Yeah, would have been fun. But, you know that he's been approached by people who ask this in all seriousness. (People, excepting present company of course, are idiots.)
So, what do you all think makes someone an "astronaut"? Reaching a certain altitude? Circling the Earth at least once without using aerodynamic lift? Some involvement in controlling the vehicle? (There's no "right" answer; it's all nomenclature.)
It wasn't even an attempted space flight. My understanding is that it takes about sixty times as much energy to get into orbit as it takes to get up to an altitude you could call "space".
More info: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
Increasing bio-fuel production increases the amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere when the feed stock is grown. Increasing coal/oil production doesn't do that; nobody's pumping CO2 into the ground to make more coal or petroleum. (That said, I'm not a big fan of bio-fuels; they take a lot of energy and land to produce.)
