Seeker Blog

is interviewed by the WSJ. Here’s a choice segment on green tech:

…”I think the trick with clean energy is not to be able to charge more. Because you can’t see global warming, I don’t think people are willing to pay more for it. It’s got to be a viable investment if it’s going to be successful.”

On the Caribbean island he calls home, Mr. Branson aims to be 100% carbon neutral six months from now, just by using wind and sun. “It will save us half a million dollars a year in conventional fuel as well.” His business plan, he adds, expects some help from oil prices, which have recently obliged by topping $100 a barrel. “Fuel prices have come to the level where, forgetting the environment, it makes sense for people to look at alternative things.”

One of his recent ventures, the Virgin Green Fund has committed $100 million to direct investment in alternative energy, placing him in company with such investors as legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, and former Vice President Al Gore. Cars in America, Mr. Branson tells me, once ran on ethanol, and liquor prohibition was part of the reason for the shift to gasoline. Officials at the time, he says, “were worried that people were going to drink their fuel tanks.”

But he does not share the American political class’s love affair with corn-based ethanol, one excuse for U.S. tariffs that block out cane ethanol from Brazil and other southern hemisphere producers. “Sugar-based ethanol is seven times more efficient than corn-based ethanol, so every acre of land can create seven times the volume of fuel.”

Mr. Branson is clearly taken with the idea of man-made climate change, and the possibility that a tipping point has been reached or soon will be. He’s thinking of setting up a war room for the environment where he and his team can analyze all the big ideas, and figure out how to pay for them. “If we are going to persuade countries not to cut down all the rain forest, then how much is it going to cost?”