It’s 6 P.M. on a Friday, and a few hundred New Yorkers are kicking off their weekend drinking $8 scotches and $10 martinis at a multilevel dance club called Strata, where Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall once filmed a scene for HBO’s Sex and the City. But the happy-hour crowd is not chatting and flirting. Instead, their eyes and cell phone cameras are trained on a stage in the center of the packed venue, where former Senator John Edwards is propounding positions as fashionable as his surroundings. Of course “we desperately need” universal health care, the troops out of Iraq, and an end to the genocide in Darfur. Of course we need that. But Edwards is feeling even more expansive than the room. Did you know the solutions to the climate crisis and poverty in Africa are one and the same? Just one word. Are you listening? Biofuels.

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“America gets off its addiction to oil,” he posits. “We move toward biofuels. The Europeans follow. The Japanese follow. The result is, all of a sudden, [oil-rich Middle Eastern] countries have no choice. They have to develop. They have to economically develop. They have to educate their kids. The price of oil goes down. They have to politically reform. All of a sudden, the world is a safer, more secure place.”

All of a sudden. “So what happens when America moves from oil to biofuels? Well, in the United States of America, we have the land mass, we have the farms [in places like, say, Iowa], to develop these biofuels. The Europeans do not. Neither do the Japanese. So all of a sudden, they need land. Where are they likely to go? Africa. And all of a sudden, millions of children in Africa, because of the move from oil to biofuels, are lifted out of poverty.”