Branson: Behind the Mask by Tom Bower Read Free Book Online Page A

donate any money and paid only lip service to those classified as ‘mission driven’. In the following two years, the Climate Group had attracted support from HSBC, Starbucks, Google and other global brands. Virgin could no longer afford to ignore the environment.
    ‘This is a wake-up call,’ Gore told Branson during the three hours he spent with him at his Holland Park home, which adjoined another house that served as his office. ‘I’ve got a plan for you. You’re a well-known business leader and you could make more of a difference than almost any other business leader if you do something dramatic and try and get people to payattention.’ An aviation company, said Gore, needed to be seen as caring for the environment.
    Branson was conscious of his personal vulnerability. In 2002, Virgin Atlantic had rejected the option of two-engined jets, leasing instead four-engined Airbuses, with Branson promoting Virgin’s ‘safe’ planes for transatlantic flights through advertisements on his aircrafts’ fuselages stating, ‘4 Engines 4 Long Haul’. Four years later, Branson recognised his mistake. Four-engined planes polluted more and were not safer. His awakening coincided with the environmental movement focusing on aviation’s greater responsibility for pollution compared to power stations and ground transport. Within thirty years, the campaigners argued, 50 per cent more aircraft would be in the air, yet aviation’s carbon emissions were being reduced by only 1 per cent a year. Many supported taxation and strict carbon allowances on air travel. Banning aircraft was not an option for those environmentalists wary of alienating the public who were keen to holiday in foreign countries. Until Gore arrived, Branson had not addressed the conundrum of profiting from a business that polluted the environment. The question, suggested Gore, was how Branson could pose as the ‘responsible face of aviation on emissions’. Environmentalists, he said, could embrace aircraft and simultaneously campaign for them to reduce their emissions. In a nutshell, continued Gore, Branson’s airline should abandon its boast that ‘Virgin produces less ice cubes’ and show instead how its core decisions were driven by ‘green’ credentials. The latest fashion of corporate self-cleansing had been labelled as ‘greenwashing’.
    Branson found Gore irresistible. Attractive, popular, rich and famous, the politician embodied the qualities Branson admired. He was also offering a solution to a problem. By joining Gore’s campaign, Branson would be introduced into the elite of America’s Democrats, chief among them Bill Clinton. Over theprevious year, the former president had positioned himself as an environmental evangelist. Branson spotted an unusual opportunity: by embracing the cause, he could glow and at the same time earn serious money. He was following a recently established path.
    As a normal consequence of the personal relationships between those with political power, in 2004 the Climate Group’s leaders had been introduced by Tony Blair to Clinton and his staff at the Clinton Institute. With Gore’s help, the group had supplied Clinton, a voracious reader, with documentary evidence for the possible ways of avoiding the ‘inevitable’ environmental catastrophe. Once immersed, Clinton developed a passion for ‘green’, combined with a desire to curtail America’s dependence on foreign oil supplies. Global warming, he believed, could be stopped without threatening the American way of life.
    In My Life , the book he published in 2005, Clinton highlighted the importance of billionaires embracing philanthropy. One of the more virtuous ways in which the rich could improve the world, he wrote, was to combat global warming and the constant rise in oil prices by investing in renewable energy. The ideal investment was ethanol manufactured from corn, which, when mixed with petrol, could power cars. The biofuel, wrote Clinton, was a win-win: