This Changes Everything (40 page)

Meanwhile, with the ten-year deadline fast approaching, it seems we are no closer to a miracle fuel to power Branson’s planes, which are burning significantly more carbon than when the
pledge period began. But fear not, because Branson has what he describes as his “fallback insurance policy.” So how is that going?
⁴¹

After the original hoopla over Branson’s $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge (or Earth Prize, as it is more frequently called), the initiative seemed to go dormant for a while. When journalists remembered to ask the Virgin
chief about the search for a miracle technology to suck large amounts of carbon from the air, he seemed to subtly lower expectations, much as he
has done with green fuels. And he had always cautioned that there was a chance that no one would win the prize. In November 2010, Branson revealed that Virgin had received something on the order of 2,500 entries. Nick Fox, Branson’s spokesperson, explained
that many ideas had to be ruled out because they were too risky and seemingly safer ones were not “developed enough to be commercialized right now.” In Branson’s words, there was no “slam dunk winner yet.”
⁴²

Fox also mentioned that far more than $25 million was needed to determine some ideas’ large-scale viability, something more on the order of $2.5 billion.
⁴³

Branson claims he hasn’t completely
given up on awarding the prize at some future point, saying, “We hope it’s only a matter of time before there’s a winner.” He has, however, changed his role from straight-up patron to something more akin to a celebrity judge on a reality TV show, giving his blessing to the most promising ideas and helping them land high-level advice, investment, and other opportunities flowing from their association
with the Virgin brand.
⁴⁴

This new incarnation of the Earth Challenge was unveiled (to significantly less fanfare than the first time around) in November 2011, at an energy conference in Calgary, Alberta. Appearing by video link, Branson announced the eleven most promising entries. Four were machines that directly sucked carbon out of the air (though none at anywhere near the scale needed); three
were companies using the biochar process, which turns carbon-sequestering plant matter or manure into charcoal and then buries it in the soil and is controversial on a mass scale; and among the miscellaneous ideas was a surprisingly low-tech one involving revamping livestock grazing to boost the carbon-sequestering potential of soil.
⁴⁵

According to Branson, none of these finalists was ready yet
to win the $25 million prize but they were being showcased like beauty queens at the energy conference so that “the best engineers, investors, opinion formers and policy makers [would] work together on this challenge. Only then will the potential be realised. I see Calgary as a great city to start in.”
⁴⁶

It was certainly a revealing choice. Calgary is the economic heart of Canada’s tar sands
boom. Oil from those dirty deposits has made the city one of the richest metropolises in the world, but its ongoing prosperity is
entirely contingent on continuing to find customers for its product. And that depends very much on getting controversial pipelines like Keystone XL constructed through increasingly hostile territory, as well as on dissuading foreign governments from passing laws that
would penalize Alberta’s particularly high-carbon fuel.

Enter Alan Knight, Richard Branson’s sustainability advisor and the man he put in charge of the Earth Challenge. Knight took great pride in being Branson’s go-to green guy, but their relationship was far from exclusive. Shell and Statoil (two of the biggest players in the tar sands) were among the other clients in Knight’s consultancy. So
too was, in his words, “Calgary City and the Alberta oil sands industry,” specifically the Oil Sands Leadership Initiative (OSLI), an industry trade group comprised of ConocoPhillips, Nexen, Shell, Statoil, Suncor Energy, and Total. Knight boasted of being given “private access to their meetings,” and explained that he advised his clients in the Alberta oil patch on how to allay mounting concerns
about the enormous ecological costs of an extraction process that is three to four times more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional crude.
⁴⁷

His suggestion? Adopt a “narrative” about how their “awesome” technology can be used not just to extract dirty oil but to solve the environmental problems of tomorrow. And, he says, the choice of Calgary to host the next phase of Branson’s Earth Challenge
was “no coincidence”; indeed it appeared to be a way for him to serve the interests of some of his biggest clients all at once—the tar sands giants as well as Richard Branson. In an interview, Knight explained that “you’ve got a lot of very good engineers and you’ve got a lot of very highly financed companies who should be looking at this technology.”
⁴⁸

But what exactly would they be looking
at this technology to do? Not simply to suck out the carbon that they are putting into the air, but also, it turns out, to add even more carbon. Because in Calgary, the Virgin Earth Challenge was “reeingineered,” to use Knight’s word. While previously the goal had been to find technology capable of removing large amounts of carbon and safely storing it, Knight started referring to the prize as “an
initiative to develop technology to recycle CO
₂
direct from the air into commercially viable products.”
⁴⁹

It made a certain amount of sense: removing carbon out of the air has long been technically possible. The problems have always been finding a means of removal that was not prohibitively costly, as well as storage and scale. In a market economy that means finding customers interested in buying
a whole lot of captured carbon. Which is where the decision to pitch the eleven most promising entries in Calgary started to gel. Since the mid-2000s, the oil industry has been increasing its use of a method known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)—a set of techniques that mostly use high-pressure gas or steam injections to squeeze more oil out of existing fields. Most commonly, wells are injected
with CO
₂
and research shows that this use of CO
₂
could cause the U.S. proven oil reserves to double or even, with “next-generation” technologies, quadruple. But there is a problem (other than the obvious planet-cooking one): according to Tracy Evans, former president of the Texas oil and gas company Denbury Resources, “The single largest deterrent to expanding production from EOR today is the
lack of large volumes of reliable and affordable CO
₂
.”
⁵⁰

With this in mind, several of Branson’s group of eleven finalists have pitched themselves as the start-ups best positioned to supply the oil industry with the steady stream of carbon dioxide it needs to keep the oil flowing. Ned David, president of Kilimanjaro Energy, one of Branson’s finalists, claimed that machines like his have the potential
to release huge volumes of oil once assumed untappable, similar to what fracking did for natural gas. It could be, he said, “a money gusher.” He told
Fortune
, “The prize is nearly 100 billion barrels of U.S. oil if you can economically capture CO
₂
from air. That’s $10 trillion of oil.”
⁵¹

David Keith, who has been studying geoengineering for twenty-five years, and who is the inventor of another
one of the carbon-capture machines to make Branson’s list, was slightly more circumspect. He explained that if carbon that was removed from the air were used to extract oil, “you’re making hydrocarbon fuel with a very low life-cycle [of] carbon emissions.” Maybe not so low, because according to a study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, EOR techniques are
estimated to be almost three times as greenhouse-gas intensive as conventional extraction. And the oil is still going to be burned, thereby contributing to climate change. While more research is needed on the overall
carbon footprint of EOR, one striking modeling study examined a similar proposal that would use CO
₂
captured not from the air but directly from coal plants. It found that the emissions
benefit of sequestering CO
₂
would be more than canceled out by all that extra oil: on a system-wide basis, the process could still end up releasing about four times as much CO
₂
as it would save.
⁵²

Moreover, much of this is oil that is currently considered unrecoverable—i.e., not even counted in current proven reserves, which as we know already represents five times more than we can safely burn.
Any technology that can quadruple proven reserves in the U.S. alone is a climate menace, not a climate solution. As David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council puts it, air capture has “morphed very rapidly from a technology whose purpose is to remove CO
₂
to a technology whose purpose is to produce CO
₂
.”
⁵³
And Richard Branson has gone from promising to help get us off oil to championing
technologies aimed at extracting and burning much more of it. Some prize.

There was something else worth noting about Branson’s decision to allow his Earth Challenge to cobrand with the Alberta oil sector. The Calgary event took place at a moment when the San Francisco–based Forest Ethics had been upping the pressure on large corporations to boycott oil derived
from the Alberta tar sands because of its high-carbon footprint. A fierce debate was also unfolding over whether new European fuel standards would effectively ban the sale of tar sands oil in Europe. And as early as 2008, the NRDC had sent open letters to fifteen U.S. and Canadian airlines asking them “to adopt their own corporate ‘Low Carbon Fuel Standard’ and to publicly oppose the expansion”
of fuel from the tar sands and other unconventional sources, and to avoid these fuels in their own fleets. The group made a special appeal to Branson, citing his leadership in “combating global warming and developing alternative fuels.”
⁵⁴

It seemed like a fair enough demand: the Virgin chief had enjoyed enormous publicity for his very public climate-change promises. None of them
had yielded much,
but surely, while he was waiting for an algae-based jet fuel to materialize or for someone to win the Earth Prize, Branson could make the relatively minor concession of refusing to power his rapidly expanding fleet of airplanes with one of the most carbon-intensive fuels on the market.

Branson did not make that commitment. Alan Knight publicly stated, “I do not believe supporting a boycott is
fair” and claimed that it was “impossible for an airline to boycott fuel made from oil sands”—a position contradicted by many experts.
^VII
55
But Branson went further than refusing to participate in the boycott. By bringing the Earth Challenge to Calgary, Branson in effect did for the tar sands what his grand (but largely ephemeral) climate gestures have been doing for Virgin all these years: dangled
the prospect of a miracle technological fix for carbon pollution just over the horizon in order to buy time to continue escalating emissions, free of meddlesome regulation. Indeed it can be argued—and some do—that Branson’s planet-savior persona is an elaborate attempt to avoid the kind of tough regulatory action that was on the horizon in the U.K. and Europe precisely when he had his high-profile
green conversion.

After all, 2006 was a pivotal year for the climate change debate. Public concern was rising dramatically, particularly in the U.K. where the movement’s radical, grassroots flank was dominated by young activists who were determined to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel economy in its tracks. Much as they oppose fracking today, these activists used daring direct action to oppose
new airports, as well as the highly controversial proposed new runway at Heathrow, which the airport claims would increase its number of flights by more than 50 percent.
⁵⁶

At the same time, the U.K. government was considering a broad climate change bill that would have impacted the airline sector, and Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor at the time, had attempted to discourage flying with a marginal
increase of the air passenger duty. In addition, the EU was entertaining a proposal to lift the airline industry’s exemption from paying
a Value Added Tax and introduce an additional tax on aviation fuel. All these measures taken together posed a significant threat to the profit margins of Branson’s chosen industry.
⁵⁷

Branson often talks a good game about supporting government regulation (saying
he favors a global carbon tax, for instance), but he consistently opposes serious climate regulations when they are actually on the table. He has, for instance, been a hyperbolic, even bullying advocate of British airport expansion, including that new runway at Heathrow. He is so hungry for the expansion, in fact, that he has claimed, at various points, that its absence “will turn us into a third
world country,” that “global corporations will turn their back on London in favour of better connected cities,” and that “Heathrow will become a symbol of British decline.”)
^VIII
58

This wasn’t the only time Branson’s claims to be committed to waging war on carbon came into conflict with his hard-nosed business instincts. He came out against the proposed climate tax in Australia and blasted a plan
for a global tax on airlines, claiming it “would tax the industry out of existence.”
^IX
59

It’s this pattern that convinced Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth U.K. that Branson’s reinvention as a guilt-ridden planet wrecker volunteering to use his carbon profits to solve the climate crisis was little more than a cynical ploy. “It comes across as a charitable act,” Childs warned of the $3 billion
pledge, “but I think he is also trying to take some of the heat out of aviation as a political issue. If you are running a transport company, you must have realized by now that climate change is going to be a massive issue for you.”
⁶⁰