He's a soil vampire, sucking in fertility from somewhere else to feed his own garden.

Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.

I've seen this sentiment so many times from westerners. You all say this, and yet at the same time you levy economic sanctions on countries like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, with the justification that by making their citizens lives horrific, you encourage them to rise against their government.

Their authoritarian militaristic government that doesn't care for human rights.

If you apply the same standard to the North Korean citizens, that they should not be expected to "take that risk", they your country's sanctions are pure collective punishment with no strategic value. You just tortured people for fun.

Quite slowly. Lignin, which makes up about 30% of woody biomass, is very difficult to break down biologically. Only a few specialized bacteria and fungi have the enzymes for it.

We don't need to sequester carbon permanently, we just need to bind enough of it into soil carbon to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. The long residence time of carbon in the soil is sufficient for this purpose.

There is no intrinsic link between biofuel and deforestation. If coffee is the most profitable crop, then you'd see an endless sea of coffee plantations in Malaysia. Would you want to ban coffee then? Okay you banned coffee, so cocoa now is the most profitable crop, so you banned cocoa. Now pineapple is the most profitable crop, so forth and so on.

The logical conclusion is that when you try to "save the forest", you are saying that a country has no sovereignty in developing its economy and exploiting its resource to enrich its citizen. "You should stay poor, because I say so".

A common proxy is "metric tonnes of steel produced" and "metric tonnes of sulfuric acid produced". For China, these have been going up in-line with their GDP growth, whereas for USA they have flatlined since 1980 despite the increase in manufacturing dollar-value output.

Only on a dollar value basis. And that's heavily skewed on how an item's value is calculated. When you use $50 of parts (all made in China) to assemble a machine that you sold at $500 , $50 of GDP value is attributed to China while $450 of GDP value is attributed to the US. But who did more "manufacturing"?