Greed is green

It is an article of faith these days that any company worth its public relations budget must proclaim loudly and frequently its good green intentions. So it was rather refreshing to hear one of Richard Branson’s top lieutenants – Will Whitehorn, chief of Virgin Galactic – cast his company’s enviro-friendly initiatives as strictly business.

“We’re not doing this to be environmentally kosher,” declares Whitehorn, referring to Virgin’s efforts to develop greenhouse-gas free biofuels for its jets and forthcoming spaceship, “we’re doing this to ensure our company’s survival.”

The occasion for Whitehorn’s remarks was one of those “green salons” that have become popular in San Francisco of late. You know, gather a group of so-called thought-leaders – executives, environmentalists, venture capitalists, journalists – in a chi-chi restaurant and let the ideas and sauvignon blanc flow. Easy enough to skewer, particularly when the well-compensated are dining on ahi tuna skewers, but you never know where the conversation will go, and in this case it strayed interestingly off-topic. The subject du jour was a white paper on corporate greenwashing from Bite Communications, the public relations firm that organized the recent lunch. Among those on hand were Whitehorn and exes from Chinese solar panel maker Suntech (STP), fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy, utility PG&E (PCG), and VantagePoint Venture Partners, investor in electric car startup Tesla Motors and solar power plant builder BrightSource Energy.

Whitehorn held center court, tracing Virgin’s trip down the green path back a decade when the company forecasted a dramatic rise in oil prices and tried to gauge the impact on its airline and new railway business. As a result, he says, Virgin spent big bucks on energy-efficient locomotives to hedge against future fuel cost spikes.

“This is not really a question of being green,” says Whitehorn, who expresses annoyance that Branson’s pledge last year to invest $3 billion in biofuels research and development was portrayed in the media as a charitable deed. “We’re doing this to make money and we’re creating a more sustainable economy in the process.”

“We’ve got to get away from this idea of doing these things as good works,” he adds. “We’re doing what we’re doing to create a profitable business for the future.”

It’s a meme increasingly being advanced by some environmentalists, most notably by the black sheep of the movement, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism” riled the green elite. The Berkeley duo’s new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, calls for reframing global warming from a doom-and-gloom scenario to an opportunity for unbridled economic prosperity by investing in green technologies. Their central argument: only when people and societies achieve a certain level of material wellbeing do they have the luxury of supporting environmental preservation. In other words, greed is green.

Whitehorn also took aim at companies that proclaim themselves carbon neutral, scorning the notion that corporate greenhouse gas emissions can be offset by merely buying carbon credits. “We’re not going to be carbon neutral – it’s impossible,” he says of Virgin. “You need to get out and do something other than buy someone else’s carbon problem.”

Still, Kristina Skierka, director of Bite’s cleantech practice, wanted to know just how green can Virgin Galactic be, given its business model of ferrying the rich into outer space for a couple hundred grand a pop. “If we use biofuels we will get the emissions down to near zero,” Whitehorn claims. “This is about a new type of launch system; the carbon impacts will be negligible.

He says space tourism is just the launching pad, as it were, for a host of space-based ventures. “If you look at space as an industrial place to conduct human activities, it has huge advantages.”

Virgin’s next frontier is the deep blue sea. According to Whitehorn, the company recently created a skunk works to develop a “radical” new submarine technology for a startup to be called, what else, Virgin Oceanic.

Comments

[ArthurGlen]

The problem with those "non greedy" amateur environmentalists is that they are exceedingly impractical and naiive. In a word, juust plain dumb. They believed that anything that produces power without carbon (excepting nuclear of course, which is simply way to technically advanced) is good. Hence the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they convinced equally dumb politicians to use for subsidizing
this most impotent and useless provider of electricity of little value. Ditto for silly solar roofs, which california is subsidizing with the utility prices higher than anyone's, raping the poor so they can fund $250,000 of the cost of multiple solar roofs on Larry Hagman's ranch. Only in California. Thank God.

[David Buuck]

It is so positive and encouraging to know that pure destructive greed and avarice are alive and well in the world. It reaffirms my faith in the human race, that we will continue to rape pillage and plunder senselessly until all is dead and gone, except the "gold bars". Lovely! Keep up the fine work, all!

[Vanderleun]

We will, but we'll remember to come by your house with the boiling tar first.

[Scott Diederich]

I agree with Nordhaus and Shellenberger. You don't have to travel too far in the third world to see people damaging their environment on a local but significant level. They don't want to, they just have no vialble options. Profitable renewable energy is where the rubber meets the road. That is exactly the sentiment Will Whitehorn is expressing. The proof is in the pudding so to say, just look at Abengoa Solar and their 280 megawatt solar plant being constructed in Arizona. Or FPL's new solar plant being built in the mojave desert to see that a page is being turned. Sorry, no nuclear powerplants will be built (anywhere). Why not? Bottom line profitability.

[steve]

Scott I disagree with you strongly on your opinion of nuclear power. I work in solar thermal and think it will be somewhat important in the future but I don’t know anyone in the industry who thinks we will be running the country on it in foreseeable future. Right now nuclear power is the only option we have that has the option to produce a large, reliable amount of clean energy and at a cost far less than solar thermal is right now.

I do feel that solar thermal will be important and we should definitely be building some of these plants to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I think of it as more of an investment for the future. Solar thermal, with a limited amount of heat storage, would work great in the Desert Southwest but to try and sell to say the Northeast would take a tremendous amount of money to rebuild our transmission system. It is just simply not feasible now, nor will it be anytime soon.

[stop killing wilderness!]

I know we aren't supposed to feed the trolls, but come on. ArthurGlen is just too wrong to leave alone. Larry Hagman did NOT get $250,000 of CA's money for his system, in fact, thanks to him, 6 low-income families got FREE residential solar systems from BP! Hardly "raping the poor," like these horrible utilities have been doing for a hundred years. He also GIVES - FOR FREE - 10,000 kWh of clean power each year into the grid, and has reduced his $37,000 electric bill to $13, meaning he has more money for good causes, which he is always working on.

Solar and wind on houses, combined with aggressive R & D into storage and conservation is the FIRST and by far the MOST IMPORTANT thing we can do to save the planet without killing off huge sections of vital wilderness ecosystems. Get with the program!

[steve]

One thing that is great about those on both the extreme left and extreme right is they are so sure of themselves that they think they can lecture everyone else. Wildness you may have missed that power plant you were talking about killing the wilderness before was going to be placed on existing farmland, most probably alfalfa. I am not a fan of growing a water intensive plant like alfalfa in the desert anyway, but in any case it is hardly killing your supposed “wilderness”. I guess I also have a problem with the word wildness for desert land. It is just another play on words to make it seem so much more dramatic, something both the extreme right and left love to do.

Now I fully agree we need to work on conservation and energy storage but the simple fact is it doesn’t exist right now and probably won’t in the near future. Another problem with your plan is just what are you going to use for all this localized generation anyway? Solar certainly won’t work everywhere and neither will wind. How do you expect to pay for all of this? Instead of coming in here all self righteous why don’t you actually put out some solutions as well as how you plan on paying for them.

[livepaths]

Very interesting.
If the economics don't work, recycling efforts won't either.
Check http://LivePaths.com, a blog about the innovative people and companies that make money selling recycled or reused items, provide green services or help us reduce our dependency on non renewable resources.