In many cases, such as corn ethanol, it can be shown that using the land to grow trees and just using fossil fuels results in lower CO2 release. The trees must never be burned, however.

The much larger issue is the fact that there is not enough land to supply fuels for the industrial world that we live in. Any use of biomass grown on land for fuel removes the possibility of using the land for food production. Any form of ethanol produced in pure enough form by fermentation can be used as food as many people now even get a substantial part of their caloric requirements from dilute or more concentrated ethanol.

Actually all ethanol, even that produced from oil can be made fit for human consumption. Certain limited amounts can prevent people from demise and make them oblivious of the fact that the more nutritious corn is being used to fuel automobiles rather than feeding them.

The recent announcement of 6 million needing food in Ethiopia has not substantially hindered the flow of corn into fuel tanks in rich nations that are legislativly insisting upon "renewable" fuels the use of which can be shown in most cases to increase the release of CO2 over the simple use of fossil fuels and the growning of long lived trees on the lands thus removed from agriculture.

Solar energy is not strictly renewable and neither is fission or even fusion power plants, but with the use of breeder reactors and other uranium and thorium converters like the Rubia Reactors there is far more than enough uranium in the ocean alone to provide all the energy the human race needs at its present size for billions of years at a cost less than cheap oil and certainly less than bio-ethanol from even cellulose.

In the near term the conversion of coal fired power plants to nuclear and the use of the coal now being used for electricity to produce gasoline and diesel instead, can cut the production of CO2 and still maintain the economy. Natural gas also can be converted into liquid fuels or used directly to replace the use of gasoline or diesel by compressing it.

Heat pumps can be used with great efficiency on nuclear electricity to replace the use of natural gas for home and industrial heating. The equipment cost will be reduced because of large scale production of the machines such as ECOcute.

Nuclear heat can intially be used at very low cost to eliminate the use of combustion of fossil fuels to produce refined liquid fuels from oil and natural gas.

Eventually nuclear heat will be used to produce hydrogen to combine with CO2 collected from the air, also with nuclear heat, in order to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels. This all can be done at less cost than the present oil prices. Even gasoline from coal can be done much cheaper than the present extortionary oil prices. Energy can be bought in the form of coal at a price ten or more times cheaper than energy bought in the form of crude oil.

Energy can be bought in the form of uranium even a million times cheaper than coal, but the equipment for using it has become far too expensive because of political figures promoting the idea that nuclear energy is far more dangerous than it actually is.

The "waste" nuclear fuel from most power plants has at least 95 percent of the energy remaining, but President Carter decided to call it "waste" because its use was inconvenient with regards to his pesonal opinions about how to induce other countries not to build nuclear weapons. The plutonium is such wastes cannot be used to build highly powerful bombs because it has to much of the wrong kind of plutonium in it, just as ordinary uranium has too much of the wrong kind of uranium in it.

As the US demonstrated during WWII, plutonium production reactors can be built in a few months and the plutomium in spent fuel is therefore of no practical interest. There is now enough knowledge available about these production reactors that would save a new nuclear power want-to-be months or years of time. The same is true about chemical processing.

This material is not waste; in almost all other countries with nuclear power plants it is reprocessed and reused. And even in the US, it could have been and is possible to use it in CANDU reactors without reprocessing of any sort just a slight repackaging is necessary and reactors could be built where repackaging is not even necessary. Our cities could be heated with artificial geothermal heat from reactors adequately safely buried directly under the cities to produce heat alone. Chernobyl type reactors expoding as it did but a hundred feet below the ground would not have spred any radiation to the city. Chernobyl was actually a demonstration of the worst possible nuclear reactor failures.

Chernobyl was destroyed in an illegal and an unsafely conducted test to find out if there was enough power available from a stopped reactor to do emergency cooling of the core with electricity from the main generator to avoid the installation of engine powered cooling pumps. It was a steam explosion and a carbon fire. The explosion was not even as bad as many large propane tank explosions, and the fire was much less a danger than such propane tank explosions. And the radioactive elements that were released could have been and mostly were safely avoided by the near population who were endangered more by secrecy than the atoms.

Fewer than ten people were killed immediately and fewer than 50 people were killed by radiation. Many deaths were emergency responders who were endangered by the failure of their superiors and the USSR to use more people to prevent long exposures.

Hyperion Power Generation should be subsidized with billions of dollars of loans to get their product in the ground in a few months. Initially they will be used at present nuclear power plants with UTC and Ormat geothermal generators.

Coal and natural gas to jet fuels factories should be built to ensure the nations supply of such fuels. They are profitable if the oil price is higher than $35. An import duty of at least $20 will ensure that these factories are always profitable. ..HG..