This Changes Everything (41 page)

Was he right? Well, one immediate impact of Branson’s pledge was that,
all of a sudden, you could feel good about flying again—after all, the profits from that
ticket to Barbados were going into Branson’s grand plan to discover a miracle green fuel. It was an even more effective conscience cleaner than carbon offsets (though Virgin sold those, too). As for punitive regulations and taxes, who would want to get in the way of an airline whose proceeds were going to such a good cause? And this was always Branson’s argument: let him grow, unencumbered by regulation,
and he will use that growth to finance our collective green transition. “If you hold industry back, we will not, as a nation, have the resources to come up with the new clean-energy solutions we need,” Branson argued. “Business is the key to solving the financial and environmental crisis.”
⁶¹

So the skeptics might be right: Branson’s various climate adventures may indeed prove to have all been
a spectacle, a Virgin production, with everyone’s favorite bearded billionaire playing the part of planetary savior to build his brand, land on late night TV, fend off regulators, and feel good about doing bad. It is certainly noteworthy that the show has been significantly less voluble ever since the Conservative-led government of David Cameron came to power in the U.K. and made it clear that Branson
and his ilk faced no serious threat of top-down climate regulations.

But even if the constantly moving goalposts in Branson’s climate initiatives merit that kind of cynicism, there is also a more charitable interpretation of what has gone wrong. This interpretation would grant Branson his obvious love of nature (whether it’s watching the tropical birds on his private island or ballooning over
the Himalayas). And it would credit him with genuinely trying to figure out ways to reconcile running carbon-intensive businesses with a profound personal desire to help slow species extinction and avert climate chaos. It would acknowledge, too, that between the pledge, the prize, and the Carbon War Room, Branson has thought up some rather creative mechanisms to try to channel profits generated from
warming the planet into projects that could help keep it cool.

But if we do grant Branson these good intentions, then the fact that all of these projects have failed to yield results is all the more relevant. Branson set out to harness the profit motive to solve the climate crisis—but the temptation to profit from practices worsening the crisis proved too great to resist. Again and again, the
demands of building a successful em
pire trumped the climate imperative—whether that meant lobbying against needed regulation, or putting more planes in the air, or pitching oil companies on using his pet miracle technologies to extract more oil.

The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis
that has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside and take a hard look at the results: at the celebrities and media conglomerates that were supposed to model chic green lifestyles who have long since moved on to the next fad; at the green products that were shunted to the back of the supermarket shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists
who were supposed to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed miserably to lower emissions; at the natural gas sector that was supposed to be our bridge to renewables but ended up devouring much of their market instead. And most of all, at the parade of billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened
capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender.

We’ve tried it Branson’s way. (And Buffett’s, Bloomberg’s, Gates’s, and Pickens’s way.) The soaring emissions speak for themselves. There will, no doubt, be more billionaire saviors who make splashy entrances, with more schemes to rebrand capitalism. The trouble is, we simply don’t have another decade
to lose pinning our hopes on these sideshows. There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.

This is important because Branson was onto something with his pledge. It makes perfect sense to make the profits and proceeds from the businesses that are most responsible for exacerbating the climate
crisis help pay for the transition to a safer, greener future. Branson’s original idea—to spend 100 percent of the proceeds from his trains and airlines on figuring out a way to get off fossil fuels—was, at least in theory, exactly the kind of thing that needs to take place on a grand scale. The problem is that under current business models, once the shareholders have taken a slice, once the executives
have given themselves yet another raise, once Richard Branson has launched yet another world-domination project and purchased an
other private island, there doesn’t seem to be much left over to fulfill the promise.

Similarly, Alan Knight was onto something when he told his tar sands clients that they should use their technological prowess to invent the low-carbon and renewable energy sources of
the future. As he said, “The potential narrative is perfect.”
⁶²
The hitch, of course, is that, so long as this vision is left to the enlightened self-interest of oil and airline executives, it will remain just that: a narrative—or rather, a fairy tale. Meanwhile, the industry will use its technology and resources to develop ever more ingenious and profitable new ways to extract fossil fuels from
the deepest recesses of the earth, even as it fiercely defends its public subsidies and resists the kind of minor increases to its tax and royalty rates that would allow governments to fund green transitions without its help.

In this regard, Virgin is particularly brazen. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers estimates that Virgin Trains has received more than £3 billion
(the equivalent of $5 billion) in subsidies since British railways were privatized in the late 1990s—significantly more than Branson pledged to the green fund. As recently as 2010, Branson and the Virgin Group received £18 million in dividends from Virgin Trains. Branson insists that the characterization of him as a freeloader is “garbage,” pointing to sharp increases in the number of passengers on
Virgin trains and writing, “far from receiving subsidies, we now pay more than £100m a year to the taxpayer.” But paying taxes is part of doing business. So when Branson pays into the Green Fund, whose money is it really—his own or the taxpayers’? And if a substantial portion of it originally belonged to taxpayers, wouldn’t it have been a better arrangement never to have sold off the rails in the
first place?
⁶³

If that were the case, the British people—with the climate crisis in mind—might have long ago decided to reinvest rail profits back into improving their public transit system, rather than allowing trains to become outdated and fares to skyrocket while shareholders of private rail companies like Branson’s pocketed hundreds of millions in returns from their taxpayer-subsidized operations.
And rather than gambling on the invention of a miracle fuel, they might have decided to make it a top political priority to shift the entire system over to electric trains, with that power coming from
renewable energy, rather than have the system partially powered by diesel, as it is now. No wonder 66 percent of British residents tell pollsters they support renationalizing the railway companies.
⁶⁴

Richard Branson got at least one thing right. He showed us the kind of bold model that has a chance of working in the tight time frame left: the profits from our dirtiest industries must be diverted into the grand and hopeful project of cleaning up their mess. But if there is one thing Branson has demonstrated, it is that it won’t happen on a voluntary basis or on the honor system. It will have
to be legislated—using the kinds of tough regulations, higher taxes, and steeper royalty rates these sectors have resisted all along.

Of course there is still a chance that one of Branson’s techno-schemes could pan out. He might yet stumble across a zero-carbon jet fuel, or a magic machine for safely and cheaply removing carbon from the skies. Time, however, is not on our side. David Keith,
inventor of one of those carbon-sucking machines, in which Bill Gates is a key investor, estimates that the technology is still decades away from being taken to scale. “There’s no way you can do a useful amount of carbon dioxide removal in less than a third of a century or maybe half a century,” he says.
⁶⁵
As always with matters related to climate change, we have to keep one eye on the ticking
clock—and what that clock tells us is that if we are to have a solid chance of avoiding catastrophic warming, we will need to be burning strictly minimal amounts of fossil fuels a half century from now. If we spend the precious years between now and then dramatically expanding our emissions (as Branson is doing with his airlines, and as Knight’s clients are doing in the tar sands), then we are literally
betting the habitability of the planet on the faint hope of a miracle cure.

And yet Branson (a notorious risk addict with a penchant for crash-landing hot air balloons) is far from the only one willing to stake our collective future on this kind of high-stakes gamble. Indeed the reason his various far-fetched schemes have been taken as seriously as they have over the years is that he, alongside
Bill Gates with his near mystical quest for energy
“miracles,” taps into what may be our culture’s most intoxicating narrative: the belief that technology is going to save us from the effects of our actions. Post–market crash and amidst ever more sinister levels of inequality, most of us have come to realize that the oligarchs who were minted by the era of deregulation and mass privatization are
not, in fact, going to use their vast wealth to save the world on our behalf. Yet our faith in techno wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster.

This is the great promise of geoengineering and it remains our culture’s most powerful form of magical thinking.

I
. The Grantham Foundation for
the Protection of the Environment has funded a broad range of large environmental groups, ranging from The Nature Conservancy to Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund to 350.org.

II
. It should be noted that though Steyer has separated out his personal funds from Farallon, he remains a limited partner and has also promoted the use of natural gas, helping to fund the EDF research that went
into its pro-fracking study and enthusiastically endorsing natural gas in
The Wall Street Journal
.

III
. Those policies have been criticized for favoring big developers over vulnerable communities and for using a green veneer to push through mega real estate development projects with dubious environmental benefits, as Hunter College urban affairs professor Tom Angotti and others have written.
Communities heavily impacted by Hurricane Sandy, meanwhile, have claimed that Bloomberg’s post-disaster rebuilding plans were made with only token input from them.

IV
. Aided by investments like these, the ethanol boom was responsible for 20–40 percent of the spike in agricultural commodity prices in 2007–2009, according to a survey by the National Academy of Sciences.

V
. Puerile humor of this
sort is a recurring theme in Branson’s PR machine (the company once painted “Mine’s Bigger than Yours” on the side of a new Airbus A340-600; boasted of its business-class seats that “size does matter”; and even flew a blimp over London emblazoned with the slogan “BA [British Airways] Can’t Get It Up!!”).

VI
. To quote one scathing assessment of the project by sociologist Salvatore Babones, “If
two words can capture the extraordinary redistribution of wealth from workers to the wealthy over the past forty years, the flagrant shamelessness of contemporary conspicuous consumption, the privatization of what used to be public privileges and the wanton destruction of our atmosphere that is rapidly leading toward the extinction of nearly all non-human life on earth, all covered in a hypocritical
pretense of pious environmental virtue . . . those two words are Virgin Galactic.”

VII
. Including sustainability consultant Brendan May, founder of the Robertsbridge Group. “Of course you can segregate fuel according to its source,” May writes. “If there’s a will, there’s a way. . . . At present, there’s just no will.”

VIII
. In 2012, he went so far as to offer to invest roughly $8 billion in
an expansion of Virgin Atlantic’s operations at Heathrow if the government would approve the new runway—a prospect that once again raises questions about Branson’s claims to be too broke to keep up with his $3 billion climate pledge.

IX
. Branson is apparently no great fan of paying taxes generally, as his byzantine network of offshore holding companies in the Channel Islands and British Virgin
Islands attests. Indeed he spent a night in jail and received a hefty fine after getting caught in an illegal cross-border tax avoidance scam when running his first company in 1971. “I was a criminal,” Branson writes of his jailhouse revelation in his autobiography.

“Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year.”

—
Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 2008
¹

“Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”

—William James, 1895
²

It’s March 2011 and I have just arrived at a three-day retreat about
geoengineering in the Buckinghamshire countryside, about an hour and a half northwest of London. The meeting has been convened by the Royal Society, Britain’s legendary academy of science, which has counted among its fellows Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking.