SO MUCH FOR THE PANIC ABOUT RUNNING OUT OF OIL

Sugar-powered plane unveiled

Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer today unveiled the world's first mass-produced commercial aircraft that runs on sugar cane ethanol fuel. The Ipanema aircraft is designed to take advantage of Brazil's supplies of the fuel, which is cheaper, burns more cleanly and is more efficient than fuels refined from crude oil, company officials said. Brazil is also a major producer of ethanol fuel, extracted from sugar cane.

Satoshi Yokota, a top Embraer official, said operating the plane on ethanol was three to four times cheaper than using airplane fuel. The Ipanema is designed mainly as a crop duster. Embraer is the world's fourth largest manufacturer of commercial airplanes.

Source.

See also my post below of 20th. Excerpt:

"There is now every evidence that oil will never run out and, even if it did, motor fuel from either coal or sugarcane is already proven technology that would cost us a bit more at the pump but that is all. And there is nothing more renewable than sugarcane. You can bring a whole crop from planting to maturity in one year! And as far back as World War II, Australians were running around in cars powered by alcohol derived from sugarcane. And the world has a chronic surplus of sugar. Sugarcane is so easy to grow that America has big tariff barriers up to keep "foreign" sugar out!






The dismal quackery of eco-economics

The notion that economic growth has to be curtailed is tragic when billions still live in dire poverty

The World Wildlife Fund warns that we are consuming 20 per cent more natural resources a year than the planet can provide. Are we living beyond our ecological means?

One of the most striking but least noticed aspects of the rise of environmentalism is the way that it has helped to redefine economics. Economic production and consumption are viewed in a fundamentally different way than they were before environmentalism became central to the dominant worldview. Environmentalist assumptions that, at the very least, should be the subject of debate are unquestioningly accepted. Environmentalism has become central to the mainstream outlook, rather than the particular property of green parties or organisations.

This development isn't just important at the level of ideas. A gloomy view of economic development plays an important role in holding back human potential. At its starkest, the acceptance of the idea that economic growth has to be curtailed is a tragedy in a world where billions of people still live in dire poverty. According to the latest available figures from the World Bank, 2.7 billion were living on less than $2 a day in 2001 of which 1.1 billion lived on less than a dollar.

The discussion of global warming provides a striking example of how this works. Almost everyone accepts that climate change means that the world needs to cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases. Yet this would almost certainly mean holding back economic growth, meaning that a large part of the global population will remain poor. There is hardly any discussion of how to deal with global warming while generating substantial economic growth at the same time. Indeed it will be argued that economic growth, far from being the problem, is central to humanity's capacity to handle climate change.

There are two recurring themes running through the environmentalist approach to economics. First, an obsession with the need for limits. The environmentalist debate, in numerous different ways, assumes that strict limits must be put on economic activity. Such premises ignore or at least downplay the power of human creativity. Economic activity does indeed often throw up problems - such as pollution - but it also, it will be argued, provides the means to overcome them.

Second, the idea of precaution has more recently become more central to the debate. The prevalent assumption is that people need to be cautious about economic development because it could have harmful unintended consequences in the future. Often such fears are expressed in the language of 'sustainability'. The precautionary approach, unlike earlier forms of environmentalism, acknowledges the power of human creativity. But advocates of precaution tend to see such creativity as a source of problems, usually in the form of risk, rather than a positive attribute of human beings.

Underlying both assumptions is a misanthropic view of humanity. Environmentalism can be seen as a counterattack against a key premise of the Enlightenment: that a central part of progress consists of increasing human control over nature. Instead, environmentalists argue that humans should accept their place as a mere subsidiary of the natural world. In practice this means reconciling humanity to poverty, disease and natural disasters.

There is environmentalist confusion between the mastery over nature and the destruction of nature. Control over nature means reshaping the natural world to meet human needs - for example, developing medicines to fight against disease or building dams to prevent flooding or generate electricity. This is not the same as destroying rain forests or making animal species extinct.

Nature has sometimes been destroyed as a side-effect of economic growth. But the aim of economic development is to benefit humanity rather than to destroy the natural world. It is important to remember that richer societies are in a much stronger position to create a positive environment for human beings than poor ones.

The remainder of this essay will examine the key tenets of environmentalist economics in more detail. It will argue that, in addition to being undesirable, the environmentalist worldview is based on fatally flawed assumptions....

More here

For a 30 year-old refutation of Greenie economics that is still relevant today, see here. Greenies have learnt nothing in the interim

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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