Richard Branson and Al Gore – Reformed characters or Political Expedients?

Following on from my blog entry earlier today I was mulling over the two individuals who made the rather generous offer to give$25 Million dollars to the person who proposes the best way to rid the planet of Carbon Dioxide.

Firstly there is Richard Branson, British business entrepreneur for whom this seems rather an odd choice of project, at least at face value. He owns a fleet of gas guzzling, atmospheric polluting, carbon dioxide generating long haul aircraft, he also owns a railway company which mainly utilises diesel engine powered trains.

He personally attempted to fly around the world in CO2 generating hot air balloons and sponsored the recent nonstop record achievement of GlobalFlyer which was basically a flying tank piloted by Steve Fossett.

But then there is his other business dream of setting up a regular service to put affluent members of the public into into low-earth orbit around the planet. This is where I see a connection with Al Gore who when he served as Vice President of the USA headed NASA that amazingly environmentally unfriendly organisation which must put hundreds of thousands of pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere every time one of the space shuttle’s takes to the skies.

Branson has gone public that he wants to run his trains and planes on environmentally friendly bio-fuels, but he has also been putting pressure on the British government to give him some tax breaks on the ‘friendly’ fuel thus giving him an economic advantage over his competitors. So maybe philanthropy is not his sole, (or should it be soul?) motive.

Al Gore has recently produced a major film about the environment entitled “An Inconvenient Truth”, perhaps I’m being a little cynical but as he says at the start of the movie “I used to be the next president of the United States” what else can a failed presidential candidate do with his life but jump on some philanthropic bandwagon?
Branson and Gore have been either directly or indirectly involved in polluting this planet on a scale that most readers of this blog will never dream of doing, (and that includes you persecuted ‘Chelsea Tractor’ owners in London), and now that the writing is on the wall the chameleons have changed colour , or is it color?