he makes beaucoup bucks…

Harvard is a top research institution, and some of the research it conducts is most glorious, precious… Harvard is also, thanks to its elite mental status, one of the most evil institutions in the world. Indeed, as many US top academic institutions, it has mostly contributed, in the sociological realm, to make us all believe that its sponsors, the US ruling class, was endowed with the correct ideology. This will be OK with many people, until they understand what happened with Hitler. Harvard’s ideology of greed made Hitler possible. 

It’s not just my opinion, knowing what I know, as the Chicago Tribune put it in 2004:

“Harvard accused of coddling Nazis

Ron Grossman, Tribune staff reporter

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

In a David-and-Goliath rerun, an obscure historian from the academic provinces has challenged Harvard, charging the crown jewel of higher education with providing Nazism an intellectual fig leaf during the run-up to World War II.

Harvard University helped enhance the prestige of Hitler’s regime in the West in the 1930s,” said Stephen Norwood, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma. “This was at a critical period when the Nazis were intensifying the persecution of Jews.”

Norwood was the keynote speaker at a recent conference on the Holocaust in Boston, where he reported finding evidence in Harvard’s archives of footsie-playing with Nazi luminaries, including sending a representative to a Nazified German university and alumni goose-stepping at a reunion.

Of course Larry Summers, a foundation of Clinton and Obama style plutocratic socioeconomiy called the historian “Norwood’s specific allegations appear to be very much open to debate”. 

In 1934 the Harvard Crimson called in an editorial for an honorary degree for Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Harvard alumnus who had become a close confidant of Adolf Hitler. Hanfstaengl was an outspoken anti-Jew and the Nazi dictator’s foreign-press secretary. His wife was intimate with Hitler. Hanfstaengl’s wife had talked Hitler out of suicide when, in a moment of despondency, he put a gun to his head.

True to its century old habit to love fascism and the like, the Harvard Crimson accused Norwood in an editorial of “attempting to gain some name recognition by attacking the American university with the most name recognition.“

 Norwood observed the obvious: anti-Judaism in the U.S. before World War II–a topic bubbling only in public consciousness from novelist Philip Roth’s best seller, “The Plot Against America.” (… a book I own… yet I don’t even remember how much of I read before being bored to tears…)

***

Similarly, “Sir” Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Airways, asked for $600 million… He didn’t strangle Obama enough [2]. On the ground that other airlines got money too (except many of these other airlines are “public” companies; Virgin is only half public, the other half is Branson). Over the years, airlines used their profits to mostly buy their own stock, when they are public companies (apparently 95% of airlines profits were used this way)… So airlines had no financial cushion.

Branson is the 268th richest person in the world with an estimated six billion  paper fortune, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index. Branson founded Virgin Atlantic in 1984 and retains a 51% stake, alongside the US airline Delta with 49%. Now Delta is already getting billions from US taxpayers.  

“Look at this enormous tax-free private island I have got!”, says Richard Branson. “All mine, huge!”: And he adds: You The People have to provide me with more! All of you! Europeans, Americans, British! Give me more! It’s matter of keeping you employed by me! And I shall invite your leaders on my island!

First Branson asked 650 million dollars from the UK government. Then “Sir” Richard Branson said he will mortgage his private Caribbean island to raise money to help his Virgin Group empire, as he pleaded with the UK government to step in and save his Virgin Atlantic airline from collapse. Hey what was the point of bribing the leaders of the West? Former President Barack Obama had the time of his life on his Pluto vacation. 

Branson, who is the UK’s seventh richest person with an estimated £4.7bn fortune, and has lived tax-free on his property, Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands for the last 14 years. After the Obamas were done with their reign, they retired for weeks to Necker Island, to enjoy being served by their “friend” Branson, no doubt rewarding them for their services (Branson enjoys lots of prerogatives in the USA, instead of being just arrested as normal people would be).

Now “Sir” Richard promised in a public blogpost on Monday that he would “raise as much money against the island as possible to save as many jobs as possible”. Why doesn’t “Sir” Richard the Greedy Hearted sell the island outright? Because Obama is his friend, and Biden couldn’t be far behind? Because the island is tax-free? Branson pretends to be a British citizen, as he pretended to be a European citizen… yet he pays no tax, yet he gets subsidies (all airlines get their fuel tax-free, so are subsidized).

Branson, 69, made the pledge as he tried to convince the government to give his airline a £500m loan to help it through the “devastating impact this pandemic continues to have”. “Devastated” we tell you, Branson is. 

Now all of Branson’s wealth was founded on subsidies. To start with, fossil fuel usage kills, at the very least 10 million people a year, and air transportation is a big part of it. If normal citizens do not pay tax, while making millions, let alone billions, they will go to jail for a very long time, and their property will be seized. That’s the case of Branson. He paid no tax. He corrupted the president. So let’s seize his wealth, and send him to prison, for bribing elected officials (just look at the vacation, complete with private jet travel, he offered to the Obamas).[3]

***

In related news faithful reader Ian Miller asks: “The obvious question is why did Milan not close down flights from Wuhan? It is not as if they did not know there was a virus on the loose there. I think your conclusion about the Hubei lockdown might be slightly wrong. Beijing did not know something we don’t, their problem was they simply did not know.”

Well, apparently, the Chinese dictator Xi knew, because he made an alarming discourse to his oligarchic accomplices on January 7… A secret discourse, of course. Not for us virus ravaged plebeians. While secretly alarmed, the dictatorship pretended officially that there was no human to human transmission (individuals claiming the contrary were hounded, arrested, and made to recant, including famous, soon to die, 34 year old, Doctor Li; other prominent whistleblower doctors have completely disappeared.. perhaps undergoing electroshock therapy to cure their derangement?). WHO kept on with the fiction of no danger of pandemic into February. Milan believed one lie too far.

Much European industry can’t function without China. It’s a shame. Pretty much all what is sold in the industrial part of Italy, including famed “Italian” clothing, is Chinese. The active principles of most drugs, including hydroxychloroquine and antibiotics“made” in… “India”…) come from China (97% for generic antibiotics sold in the US). Trump invoked this week the Defense Procurement Act for… cotton swabs… (So far, made in China!)

Now the European “leaders” were anxious to believe the lies coming from the Chinese dictatorship which enrich those who pay the so-called leaders after their “service” (when they self-serve). Also equally anxious to believe the WHO, China’s agent.

***

Ian:”I also think that in this case your argument that democracy is better might be questioned. China has done a better job of constraining the virus that I believe the US will do, looking at the progress so far.“

This assertion depends upon believing in the Chinese dictatorship to start with. There is plenty of evidence that it lied by a factor of ten or even twenty in the number of deaths and people affected.

China lockdowned Chengdu, sixteen million, in Sichuan, west of Hubei, when there were three cases there. Obviously it means they knew something they didn’t tell the rest of the world. Right, the rest of the world should have looked at what the dictatorship was doing, not what it said to the world.

The P4 lab in Wuhan, the only one in China operating at that level of danger and confinement, was set up by the French. Democracy is smarter. The Chinese dictatorship is mostly a giant colony of carnivorous, bat eating, pangolin snacking, lazy parrots. The Chinese were banned from the ISS, the International Space Station, because it was believed they would just parrot all they saw inside, and then undermine. A thermonuclear dictatorship is an immense danger. Arguably, China is more of a dictatorship than Russia.

It is said, by people living there, that Wuhan is only 20-30% back. Not 70% as propaganda has it. We will beat this virus through advanced tech and science, as revealed by democracy. The tin pot dictator in China, a larger version of the one in North Korea, wants to pass for valuable, but he is just a thief, who stole billions, and knows just enough goons to impose his small-man will…

Branson, Harvard, Xi (and their little boy helpers, from Kenya or not…)… All these “moral persons” (that’s a juridic term), are deeply evil, they are poison to Democracy, thus intelligence, thus survival. Time to heap spite on them!

As Aristophanes said, enough of these small-man stories. Let’s get rid of them.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] After all, HARVARD UNIVERSITY WILL return $8.6 million it received from a coronavirus relief package that Congress passed last month after a public dispute with President Donald Trump and his administration.

The about-face came just hours after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called on lawmakers to ban “elite, wealthy institutions” from receiving funding from the federal coronavirus stimulus package.

Filthy rich Princeton, Stanford, and other leading plutocratic universities also returned Coronavirus employer paycheck funds right away, Trump announced on April 23… HOWEVER, I know filthy wealthy LAW FIRMS, who have grabbed what a chuckling multimillionaire partner told me was Coronavirus “free money“.

***

[2] The former Commander in Chief, Obama the Plutophile, Light of self-celebrating “Liberals”, learned how to kitesurf with tax-free, subsidies gulping plutocrat Richard Branson. The Obamas enjoyed their time off on Necker Island, the Virgin founder’s luxury island in the Caribbean, according to Branson’s blog… At last they could be what they always wanted to be… 

***

[3] Subsidy, influence peddling, corruption specialist Branson Branson pledged to inject $250m (£197m) into Virgin Group, his Obama seducing empire which stretches from planes and trains to health clubs and spaceships for billionaires, and which employs about 70,000 people. The pledge – of which $100m is thought to be earmarked for the airline – is not even 5% of his fortune. And he paid no taxes for 14 years to anyone! But as a foundation of his fun, to him and his ilk, is to make fun of us, by seeing how stupid we can get for his amusement and that of his species, what is there not to like? When one pays nurses $20 an hour, and kickballers, $10,000 an hour, one may as well pay Branson a few billions: after all those Obamas and their ilk got to be pretty expensive to entertain and keep happy….

 

EURO CHEAT: German Hidden Banks Subsidies Destroy Europe!

More generally, the collapse of the European economy is caused by too much economic “liberalism”, while the rest of the world does the opposite, by providing strategic state help. This dichotomy happens within the Euro zone itself, where Germany found a trick to provide stealthy government help.

Abstract: The collapse of industrial production in France, Italy and Spain, while it soared in Germany, under the Euro regime, has a simple technical explanation. Using bankrupt banks, Germany subsidizes massively its industry. However, under vicious European Union rules, Germany insists that countries other than Germany do not get any STATE subsidies… while Germany enjoys them quietly. This cannot be allowed to go on.

The existence of a, de facto, common currency is nothing new in Europe: it was practiced during most of the last 2,000 years. It is a drastic economic advantage. Thus, so it should be with the Euro. However the present unfair and imbalanced German practice is unsustainable. The solution is for the rest of Europe to get state help, just as Germany, Japan, China, the USA and the UK (massive quantitative easing and other interventions), and also India, do: extend state subsidies to non-German Euro nations. (Either by creating banks similar to the bankrupt state supported German banks, as used to exist in France, or by some other subsidies…)

Several facts can be observed: first that the fossil fuel countries, Canada, US, Australia, did pretty well, thanks to their smothering of the planet in compensation for them making lots of money (figuratively or not). Second, that the Euro has become a Germany-first, a über alles Germany device. As I explained, that’s caused by bankrupt banks, which can lend to small, crucial industries, while being fed by state subsidies…

***

French presidential elections are 3 weeks away. Marine Le Pen wants to leave the Euro, and the European Union (however, she also intent to change to a Swiss-like system of plebiscites, so she would submit any big change to these). Marine Le Pen was received both by Putin and the presidents of Chad and Lebanon.

Many opinion leaders have clamored for years to destroy the Euro, such as the well-known establishment propagandist Paul Krugman. Except for howling together, the reasoning is not obvious. The anti-Europeans’ basic argument is that various economies need to devalue their currencies at different rates, because otherwise they won’t change.

On this site Picard 578 and Lovell said:”The problem of the Euro is its existence”. I disagree: common currencies are very advantageous, but this one has a poisonous hook inside.

***

Past Currency Problems: Rome, China, Europe:

It is true that the gigantic Roman empire ran into a currency problem, characterized superficially both by dearth of fiduciary currency and inflation. One reason was the weakening of the application of Roman Civil law by centuries of fascism. Another is that, like China, the Romans did not have enough precious metals (anymore: they had exhausted the mines).

The Franks solved both problems: they yanked law enforcement from the Roman Catholic bishops, re-establishing good old fashion cruel punishments for malefactors: currency counterfeiters were slowly boiled to death, alive, in special long cages where they slowly cooking twitching bodies could contribute to leaving a lasting impression to the obtuse masses.

The other way the Franks solved the problem of precious metals was by conquering Eastern Europe, something the Romans (except for imperators Caesar and Trajan) had not even envisioned. There were abundant silver mines in Eastern Europe. (The Chinese solved, sort of, their currency problem with paper currency. That lasted seven centuries, until collapse of the Yuans under hyperinflation. The Ming and Manchus got Bolivian silver from Bolivia, through the Philippines held Spain.

***

Common European Currencies Never A Problem:

When there is no common currency, there is no common trade..Clearly common currency collapse contributed to the fall of the Rome of the Third and Fifth centuries, and the Roman Catholic bishop government of around 400 CE. The same holds for the Yuan. The Chinese used cumbersome copper as precious metal, or potentially worthless paper. When people cheated with currency in 400 CE Rome, the local bishop from the local plutocratic family, would admonish them. Six centuries later, the Franks had them bathe in boiling water, wine or oil.

Charlemagne was actually Roman EMPEROR. The currency system he refurbished had existed for 8 centuries and would exist for centuries more. Although various mints did various things, there was interoperability of the coins.

The Franks did re-establish the Roman currency, both by ferocious enforcement of the law, and by making the coins themselves more valuable (by augmenting their precious metal content).

From 650 CE to 1000 CE, temperature increases of the Middle Age Warming and the re-establishment of a stronger state (very strong in 800 CE, when the Roman empire was officially “renovated”, much more fragmented later in West Francia) brought more than a doubling of the population of Europe (from 18.5 million to 39 million). In spite of all the disturbances and massacres caused by invasions of rabid, voracious, pitiless Saracens, Vikings and Magyars.

Although West Francia (present day occidental two-thirds of France) was cut up in 60 local states (some duchies, some counties, some free cities, some church states), after the death of emperor Charles the Bald, counterfeiters were boiled all over, and thus (roughly) the same currency worked in northern Germany, Rome, or Austria.

I insist on this for good reason: the government of Roman bishops of 400 CE had decided, as the good Christians they were, not to apply the death penalty anymore for highwaymen. Result: the currency became extremely fake, and the road extremely unsafe. Too much goodness leads to too much crime for civilization to keep on operating. This is what the government of bishops of 400 CE proved (at the same time, realism forced the bishops to agree to let the Franks receive military control of three Roman provinces, including Gallia and Germania).

Charlemagne was Imperator Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans, approved by Constantinople, Oriental Rome). The Franks viewed Rome as “renovated”, but the fact is Roman civil law, Roman roads, and Roman currency had survived the collapse of the Roman state in the Fifth century (when it was progressively replaced by the imperators/elected kings of the Franks). The Belgian historian Pirenne suggested that it is the rise of the Muslim Caliphate which really caused a problem. That’s pretty much obvious as Islam was explicitly contrived to destroy the Greco-Roman state, promptly conquered more than half of it, by the sword, in 80 years, and then embargoed the rest!

In any case, the pure gold Roman Solidus was still used in 1000 CE, and the basic coin was still the Denarius (pfennig, penny, French “denier”). England, not yet part of the empire in 800 CE was still part of the currency system. Although England had 70 mints then, the English penny paid two-third of one basic worker’s day, same as on the other side of the Channel. As it took months to travel across Europe, the fact that there were many local mints does not mean that the (“Renovated”) Roman currency could not be viewed as global.

Charlemagne was the first Roman emperor who was officially sacred by the Pope. Hence the notion of “Holy” Roman empire, which surface several centuries later. By 1500, a common central European (Holy Roman-German currency) appeared: the Thaler (hence the word “Dollar”). The Thaler was used for nearly four centuries… until 1873, when Bismarck’s imperial maneuvering eradicated it…)

Europe had common currency before: the Thaler, covering Mittel Europa, lasted four centuries.

The Euro and EU intervention in economy is well beyond just having a common currency. For example it prevents to re-establish order in Africa, because France does that, France then gets punished for it in diverse ways, including by having not enough money for the rest of her economy. The proper usage would be to subtract France/Europe defense from deficit computations and, more generally, spending.

In particular money and plotting should have been spent as needed to establish a proper democracy and state backing it up, in Libya. Same for all subsahelian countries (Mali, Chad, etc.)

***

Germany Banking Subsidy Trick:

Thousands of medium German banks are crucial to finance the “middleling” German companies (of the “Mittelstand”) which produce crucial equipment for larger companies (say specialized brakes for fancy cars, or specialized LED lights used in characteristic German cars like my own). Such companies can then evolve and produce in a very protected, stable environment, favorable to apprenticeship.

It is a good system.

Too bad other countries are not allowed to have one too. To have one, other countries would have to massively invest, in full, enormous catastrophic deficit mode, before then going-on in a chronic deficit mode (as Germany presently does).

Weirdly, I am the only one to talk about this.

By the way, China’s local communities (sometimes cities with 25 million people…) do the same as Germany: massive deficit spending to sustain massive local industrialization. Right, the Chinese system is suffering from terminal debt. However, the fact is Chinese industry is thriving and expanding worldwide (Example: a Chinese drone company has a contract for taxi drones in Dubai, to operate in a few months…).

Meanwhile, French industry has collapsed, most governmental help being outlawed by European institutions (which did not discover the German trick therein described…) 

Thus General Electric, saved by 60 billion dollars from Obama, was able to swallow its French competitor, with Brussels’ benediction… That was helped by US “Justice” condemning said French competitor to a billion dollar fine, for… alleged corruption in Indonesia… The European Union has prevented its actors to act dirty. Except for those, like Germany, which play dirty.  

Goodness is always last to play dirty, by definition. However, if goodness never plays dirty in the end, goodness will be devoured by badness, malefaction. Voltaire recommended that we “ought to crush infamy”. That means not turning a blind eye towards those who exploit the rest of the world, just because we are good, and aspire to goodness. Now more than ever.

Patrice Ayme’

AGRICULTURE WITHOUT SCIENCE IS RUIN OF THE SOUL

BRING ON GENETICALLY ENGINEERED BIOFUELS.

***

Americans and Europeans seem to enjoy paying taxes for $300 billion of farm subsidies, and their main victims are the poor farmers of the poorest countries.

Morality would call to divert some of this exhuberance towards agricultural research, including genetically engineering plants that would allow to lower the fertilizer loads (which contribute heavily to the greenhouse). Corn is especially unsuitable for biofuels, requiring, as it does, lots of water, and fertilizers (biofuels from corn augment the CO2, those from cane sugar do not, but barely so). In general there should be a world law saying: NO FUEL FROM FOOD (except in remote islands converting say coconuts, but only with special authorization).

But the idea of biofuel is good. Simply, really interesting biofuels will have to be genetically engineered. They probably will come from some sort of hybridized algae .

In other words, a lot of genetic engineering is needed ASAP, although that is not popular in some places (which profit heavily from past agricultural practice: France). Erroneously so, factually and morally: nearly all the food calories consumed around the world come from genetically engineered organisms. Pigs, corn, rice, wheat, even potatoes have all been obtained by heavy selection. In some cases, it is not even clear where some of these species come from: apparently the ancestors of rice lived on land, not in water, and corn is such a man made species that its ancestors are a matter of speculation (it seems genes from different species were mixed, maybe up to 12,000 years ago. Neolithic man should get the Nobel prize in biology and medicine posthumously, for the invention of genetic engineering!)

We have come to a point where agriculture without more science is ruinous for soul and planet.
***

P/S 1: Nowadays the economy of food is not that of the Middle Ages, even in the poorest countries. Food is heavily dependent upon transportation (of the food itself, and/or water, and/or fertilizers). This all uses energy. Gasoline and diesel have the highest energy density. Europe suffered extreme deforestation around 1200 CE, due to the fact people got all their energy from that biofuel known as wood.

The poorest people on earth eat grain, and they are not cattle. That means, they cook. It used to be the largest part of their budget. These poor people deforest, because they need biofuel.

Some people who evoke lovingly electric engines apparently forget that their pet electric car is at the end of a cable at the extremity of which other super gigantic electric engines working in reverse (aka turbines) convert violent rotary motion from massive heat into electronic agitation.

Electric power comes from centralized energy generation, in other words, in practice, a huge fire. Those whining poetically about fuel cell technology should spare a thought for Apollo XIII (the O2-H2 fuel cell exploded, and the astronauts survived with lots of in extremis, miraculous brainwork). Advanced prototype batteries, because they pack so much energy, tend to explode.

So how do we generate all this centralized energy electric lovers need? The planet is dammed out (and tropical dams can create massive quantities of methane, besides drowning the landscape). OK, we could, and will, put maglev wind turbines one kilometer high everywhere windy…The only clean energy (carbon wise) deployable now in enormous amounts everywhere is nuclear energy (no screaming about the bad news, please!). Solar towers and photovoltaics could be deployed massively in the US West (which has exceptional insolation far from bin Laden). It’s starting, but way too slowly: it takes 50 years to deploy a new energy technology to have economic preponderance.

Coal and the tar sands should be tarred, feathered, and run out of town (they ruin the atmosphere, and the sea, and the earth). They surely will be when sea levels start to rise real fast, a few years from now.

 

P/S 2: Roger Cohen wrote an article weighing diverse observations on biofuels (http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/23/opinion/edcohen.php). The preceding was a complement (in Cohen’s blog, www.iht.com/passages, some readers pointed out some shortcomings of his work (especially regarding water usage, and displacement of agricultural land by biofuel, one more reason to go towards algae)).
Patrice Ayme