 |
In 2006, after
meeting Al Gore, Richard Branson pledged £3bn to battle climate change over the
following decade. He has since spent just £230m. Photograph: Bruno
Vincent/Getty Images
|
Richard Branson failed to
deliver on $3bn climate change pledge
New book by Naomi Klein claims that Virgin founder gave less than a
tenth of cash promised to develop low carbon fuel
Naomi Klein: the hypocrisy behind the big business climate change battle
Suzanne Goldenberg
theguardian.com,
Saturday 13 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/13/richard-branson-failed-climate-change-pledge
Richard Branson has failed to deliver on
his much-vaunted pledge to spend $3bn (£1.8bn) over a decade to develop a low
carbon fuel.
Seven years into the pledge, Branson has
paid out only a small fraction of the promised money – “well under $300m” –
according to a new book by the writer and activist, Naomi Klein.
The British entrepreneur famously promised
to divert a share of the profits from his Virgin airlines empire to find a
cleaner fuel, after a 2006 private meeting with Al Gore.
Branson went on to found a $25m Earth prize
for a technology that could safely suck 1bn tons of carbon a year from the
atmosphere. In 2009, he set up the Carbon War Room, an NGO which works on
business solutions for climate change.
But by Klein’s estimate, Branson’s “firm
commitment” of $3bn failed to materialise.
“So the sceptics might be right: Branson’s
various climate adventures may indeed prove to have all been a spectacle, a
Virgin production, with everyone’s favourite bearded billionaire playing the
part of planetary saviour to build his brand, land on late night TV, fend off
regulators, and feel good about doing bad,” Klein writes in This Changes
Everything, Capitalism vs The Climate.
Klein uses Branson and other so-called
green billionaires – such as the former New
York
Branson routed a first pay-out of his $3bn
commitment, about $130m, through a new Virgin investment company into corn
ethanol.
The fuel has now been widely discredited as
a greener alternative to fossil fuels, because of its climate change impacts
and for driving up the cost of food.
Virgin went on to look at other biofuels,
at one point exploring a project to develop jet fuel from eucalyptus trees.
“But the rest of its investments are a grab bag of vaguely green-hued projects,
from water desalination to energy efficient lighting, to an in-car monitoring
system to help drivers conserve gas,” Klein writes.
By last year, the total of those
investments, in corn ethanol and elsewhere, amounted to about $230m, she
estimates. Branson made an additional small investment in an algae fuel company,
Solazyme. But Branson still puts the total spend at well under $300m – just a
tenth of his $3bn pledge.
The British entrepreneur has acknowledged
that his efforts to mobilise large investments on cleaner fuels have fallen
short. However, he told the Observer earlier this year he had lost many
millions in failed green investments.
“There is no question that Virgin is
involved in a number of businesses that emit a lot of carbon, and that is one
of the reasons why I have to work particularly hard … but, more importantly, to
try to help other people balance their books as well,” he said.
“We have invested hundreds of millions in
clean technology projects. We haven’t made hundreds of millions profit,” he
said.
Branson also told the Observer that he felt
he had a responsibility to do something for the climate – given that so much of
his empire is built on carbon-intensive transport industries.
“There is no question that Virgin is
involved in a number of businesses that emit a lot of carbon, and that is one
of the reasons why I have to work particularly hard … but, more importantly, to
try to help other people balance their books as well,” he said.
 |
Naomi Klein: 'My
doctor told me that my hormone levels were too low and that I'd probably
miscarry, for the third time. My mind raced back to the Gulf.' Photograph: Anya
Chibis for the Guardian
Naomi Klein: the hypocrisy
behind the big business climate change battle
Soon after reporting on the 2010 BP oil spill, Naomi
Klein found she was pregnant – and miscarried. Was there a connection? She
looks at the 'greenwashing' of big business and its effects
Naomi Klein
The Guardian,
Saturday 13 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/13/greenwashing-sticky-business-naomi-klein
I denied climate
change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure. But I
stayed pretty hazy on the details and only skimmed most news stories. I told
myself the science was too complicated and the environmentalists were dealing
with it. And I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with the shiny
card in my wallet attesting to my "elite" frequent-flyer status.
A great many of
us engage in this kind of denial. We look for a split second and then we look
away. Or maybe we do really look, but then we forget. We engage in this odd
form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons.
We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will
change everything.
And we are
right. If we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year
after year, major cities will drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the
seas; our children will spend much of their lives fleeing and recovering from
vicious storms and extreme droughts. Yet we continue all the same.
What is wrong
with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to
believe: we have not done the things needed to cut emissions because those
things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning
ideology for the entire period we have struggled to find a way out of this
crisis. We are stuck, because the actions that would give us the best chance of
averting catastrophe – and benefit the vast majority – are threatening to an
elite minority with a stranglehold over our economy, political process and
media.
That problem
might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in
our history. But it is our collective misfortune that governments and
scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas
emissions in 1988 – the exact year that marked the dawning of
"globalisation". The numbers are striking: in the 1990s, as the
market integration project ramped up, global emissions were going up an average
of 1% a year; by the 2000s, with "emerging markets" such as China
fully integrated into the world economy, emissions growth had sped up
disastrously, reaching 3.4% a year.
That rapid
growth rate has continued, interrupted only briefly, in 2009, by the world
financial crisis. What the climate needs now is a contraction in humanity's use
of resources; what our economic model demands is unfettered expansion. Only one
of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature.
What gets me
most are not the scary studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to
avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For A Moose is one of
his favourites. It's about a bunch of kids who really want to see a moose. They
search high and low – through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a
mountain. (The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page.) In the end,
the animals all come out and the ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never ever
seen so many moose!" On about the 75th reading, it suddenly hit me: he
might never see a moose.
I went to my
computer and began to write about my time in northern Alberta
And not just in Alberta Minnesota 4,000 in the 1990s to just
100.
Will my son ever
see a moose?
In our desire to
deal with climate change without questioning the logic of growth, we've been
eager to look both to technology and the market for saviours. And the world's
celebrity billionaires have been happy to play their part.
In his
autobiography/new age business manifesto Screw It, Let's Do It, Richard Branson
shared the inside story of his road to Damascus
As he tells it,
his first move was to summon Will Whitehorn, then Virgin Group's corporate and
brand development director. "We took the decision to change the way Virgin
operates on a corporate and global level. We called this new approach Gaia
Capitalism in honour of James Lovelock and his revolutionary scientific
view" (this is that the Earth is "one single enormous living
organism"). Not only would Gaia Capitalism "help Virgin to make a
real difference in the next decade and not be ashamed to make money at the same
time", but Branson believed it could become "a new way of doing
business on a global level".
 |
'For two years
after I covered the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico ,
I couldn't look at any body of water without imagining it covered in oil.'
Illustration: Noma Bar for the Guardian
Before the year was out, he was ready to make
his grand entrance on to the green scene (and he knows how to make an entrance
– by parachute, by jetski, by kitesail with a naked model clinging to his
back). At the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York
In short, he was volunteering to do precisely
what our governments have been unwilling to legislate: channel the profits
earned from warming the planet into the costly transition away from these
dangerous energy sources. Bill Clinton was dazzled, calling the pledge
"ground-breaking". But Branson wasn't finished: a year later, he was
back with the Virgin Earth Challenge – a $25m prize for the first inventor to
figure out how to sequester 1bn tonnes of carbon a year from the air
"without countervailing harmful effects". And the best part, he said,
is that if these competing geniuses crack the carbon code, the "'doom and
gloom' scenario vanishes. We can carry on living our lives in a pretty normal
way – we can drive our cars, fly our planes." The idea that we can solve
the climate crisis without having to change our lifestyles – certainly not by
taking fewer Virgin flights – seemed the underlying assumption of all Branson's
initiatives. In 2009, he launched the Carbon War Room, an industry group
looking for ways that different sectors could lower their emissions
voluntarily, and save money in the process. For many mainstream greens, Branson
seemed a dream come true: a media darling out to show the world that fossil
fuel-intensive companies can lead the way to a green future, using profit as the
most potent tool.
Bill Gates and former mayor of New York Michael
Bloomberg have also used their philanthropy aggressively to shape climate
solutions, the latter with large donations to green groups such as the
Environmental Defense Fund, and with the supposedly enlightened climate
policies he introduced as mayor. But while talking a good game about carbon
bubbles and stranded assets, Bloomberg has made no discernible attempt to
manage his own vast wealth in a manner that reflects these concerns. In fact,
he helped set up Willett Advisors, a firm specialising in oil and gas assets,
for both his personal and philanthropic holdings. Those gas assets may well
have risen in value as a result of his environmental giving – what with, for
example, EDF championing natural gas as a replacement for coal. Perhaps there
is no connection between his philanthropic priorities and his decision to
entrust his fortune to the oil and gas sector. But these investment choices
raise uncomfortable questions about his status as a climate hero, as well as
his 2014 appointment as a UN special envoy for cities and climate change
(questions Bloomberg has not answered, despite my repeated requests).
Gates has a similar firewall between mouth and
money. Though he professes great concern about climate change, the Gates
Foundation had at least $1.2bn invested in oil giants BP and ExxonMobil as of
December 2013, and those are only the start of his fossil fuel holdings. When
he had his climate change epiphany, he, too, raced to the prospect of a
silver-bullet techno-fix, without pausing to consider viable – if economically
challenging – responses in the here and now. In Ted talks, op-eds, interviews
and in his annual letters, Gates repeats his call for governments massively to
increase spending on research and development, with the goal of uncovering
"energy miracles".
By miracles, he means nuclear reactors that
have yet to be invented (he is a major investor and chairman of nuclear startup
TerraPower), machines to suck carbon out of the atmosphere (he is a primary
investor in at least one such prototype) and direct climate manipulation (Gates
has spent millions funding research into schemes to block the sun, and his name
is on several hurricane-suppression patents). At the same time, he has been
dismissive of the potential of existing renewable technologies, writing off
energy solutions such as rooftop solar as "cute" and
"noneconomic" (these cute technologies already provide 25% of Germany
Almost a decade
after Branson's epiphany, it seems a good time to check in on the
"win-win" crusade. Let's start with his "firm commitment"
to spending $3bn over a decade developing a miracle fuel. The first tranche of
money he diverted from his transport divisions launched Virgin Fuels (since
replaced by private equity firm Virgin Green Fund). He began by investing in
various agrofuel businesses, including making a bet of $130m on corn ethanol.
Virgin has attached its name to several biofuel pilot projects – one to derive
jet fuel from eucalyptus trees, another from fermented gas waste – though it
has not gone in as an investor. But Branson admits the miracle fuel
"hasn't been invented yet" and the fund has since moved its focus to
a grab-bag of green-tinged products.
Diversifying his
holdings to get a piece of the green market would hardly seem to merit the
fanfare inspired by Branson's original announcement, especially as the
investments have been so unremarkable. If he is to fulfil his $3bn pledge by
2016, by this point at least $2bn should have been spent. He's not even close.
According to Virgin Green Fund partner Evan Lovell, Virgin has contributed only
around $100m to the pot, on top of the original ethanol investment, which
brings the total Branson investment to around $230m. (Lovell confirmed that
"we are the primary vehicle" for Branson's promise.)
Branson refused
to answer my direct questions about how much he had spent, writing that
"it's very hard to quantify the total amount… across the Group". His
original "pledge" he now refers to as a "gesture". In 2009,
he told Wired magazine, "in a sense, whether it's $2bn, $3bn or $4bn is
not particularly relevant". When the deadline rolls around, he told me,
"I suspect it will be less than $1bn right now" and blamed the
shortfall on everything from high oil prices to the global financial crisis:
"The world was quite different back in 2006… In the last eight years, our
airlines have lost hundreds of millions of dollars."
Given these
explanations for falling short, it is worth looking at some of the things for
which Branson did manage to find money. In 2007, a year after seeing
the climate light, he launched domestic airline Virgin America. From 40 flights
a day to five destinations in its first year, it reached 177 flights a day to
23 destinations in 2013. At the same time, passengers on Virgin's Australian
airlines increased from 15 million in 2007 to 19 million in 2012. In 2009, Branson
launched a new long-haul airline, Virgin Australia; in April 2013 came Little
Red, a British domestic airline.
So this is what
he has done since his climate change pledge: gone on a procurement spree that
has seen his airlines' greenhouse gas emissions soar by around 40%. And it's
not just planes: Branson has unveiled Virgin Racing to compete in Formula One,
(he claimed he had entered the sport only because he saw opportunities to make
it greener, but quickly lost interest) and invested heavily in Virgin Galactic,
his dream of launching commercial flights into space, for $250,000 per
passenger. According to Fortune, by early 2013 Branson had spent "more
than $200m" on this vanity project.
It can be argued
– and some do – that Branson's planet-saviour persona is an elaborate attempt
to avoid the kind of tough regulatory action that was on the horizon when he
had his green conversion. In 2006, public concern about climate change was
rising dramatically, particularly in the UK UK
So, was
Branson's reinvention as a guilt-ridden planet-wrecker volunteering to solve
the climate crisis little more than a cynical ploy? All of a sudden, you could
feel good about flying again – after all, the profits from that ticket to Barbados
There is a more
charitable interpretation of what has gone wrong. This would grant Branson his
love of nature (whether watching tropical birds on his private island or
ballooning over the Himalayas ) and credit him
with genuinely trying to figure out ways to reconcile running carbon-intensive businesses
with a desire to help slow species extinction and avert climate chaos. It would
acknowledge, too, that he has thought up some creative mechanisms to try to
channel profits into projects that could help keep the planet cool.
But if we grant
him these good intentions, then the fact that all these projects have failed to
yield results is all the more relevant. He set out to harness the profit motive
to solve the crisis, but again and again, the demands of building a successful
empire trumped the climate imperative
 |
Oil on the
surface of the Gulf of Mexico in an aerial view of the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill off the coast of Mobile , Alabama
The idea that only capitalism can save the
world from a crisis it created is no longer an abstract theory; it's a
hypothesis that has been tested in the real world. We can now take a hard look
at the results: at the green products shunted to the back of the supermarket
shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were
meant to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the
fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed to cut emissions.
And, most of all, at the billionaires who were going to invent a new form of
enlightened capitalism but decided, on second thoughts, that the old one was
just too profitable to surrender.
At some point about seven years ago, I realised
I had become so convinced we were headed toward a grim ecological collapse that
I was losing my capacity to enjoy my time in nature. The more beautiful the
experience, the more I found myself grieving its loss – like someone unable to
fall fully in love because she can't stop imagining the inevitable heartbreak.
Looking out over British Columbia 's Sunshine Coast Gulf of Mexico : for two years after, I couldn't look at
any body of water without imagining it covered in oil.
This kind of ecological despair was a big part
of why I resisted having kids until my late 30s. It was around the time that I
began work on my book that my attitude started to shift. Some of it, no doubt,
was standard-issue denial (what does one more kid matter?). But it was also
that immersing myself in the international climate movement had helped me
imagine various futures that were decidedly less bleak. And I was lucky:
pregnant the first month we started trying. But then, just as fast, my luck ran
out. A miscarriage. An ovarian tumour. A cancer scare. Surgery. Month after
month of disappointing single pink lines on pregnancy tests. Another
miscarriage.
It just so happened that the five years it took
to write my book were the same years my personal life was occupied with failed
pharmaceutical and technological interventions and, ultimately, pregnancy and
new motherhood. I tried, at first, to keep these parallel journeys segregated,
but it didn't always work. The worst part was the ceaseless invocation of our
responsibilities to "our children". I knew these expressions were
heartfelt and not meant to be exclusionary, yet I couldn't help feeling shut
out.
But along the way, that feeling changed. It's
not that I got in touch with my inner Earth Mother; it's that I started to
notice that if the Earth is indeed our mother, then she is a mother facing a
great many fertility challenges of her own.
I had no idea I was pregnant when I went to Louisiana
After a week of monitoring, the pregnancy was
diagnosed as ectopic - the embryo had implanted itself outside the uterus, most
likely in a fallopian tube. I was rushed to the emergency room. The somewhat
creepy treatment is one or more injections of methotrexate, a drug used in
chemotherapy to arrest cell development (and carrying many of the
side-effects). Once foetal development has stopped, the pregnancy miscarries,
but it can take weeks.
It was a tough, drawn-out loss for my husband
and me. But it was also a relief to learn that the miscarriage had nothing to
do with the Gulf. Knowing that did make me think a little differently about my
time covering the spill, however. As I waited for the pregnancy to
"resolve", I thought in particular about a long day spent on the
Flounder Pounder, a boat a group of us had chartered to look for evidence that
the oil had entered the marshlands.
Our guide was Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf
Restoration Network, a heroic local organisation devoted to repairing the
damage done to the wetlands by the oil and gas industry. As we navigated the
narrow bayous of the Mississippi Delta, Henderson Roseau
Spring is the start of spawning season on the Gulf Coast ,
and Henderson
The prospects for these microscopic creatures
did not look good. Each wave brought in more oil and dispersants, sending
levels of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) soaring. And
this was all happening at the worst possible moment in the biological calendar:
not only shellfish, but also bluefin tuna, grouper, snapper, mackerel, marlin
and swordfish were all spawning. Out in the open water, floating clouds of
translucent proto-life were just waiting for one of the countless plumes of oil
and dispersants to pass through them like an angel of death. Unlike the
oil-coated pelicans and sea turtles, these deaths would attract no media
attention, just as they would go uncounted in official assessments of the
spill's damage. If a certain species of larva was in the process of being
snuffed out, we would likely not find out about it for years, and then, rather
than some camera-ready mass die-off, there would just be… nothing. An absence.
A hole in the life cycle.
As our boat rocked in that terrible place – the
sky buzzing with Black Hawk helicopters and snowy white egrets – I had the
distinct feeling we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed
in a massive multi-species miscarriage. When I learned that I, too, was in the
early stages of creating an ill-fated embryo, I started to think of that time
in the marsh as my miscarriage inside a miscarriage. It was then that I let go
of the idea that infertility made me some sort of exile from nature, and began
to feel what I can only describe as a kinship of the infertile.
 |
Oil is deposited
along dead marsh land near Bay Jimmy in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, in January
2011, 10 months after the spill. The clean-up is ongoing. Photograph: Getty
Images
|
A few months
after I stopped going to the fertility clinic, a friend recommended a
naturopathic doctor. This practitioner had her own theories about why so many
women without an obvious medical reason were having trouble conceiving.
Carrying a baby is one of the hardest physical tasks we can ask of ourselves,
she said, and if our bodies decline the task, it is often a sign that they are
facing too many other demands – high-stress work, or the physical stress of
having to metabolise toxins, or just the stresses of modern life. Most
fertility clinics use drugs and technology to override this, and they work for
a lot of people. But if they do not (and they often do not), women are
frequently left even more stressed, their hormones more out of whack. The
naturopath proposed the opposite approach: try to figure out what might be
overtaxing my system, and then remove those things. After a series of tests, I
was diagnosed with a whole mess of allergies I didn't know I had, as well as
adrenal insufficiency and low cortisol levels. The doctor asked me a lot of
questions, including how many hours I had spent in the air over the past year.
"Why?" I asked warily. "Because of the radiation. There have
been some studies done with flight attendants that show it might not be good
for fertility."
I admit I was
far from convinced that this approach would result in a pregnancy, or even that
the science behind it was wholly sound. Then again, the worst that could happen
was that I'd end up healthier. So I did it all. The yoga, the meditation, the
dietary changes (the usual wars on wheat, gluten, dairy and sugar, as well as
more esoteric odds and ends). I went to acupuncture and drank bitter Chinese
herbs; my kitchen counter became a gallery of powders and supplements. I left Toronto and moved to rural British Columbia
Gradually, I
learned to identify a half-dozen birds by sound, and sea mammals by the ripples
on the water's surface. My frequent-flyer status expired for the first time in
a decade, and I was glad.
For the first
few months, the hardest part of the pregnancy was believing everything was
normal. No matter how many tests came back with reassuring results, I stayed
braced for tragedy. What helped most was hiking, and during the final anxious
weeks, I would calm my nerves by walking for as long as my sore hips would let
me on a trail along a pristine creek. I kept my eyes open for silvery salmon
smolts making their journey to the sea after months of incubation in shallow
estuaries. And I would picture the cohos, pinks and chums battling the rapids
and falls, determined to reach the spawning grounds where they were born. This
was my son's determination, I would tell myself. He was clearly a fighter,
having managed to make his way to me despite the odds; he would find a way to
be born safely, too.
I don't know why
this pregnancy succeeded any more than I know why earlier pregnancies failed –
and neither do my doctors. Infertility is just one of the many areas in which
we humans are confronted with our oceans of ignorance. So, mostly, I feel
lucky.
And I suppose a
part of me is still in that oiled Louisiana
But surviving is
not the same as thriving, not the same as living well. For a great many
species, it's not the same as being able to nurture and produce new life. With
proper care, we stretch and bend amazingly well. But we break, too – our
individual bodies, as well as the communities and ecosystems that support us.
• This is an
edited extract from This Changes Everything: Capitalism v The Climate, by Naomi
Klein, published next week by Allen
Lane UK
In Monday's G2:
an exclusive interview with Naomi Klein.
Naomi Klein is
due to appear at a Guardian Live event to talk about climate change on 6
October at London SW1. Tickets, priced £20, are available here.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário