It's all about being on the move, and getting there fast.Here at Club of Pioneers we are especially happy with the news that soon we will be able to travel from Brussels to Sydney, in FOUR hours! How soon , we are not so sure about. The LAPCAT, which stands for Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologie, is funded by the European Space Agency and powered by hydrogen. Sounds almost too good to be true. Image of Config A2 from Reaction Engines Staying in the air, Virgin Ltd founder and former climate change denier Richard Branson has announced his intentions to power his jets with pond scum infused biofuel. Last week, Virgin announced plans to test fly a Boeing 747-400 from London to Amsterdam using a blend of about 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent jet fuel.
From Autobloggreen we hear that the amazing Luigi Colani, responsible for biodynamic car designs, (amongst other things), has teamed up with toy makers Corgi to develop a 1/16-scale hydrogen fuel cell car. This RC car will be unveiled in early February at the Toy Fair Nürnberg. It will surely be beautiful.

Image by Volker WeberBut the fastest of all must be Prince Charles, who appeared at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, as a hologram!
A life-size, three-dimensional image of the Prince was projected onto the stage, thus maintaining an extremely low carbon footprint and saved 20 tons of carbon waste. Maybe more conferences, summits and stars should use this new mode of “embodied” transport. Perhaps David Beckham should take note, who has recently been touted as having “the largest carbon footprint in history”.

What does bioethanol have to do with a German embassy event in Washington?
It might sound strange but it fits perfectly considering that the embassy event was titled "The Garden of Ideas" and was all about sustainable energy in Germany. We talked to Dr. Lutz Guderjahn, CEO of CropEnergies which is currently the largest bioethanol plant in Europe. Listen to his response to the bioethanol critics...

Yep, being green is confusing. And when you try to be green sometimes, it turns out you're just making things worse. Take for example biofuels. Sounds like the thing to put in your motor, no? Maybe not. Treehugger has a post about their concerns for certain types of biofuels:

Treehugger has complained about biofuels from corn or palm oil for years, and taken some abuse for it; the main argument is "don't worry, all of these ethanol plants will run on algae or switchgrass in a couple of years, corn is just an interim measure" or the Palm Oil Truth Foundation sends another dozen emails about the glories of clearing the rainforest to grow fuel. The subsidies keep growing and the forests keep getting ploughed over.

Craig Mackintosh at Celsias writes about "the obstinate pushing of ethanol from corn, sugar, soy, and palm oils in the face of their overwhelming detrimental effect on people’s lives, and on the environment. It is where big industry, desperate to retain consumer dollars, is influencing government - who are in turn pandering to very destructive whims."

Meanwhile, an article on Bloomberg suggests that Cuba's Castro is taking the Treehugger line in his first signed article since his recent surgery:

In the article titled ``More Than 3 Billion People in the World Condemned to Premature Death From Hunger and Thirst,'' the 80-year-old Cuban president attacked Bush's promotion of alternative fuels such as ethanol, made mainly from corn and aimed at reducing U.S. dependence on oil imports. Castro objected to the use of farmland for fuel production instead of food.

Castro wrote, ``you need 320 million tons of corn to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol,'' and that it is dangerous to offer financial incentives to ``poor countries'' to produce ethanol from corn. The ``sinister idea'' of converting food into fuel has been ``definitively established as the economic line of U.S. foreign policy,'' Castro said in the article.

``Apply this idea to Third World countries and you will see how many people among the hungry masses of this planet stop eating corn,'' Castro wrote.