Richard Branson Owes Me $25 million

When you have finished reading this newspaper, toss it into your trash barrel. Do the same with magazines, cardboard, egg cartons, and any other wood fiber product you use. Recycle nothing.
There. Now Richard Branson owes me $25 million dollars.
Richard Branson is the gloriously good looking and impeccably coifed owner of Virgin Airways. As owner of a fleet of jets, Richard Branson pumps inconceivable quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the process of enriching himself. So perhaps he was trying to purchase an indulgence last week when he posed for a picture with Al Gore and offered $25 million to whomever comes up with a means of scrubbing the Earth’s atmosphere of carbon dioxide and thereby save the world from the ravages of global warming. Sounds like a good plan to me.
And now I just provided the solution, so I figure he owes me the money - at least some of it. After all, the carbon content of all the paper manufactured in this country translates into 300 billion pounds of carbon dioxide annually. I’d be willing to bet that burying that much carbon dioxide would more than make up for Branson’s pollution. And, besides, burying paper in landfills rather than recycling it would seem to be a responsible course of action if global warming is really the threat to civilization that Al Gore says it is. It makes more sense than carbon taxes.
Now I do not honestly expect Richard Branson, Al Gore or anybody else to applaud the brilliance of my idea. The environmental movement is governed by an orthodoxy that scorns ideas such as mine as heresy for which I probably deserve to be burned at the stake. My idea only gets the job done. It does not make us poorer or less free. America would not have to concede any sovereignty and it does not make government any more powerful. It fails every test that matters.
But, the very fact that Branson, with the prophet Al Gore at his side, offered a reward for, what is in essence environmental engineering, reveals that environmentalism is taking a very tentative baby step toward genuinely sensible solutions. And that means that even environmentalists have begun to take global warming seriously.
It wasn’t that long ago that any mention of environmental engineering would have brought torch waving and pitchfork bearing environmentalists pounding on your door. Someone once calculated that planting about 75,000 square miles (roughly the area of South Dakota) worth of fast growing hybrid poplar trees would, in just a decade or so, remove from the atmosphere all of the CO2 generated by the United States from the dawn of the industrial revolution. The proposal was met not just with indignant shrieks, but with ecoterrorist arson. Another plan to fertilize equatorial oceans and remove CO2 by stimulating plankton growth was greeted just about as warmly. Chemical engineers tell us that we already have the technology to scrub the skies and dispose of the carbon dioxide by depositing it two miles beneath the surface of the ocean where the cold and extreme pressure will entomb the CO2 as a stable supercritical fluid that would lie inert on the abyssal plain until we can think of something better to do with it.
One would think that if environmentalists genuinely believed that the world was as imperiled by global warming as they claim, then they would at least consider remedial actions. Instead, they steadfastly adhered to such dogmatic ritualism as the Kyoto Treaty, which would have accomplished little while impoverishing us much.
I have long said that I will take global warming seriously when environmentalists take it seriously. That means that they would have to yield some ground on nuclear power and environmental engineering. Instead, Al Gore has emerged not just the voice of environmentalism, but also a glaring example of insincerity. He demands sacrifice from us, but keeps three mansions and declines to check a box on his power bill that would add a surcharge to pay for wind power generation. Richard Branson probably wouldn’t sacrifice the energy required to power his blow drier, but he’ll lecture the rest of us on the sacrifices we should make.
But, as only Nixon could have normalized relations with China, perhaps it will require an environmentalist to pave the way for rational climate policy.