February 26th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

Entrepreneur/showman Richard Branson refuses to accept the notion that air travel will always be a guilty pleasure or necessary evil for globe trotting environmentalists.

On Sunday, Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline was the first to fly a commercial aircraft using biofuel as part of its fuel mix. It wasn’t a commercial flight, mind you — the only people on board for the London-to-Amsterdam hop were five crew members — and it was hardly an all-green one, as biofuel made up only 20 percent of the liquid feeding one of the plane’s four engines.

Still, the test had the desired effect, generating news items everywhere from the UK’s Guardian newspaper to Scientific American. And it gave Branson a platform for touting his carbon-neutral goals, going further to assert that his company would use only biofuel produced in a way that doesn’t compete with food production. (This test used oils derived from coconuts and palm trees.)

Not everyone was impressed by the display — critics at Greenpeace and elsewhere dismissed it as a stunt, arguing that even the kinds of non-food plants from which Virgin plans to produce fuel can’t be grown (in quantities needed to fuel the aviation sector) without threatening food crops or having other environmental consequences.

Meanwhile, Virgin Atlantic’s own CEO Steve Ridgway seems a bit grumpy that his colleague’s grandstanding is even necessary. “Aviation emissions are half that of the shipping sector’s,” he told Forbes, going on to claim that these emissions account for less than 2% of global output.

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