Rest of the world: airline industry, F1 and space tourism will help kill planet
It caught my eye yesterday (via Twitter) that Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson was in Copenhagen bending the ears of the world’s most powerful people on behalf of the airline industry – just a day after announcing the launch of the Virgin F1 team.
Sir Richard’s tweets seemed to me so incongruent I grabbed them on my iPhone.
It’s not that I wouldn’t expect the boss of one of the world’s biggest airlines to be lobbying at Copenhagen. It’s not even that I don’t believe that he’s probably a decent bloke with some genuine good intentions looking to make a difference in the world; I’m sure he is.
It’s just that I can’t shake the simple incongruence of those things: a desire to help save our planet and a desire to race Formula 1 cars around tracks burning fossil fuels for the benefit of the automotive industry.
I don’t want to be a party pooper, Sir Richard. Far from it. I just want (perhaps in the spirit of Joanna Macy) to allow myself to feel the full wrongness of it without rationalising it away.
So there you are. If you want to help the planet, Sir Richard, why not consider NOT running a F1 team?
