It's exactly what André and I experienced during our first lectures on the Solar Impulse project five years ago. We said that General Motors and consorts would go bankrupt for lack of customers ready to guzzle such amounts of energy in their car engines. People retorted that we were neither economists nor industrialists and that we should keep within our fields of competence. And what do we see now? GM and Chrysler on their knees - and not only they - begging the state to cast taxpayers' money into a bottomless pit. To preserve jobs, they say.

And what if these employees were paid instead by the State to build solar generating stations and windfarms instead of going on producing expensive, polluting engines that no one wants any more? Will people again retort that this is not our area of competence? No, we are not economists, and fortunately so, given their disastrous results. We are not even seers, just normal people with a little bit of common sense who are hoping that Europe will today make better industrial choices than the USA.

Let's talks again in five years' time to see whether this is so.