Quid and Quiddity

Sir Richard Branson is in the headlines today for another environmental initiative. You may remember that last September, at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, the Virgin Atlantic mogul announced that he would plow all the profits from his railroad and airline ventures into clean energy research -- an investment he figured at roughly $3 billion over ten years. Some critics were quick to point out that this was not a philanthropoic gesture, but a business decision. Some wondered whether that mattered.

Branson's latest initiative is not an investment but a challenge; he is offering 10 million pounds to the scientist who invents the best way (as determined by a panel said to include James Lovelock, James Hansen, and Tim Flannery) to 'scrub' excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Carbon capture and sequestration is currently in limited use on power plants (a source of new CO2 emissions), but this challenge targets C02 already in the atmosphere, where the gas can persist for centuries.

Again, there are critics of Branson's idea. They point to the irony that another of Branson's ventures, Virgin Galactica, would send tourists on carbon-spewing joyrides to space. This is, indeed, a difficult paradox to square. If only we could turn cognitive dissonance into rocket fuel.