Is Richard Branson a green hypocrite — or just a bad businessman?
Ireland's Sunday Business Post savages Virgin chief Richard Branson for the $3 billion pledge he made two years ago to invest all the profits from his air and rail-transport businesses into cleantech. The Post notes that Branson's green technology of choice, biofuels, has fallen out of favor, as scientists and politicians debate whether we should be fueling our tanks or feeding people with the source materials for vegetable-derived energy. The Post, in other words, is accusing an entrepreneur of being an entrepreneur. Hardly stinging. If one really wanted to bring Branson down, one might have pointed out how the normally savvy media spinner just highlighted the food-vs.-energy debate when, for a photo op at a test flight powered by coconut and palm oil, he drank some of the fuel out of a coconut. (Photo by Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images)