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Branson Blasts Off
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Green Giants: An Occasional Series of Interviews with Leaders on Environmental Issues
Virgin CEO Richard Branson tells The Daily Beast he has an escape plan for the end of the world—an environmentally sound spaceship.
Over the last four decades, Richard Branson has launched more than 200 companies to create his Virgin empire, including Virgin Galactic, the first commercial venture in space exploration. He’s also devoted significant amounts of his time and money to developing green technologies aimed at combating climate change. So perhaps it’s fitting that he should eventually combine the two interests. In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Beast, Branson talks about green space travel, developing an interstellar escape plan in case of environmental catastrophe, and his “Carbon War Room,” a group of entrepreneurs who know a thing or two about going green and getting rich.
Virgin Atlantic was the first airline to conduct a commercial test flight using biofuels in early 2008. What’s the latest on that program?
We’ve invested in a company called Gevo and they’ve developed a fuel called isobutanol, which is almost 100 percent carbon neutral. We are in the process of testing that for aviation use and we’re hopeful—but not guaranteeing—that within five years most of the Virgin Atlantic planes can be flying on that fuel. We’re also in discussions with others that have invested in algae-based fuels.
The five-year time frame is more ambitious than I would have thought.
The troubles of the world are worse than I thought, and therefore we’ve got to be ambitious in dealing with them.
“As [Stephen Hawking] rightfully says, chances are mankind will one day be destroyed on Earth. So it makes sense for us to try and set up a proper base somewhere else.”
You have a track record of bringing people together to do just that. In 2007, you formed The Elders—a group of global diplomats—with Nelson Mandela and Peter Gabriel. And last year Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others, came together at your home on Necker Island to brainstorm about ways to fight climate change. Are any new partnerships under way as a result of that meeting?
That was a forerunner of the Carbon War Room. If carbon is the enemy, you set up a war room. For the last three days, I’ve been tucked away in a house outside New York City setting it up. There are major issues, but major opportunities. Take the shipping industry—they are just as big a polluter as the airline industry, if not more. But they’ve managed to keep under the radar and done almost nothing about their carbon footprint. They could save vast amounts of money and contribute a lot to the world if they got their act together. So we’re working on ways to try and get in there and educate them.
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And how to make it economically feasible for the industry at the same time.
Yes, to tackle these issues so the businesses themselves do not suffer financially. We’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs working on it. If there’s a way that businesses can benefit from tackling carbon that’s obviously a win-win.
Who else is involved?
We’ve just named Jigar Shah, founder of Sun Edison and former manager of U.S. marketing at BP Solar, as our CEO.
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Wall-E, anyone?
It would make more sense, to put the so called ruling class on a space ship.
Then there would be less chance for them to deplete the resources. Less chance for them to limit the chances for others to succeed on earth.
Once the greedy that makes others needy, are discovery far away planets, the meek and mild could begin to share so they can benefit from the multiplier principle.
Oh the way fishes and loaves were divided. If the fear mongers had their way, even those loaves and fishes would land up in the bin, to keep prices inflated.
Regardless if people are not able to buy anything anymore cause the economy has collapsed.
Then, once the ruling elite, are out there exploring far away planets, we could redirect our energy into planning instead of reacting, we could bend the way light does, and grow with the curve, we could turn the weapons into plough shares, because it would be the perfect moment we were waiting for, even though the perfect person we were waiting for didn't arrive yet.
"Once the greedy that makes others needy"
What a bunch of psycho babble bullcrap.
The so-called "greedy" are the entrepreneurs,
creators of technology, computers, the internet,
cars, planes, telephones, microphones, televisions,
medical technology, and agricultural advances
making food more abundant, making many lives better.
How would some pissy mad-at-the-world
whiner blog about "evil" rich people,
if there were no "greedy" visionaries,
creators of this very internet ?
The broad brushed vilifying of rich people, the "ruling class," is so tired.
Yes, there are some bad seeds,
but that applies to people from all walks of life.
Many of the rich do more to lift the "less fortunate."
How many of us are employed by a poor person ?
So surrender all your technological devices
supported by the "evil" ruling class,
and go move into the woods and eat tree bark.
Unless they have access to technology that us ordinary schmucks know nothing about--which is always possible--it would take them a very long time to get to even the closest stars, assuming they knew about planets out there that weren't hot as hell, frozen, or radioactive.
I know it sounds crazy but let no-one underestimate Branson, the battling Brit, one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever.
This is old news. The only interesting point is that "The Elders" group is such a poor reflection of contemporary global culture. Old people and media whores. Any women (breeding stock doesn't count) or non-famous diverse thinkers? I suspect that if we saw the whole list, we will pray for them to leave sooner rather than later.
Richard Branson needs to read Miller-McCune magazine and Web site:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/archive/tags/Climate Change
Yes, the rich can escape this planet for a while, but where are they going to go? All the other planets in this solar system are not exactly garden spots, and we do not have the technology to travel to other stars, even assuming that there are other earth-like planets., Almost certainly there are, but how do we get there?
Unless some of these people at the top of the food chain know things about the universe out there that we don't? I've always wondered about that....
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