The solution is no pollution. 

Stop polluting is the way to avoid the looming climate catastrophe on planet Earth. It’s not in your power to do that on behalf of humanity, Mr. Richard Charles Nicholas Branson. You’re after all just one very tiny billionaire (i.e. compared to the real size of the earth).

But it is within your reach to stop polluting, yourself, or more precisely: to make your business operations stop polluting. So, now that I've reduced the Virgin Earth Challenge to its essentials, you see that it becomes a challenge to you, Branson. It’s still a bold challenge, but it’s yours: How can you transform your Virgin travel empire into one that does not contribute to killing the planet.

I’m not suggesting that you shut down your business. That’s not what you want. And it probably won’t make any difference, because someone else would just step in and fill that empty gap in the market. Pollution would persist, only that someone else, not you, would profit from it.

The business idea that has made your Virgin travel empire so successful, has been to provide pleasant long-distance travels to people while entertaining them during their journeys. That is not a bad business idea. Not at all. And it’s certainly not an evil business idea. It is not this brilliant customer care concept of yours that litters the atmosphere. The problem is all about the vehicles you have adopted for those transports, the fossil fuel powered tubes with wings (called airplanes).

So, the challenge to you, Richard Branson, is to replace those heavily polluting winged human transport tubes with some other kind of long-distance means of transport that can benefit the customers equally (or better), and which don't pollute.

And that, dear sir, is technically far less challenging than demonstrating a scalable and sustainable way of permanently removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, as your original Virgin Earth Challenge suggests.

I, that is we: me and my brain, believe we are on to something here, that might just do.

◄ Previous post

Next post ►