By Josh Gregory
Last week, the British entrepreneur Richard Branson pledged a predicted $3bn towards investment in new environmentally-friendly biofuel businesses. However, as I predicted, George Monbiot, the popular Guardian columnist, has refused to take Mr Branson off his 'greenwash' list. In fact, he has launched a fresh offensive, quite rightly pointing out that in order to create the money for investment, Mr Branson have to use profits arising from expansion of his air and rail interests. He will ‘destroy the planet in order to save it’. But what else could we expect? Mr Monbiot is a committed environmentalist, and I suspect that he belongs to that part of the political spectrum which assumes that all actions arising from the desire to make money must necessarily be tainted with evil. Today, however, Mr Branson has made fresh proposals to tackle airline pollution, which arguably go some way towards answering Mr Monbiot’s objections. It will be interesting to see whether Mr Monbiot tones down his rhetoric.
