Re: Where are we?

Description: Should the government be doing more to address climate change?

Transcript: going back to McNamara, he said that there is too much power vested in one individual, you know, the president at the time. And you need more people to be able to make those decisions before you go into a war situation. You had a situation there that Bush had been given permission to take. You know, a momentous decision of taking his country down a terrible path. And so I think there needs to be more checks and balances to make sure that mistakes like that don’t get made again. But it’s also, I think, a . . . It is also, I think, a . . . almost spiritual approach. I mean, I think you’ve got to come more from the premise that war is evil, and that war is unnecessary, and that war is going to kill children. And it’s gonna kill . . . you know it’s going to kill women. It’s going to kill pregnant woman. Unbelievably in Iraq they’re still using cluster bombs in a war that everybody knew was going to be won in a week. I mean why scatter cluster bombs all over . . . all over the place for children and women to be maimed straight after the war? We’ve got a lot of questions we need to ask ourselves both in Britain and American as a result of what happened there, and just to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I think the power of the media is terrifying. The media have enormous power, and they therefore again have enormous responsibility. They have enormous responsibility to wield that power responsibly. And the media in America, I think, has a lot to answer for.

I won’t go as far as saying it was deliberate. They certainly made the most of a spectacle. I mean, you know, the gung ho attitude say of Fox Television sort of going into Iraq. No thoughts at all for the civilians and the children. I thought, you know, the whole reporting was unbelievably irresponsible.

Question: Would you have done things differently?

Transcript: Well I don’t own any media outlets I’m afraid. I’ve got a 10 percent stake in one; but if I did own a media outlet, I would hope . . . hope I could own it responsibly. And I hope that the news would be dispassionate. You know, it’s sad today to see Lou Dobbs on CNN. You know, CNN _____ very dispassionate TV channel that, you know, is the voice of the world, speaking so _______ and speaking without any dispassion whatsoever. I mean this is meant to be a news channel, and here he is spouting forth his views before anybody has a word to say, you know . . . to say anything in response. And that’s, you know . . . I think that’s wrong.

Question: Who should regulate the media?

Transcript: They . . . I think the media . . . the media has to regulate itself, and the government should only intervene if the media becomes anti-competitive. What we need is more competition. And I think you can get more competition you’ll have a lot more balance media. I think what governments have got to be careful about is letting too much media be owned by too few people. And of course when those media barons support the government, they are out to be allowed to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And it takes a brave government to stand up to them.

In Britain, we’ve finally got a government that is, I think, drawing a line in the sand with Rupert Murdock and has referred a number of decisions that he has taken recently to the Monopolies Mergers Commission. And I think that was a brave government to do that.

Question: The value of dispassionate viewing.

Transcript: I honestly don’t think so. I mean I think . . . You know, you take the BBC as an example. Although it’s government owned, you know, people respect the BBC; but they also watch the BBC because they know it’s dispassionate. And they know they’re going to get an honest viewpoint. And it is the biggest news channel in the UK. And you know if the BBC can have that, you know . . . If there was an equivalent channel in America, I think it would be watched by people. I think it’s wrong to think that just because a TV channel is not gung ho that everybody is going to switch off in their . . . in their millions. I think people actually want the truth. They want dispassionate viewing. But if I’m wrong, I still think it’s important that TV stations give people the truth and give people a more balanced outlet.

I mean you know, Ted Turner, he’s not dead; but he’ll be turning over in some . . . in his bath robe or in his grave right now. And you know I’m incredibly sad to see . . . to see what’s happened. Look. There are good people on CNN, but they just shouldn’t . . . they shouldn’t spoil, you know . . . Anderson Cooper, he’s good; but they shouldn’t spoil those people by having others that . . . that are xenophobic.

I think that . . . In Britain we’ve just banned smoking in public. And it’s working. People who were smoking in public are looking like they’re gonna give up smoking in public. And I think the same applies to television. If you, you know . . . if you give people decent television and there isn’t, you know, absolute garbage next door to that decent television, people will watch decent television. Maybe they’ll . . . they’ll learn a lot from watching decent television. If you sit in front of American television networks, you know, finding a story about almost any . . . any country outside America apart from Iraq at the moment is impossible. There is a war going on in Somalia at the moment. Ethiopia has invaded Somalia in the last three months. I don’t think many people in America would know that. It could have enormous ramifications for the whole of Africa. And you know, if militant Islam react really badly as a result of that invasion. . . It just needs to be more debate, more discussion

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well I mean the number one priority must be global warming. And I think that every government, every government department in the world should have . . . I mean like the minister of transportation, safety, and global warming. Those three should be their two number one priorities and everything else should come underneath. The minister of telecommunications, safety, global warming. Those should be their two priorities. The minister of aviation, safety, and global warming. Those should be their priorities. And if we treat global warming that seriously, we can overcome that problem. It is a worse problem than 1939, you know, where we were facing Hitler invading Britain, and we must treat it as such. You know, we need leaders on every country in the world to put it back that high a priority. And people in this day and age should not be dying from diseases, and that should be the second most important priority. Let’s get out there and make sure that we don’t allow people to die of diseases. We certainly should make sure we don’t allow people to die from famine. It’s unforgivable. You know people should be educated, and we must make sure that on a global basis that the resources are given to educate people. And then overriding most of those things – maybe not global warming – conflict. You know if you have conflict, you can’t deal with all these other problems. So we’ve got to make sure that we avoid conflict. And you know everybody in the world must rise up against countries that are going to use conflict as their weapon of first use. And it should be absolutely and utterly the . . . The absolute last use should be to use weapons of mass destruction.

Question: You had a change of heart on global warming. Why?

Transcript: I had read the book “The Skeptical Environmentalist”. I think his basic premise was we are heading for an ice age, and I should . . . It’s quite nice that we got global warming because that will slow us up heading towards the ice age. And as an airliner I thought that was quite convenient. And that meant that I could say, “Thank you very much” and get on with business as normal. Subsequent to that, I started meeting scientists who vehemently disagreed with him. I then had the privilege of having Al Gore, you know, come to my home and spend two hours in London – before “The Inconvenient Truth” was launched – giving me a personal lecture as to why I should use myself to get out and try to campaign and do something about global warming. Maybe make a grand statement. And after he left, you know, I read a number of books. The . . . Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” was an excellent book, and obviously James Lovelock’s books. James Lovelock’s very, very concerned about global warming. He actually thinks we . . . we’ve actually gone beyond the tipping point where mankind is doomed; but most other scientists don’t believe we’ve gone that far. And then I was sitting in the bath one day and I thought, “Damn it! We . . . we own a dirty business. The airline business. I own lots of other businesses. I can afford to put 100 percent of all the other profits I make from our airline businesses around the world into seeking out clean fuels, and seeing if we can come up with a fuel that can actually . . . can actually tackle global warming.”

We made the announcement a week later – the Clinton initiative – and said that we would invest three billion dollars over the next 10 years in trying to come up with an alternative fuel. And . . . and then we put up the price of 25 million dollars to . . . in case Lovelock was correct in that we had gone beyond the tipping point; and therefore the only way of saving the world is to come up with a way of extracting the carbon that’s already out there. So we put out this prize to see if people could extract the carbon out of the earth’s atmosphere. And then subsequent to that we had the most fascinating year or so learning about ethanol and butanol and isobutanol – it sounds boring, but it’s actually fascinating – and wind powers and factory power and trying to come up with something which will make the coal companies and the oil companies shake in their boots

The downside of putting three billion dollars into one project, you know. . . I mean generally speaking the Virgin Group, we would spread that across, you know, 20 or 30 projects and some would work and some wouldn’t work. By putting it all into clean fuels, you know, it may work spectacularly or we may fall flat on our face. But . . . but the . . . but it’s incredibly important that somebody does it. And it’s incredibly important that not just ourselves do it, but a lot of people do it. The opportunity is to come up with a fuel that can power our planes, our trains, our buses, our lorries, our cars that doesn’t put out any carbon . . . that doesn’t dig up dirty fuel from underground. Anything that we dig up from under the earth . . . We shouldn’t dig up the dead because it’s wrong to dig up the dead. And so anything that comes up from under the ground is basically going to put out carbon. Anything we can produce above the ground shouldn’t put out . . . put out carbon. And so I’m hopeful that we will come up with a fuel that, you know, we’ll be able to use. First of all we’re . . . next year we’re going to fly a 747 we hope. We’ve said we will. We’re going to have to now deliver. But we will at any price with a clean fuel. And then we’re gonna have to see whether we can then manufacture that fuel so it can look after all planes in the world. We’re already beginning to develop fuels which I think will be cleaner and cleaner for cars, and lauries and buses too.

Question: Should the government be doing more?

Transcript: I mean you do need government to set the rules. And you need government that are educated; who read well; who listen to the vast majority of the scientists; who realize that we do have a catastrophe on our hands; and who set the rules. And if the rules are set properly, then coal companies will have to put their carbon back into the earth’s atmosphere. It’s something that can be done. It is actually, you know, the coal fire-producing power stations that are doing the most damage in the world. And even if, you know, there’s an earthquake one day and some of that carbon’s released, it will give us time to come up with maybe ways of getting the carbon out of the earth’s atmosphere, and maybe ways of coming up with clean fuels. So governments need to set the rules. Governments should say to all the petrol stations, you know, they need to have an ethanol plant in every petrol station. Or at least in every, you know, one in every three petrol stations. Governments need to say that, you know, that every five years, the amount of the use of clean fuels must go up by, you know, by say 10 percent every few years. So that these things need to be mandated to force it through. Brazil, you know . . . 75 percent of their cars are now run on clean fuels. It can be done. It’s not that difficult a thing to do. Instead, instead interestingly, America forbids the importation of sugar. There is sugar awash in the world. Sugar produces clean fuels six times more efficiently than corn. You could produce . . . every single car in America could be running on sugar-based ethanol, and no carbon emissions going out whatsoever. The whole of Europe could be run on, you know, sugar-based ethanol. In fact, you know, most likely it would be butanol because it’s more powerful than ethanol, but that needs to be developed. But . . . and so instead of being counterproductive to global warming, they need to be productive.

Recorded on: 7/5/07