Description: Richard Branson discusses renewable energy. He is excited by the prospects of clean fuel.

Transcript: 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.” And so 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 lauries, 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.

Recorded on: 7/5/07