Solutions to Tackle Global Warming - Branson's Next Bet
Richard Branson, entrepreneurial icon, shares his freshest ideas - like a Virgin superfuel that will let us jet around the world guilt-free.
By Carleen Hawn, Business 2.0 Magazine - October 2006
Where others see disaster, Richard Branson sees opportunity. The founder of Virgin Group has business interests on six continents, including airlines, express trains, and limousine services, so his company's contribution to global warming worries him.
In this interview, Branson talks about his newfound conviction that global warming is a real menace ("CO2 is like a bushfire that gets bigger and bigger every year"), and alternative fuels ("Virgin Fuel, yes! ...We think this fuel will work in cars and trucks and trains within a year. And we're hoping that it might work in commercial jet engines within five years")...
He talks about a few other things as well...
Talking of alternative energy, that is one area anyone interested in billion dollar ideas should continuously keep an eye on. By some estimates, alternative energy as an industry will be so large in the next few years that it will look the information technology explosion in the last three decades look like small change. And they could be right. Energy industry is a 4-5 trillion $ industry - that is about 10% of the entire world economy, and the main fuel of this industry, oil, will start running out (not really exhausted, but in the sense of becoming simply unaffordable) in the next 40-50 years...which means folks got to start figuring out solutions now...just try to think about how big an industry that could be...
To whet your appetite even further, just consider these numbers: every day, the world uses about 10 million T of oil, and even if you take that one T of oil (gasoline, diesel etc) costs about 500 $ (it is a lot higher in many parts of the world), everyday, it is a market that is worth 5 billion $ per day, at the bare minimum - that is about 2 Trillion $ per year. And this resource is running out. As a shrewd businessman, wouldn't you to care to keep an eye open for this industry?
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