Eric Worrall writes: Flamboyant British Billionaire Richard Branson, the man behind Virgin Galactic, the commercial space tourism venture, has been accused by greens of not fulfilling $3 billion of his green funding pledges.
According to The Guardian, a prominent Green UK daily newspaper;
“Richard Branson has failed to deliver on his much-vaunted pledge to spend $3bn (£1.8bn) over a decade to develop a low carbon fuel.
Seven years into the pledge, Branson has paid out only a small fraction of the promised money – well under $300m – according to a new book by the writer and activist, Naomi Klein.”
Branson responded that he has lost a lot of money on green investments;
“There is no question that Virgin is involved in a number of businesses that emit a lot of carbon, and that is one of the reasons why I have to work particularly hard … but, more importantly, to try to help other people balance their books as well. We have invested hundreds of millions in clean technology projects. We haven’t made hundreds of millions profit,”
I guess even green billionaires have to make a choice, eventually, between pursuing green investments, and being a billionaire. To be fair to Branson, he tried – the £300 million he spent and presumably lost is a significant sum.
Branson’s experience demonstrates that at the end of the day, only governments have the luxury of being able to sink vast sums into green money pits, without any serious possibility of a return on investment.
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Good for R.B. this is why the govt needs out of the green business so all that nonviable crap can wither and die a natural death. Or if the market wants it and is willing to support it, fine. Other than that uncle sugar can stop stealing from the taxpayer.
So their issue with Branson is that he hasn’t put enough feed in the trough.
I bet though what he’s done to date has been tax deductible.
Mmm. If it is money lost by investment, then it is deductible (and should be).
evanmjones:
Mmm. If it is money lost by investment, then it is deductible (and should be).
—
I could not disagree with you more. Anyone can make irresponsible or criminal choices spending other people’s money with no risk of losses. Covering the losses of fools is completely unacceptable, it rewards failure and encourages a spiral into systemic failure, corruption and criminality. When you risk your own money you do actually try to plan and build real investments which so pay you back, and a whole lot more, and which are then generating a proportion of taxable income. People who want the rewards must always shoulder the risk and remain accountable for their losses. Expecting others to pay for foolish gambling habits is naked public fleecing and theft by a corrupt actor who should be bankrupted then asset stripped to their underwear. That’s how you keep the riff-raff’s hands out of the public cookie jar so you can create and maintain a viable civilization. What you suggest, namely, that tax payers “should” always pay for others gambling losses, is about as wrong-headed as you could possibly be and approximates the mindset of a criminal who’s accustomed to getting away with feeling completely entitled to steal other people’s money. But maybe it’s a winning formula for ‘investment’ success if you’re the Mafia, or else you’re a banker … but I repeat myself.
Anyone can make irresponsible or criminal choices spending other people’s money with no risk of losses.
Not him. He just lost it. Therefore is is universal practice that he be permitted to deduct it. This is not a Solyndra-type example where he takes no loss.
So you believe that if someone makes a poor investment and loses his money that other taxpayers be liable to fund his loses. That’s crap. If he loses it, he should pay all of it.
@Unmentionable:
You are losing track of the fact that the only way he can write off these losses is to have other income to write it off against. This is long established, and economically sound, tax policy. In general, we do not tax people on gross income, we tax them on net income – however foolish the source of their investment losses appear.
unmentionable: “Anyone can make irresponsible or criminal choices spending other people’s money with no risk of losses. Covering the losses of fools is completely unacceptable, it rewards failure and encourages a spiral into systemic failure, corruption and criminality.”
So how do you feel about people on welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc.? You don’t think that in a lot of those cases bad or criminal choices got them into the position they are in? In those cases, is “covering the losses of fools completely unacceptable?” You are describing the concept of “moral hazard” and it is a big challenge for society. We have too much of it today, and that’s largely why just about every country on earth is buried under debt.
Unmentionable: if drug companies and innovative companies were not able to write off their losses against the profits of their successful products, there would be no more new medications or innovations, particularly with the high corporate tax rates of the US.
Unmentionable, I think you are mistaking a tax write off for a bailout. Nobody is covering his loses, they are simply saying the amount of taxable income he has is less.
@Unmentionable
Sometimes I read a comment on this site and just shake my head in disbelief.
Yours has been one of them.
Richard has enough losses to set against tax without needing to lose $300 million trying to make diesel from palm oil, clearly you haven’t noticed that Virgin Atlantic lost £200 million over the last two years and having to pay the excessive cost of using green fuel would just have made that loss even worse.
Unlike his Virgin airplanes, Richard Branson will only be seen to go with whatever direction the wind is blowing …….
Virgin Hot Air
We have invested hundreds of millions in clean technology projects. We haven’t made hundreds of millions profit,
The ‘green’ activists don’t give a damn if businesses go bankrupt trying to finance their pipe dreams. Branson, fortunately, is a a pragmatic businessman first and a mush mouthed ‘environmentalist’ second.
Perhaps the Greens failed to notice that “investment” implies future positive returns.
Perhaps they should Google “Cut your losses.”
I imagine that Branson’s commit and the money that he did spend got him access to some very powerful people that he might not otherwise have had access to, and during their conversations is strikes me as plausible that other subjects of interest to Branson’s corporate entities may have come up….
I expect that Branson considers the 300 mil as being better spent than he may publicly admit.
David,
Branson is the person everyone else wants access to! Especially in the UK all doors open for him.
He doesn’t spend money to impress anyone.
Regards,
Ed
As long a $200M went to Obama and the democrat party or else Holder will have to investigate RB.
He probably reckons that the three hundred he has spent is the price of experience, and he is not going to throw any more down the drain. There is no such thing as a low carbon fuel that is economically and financially sound. If he has got wisdom, and has met interesting and/or useful people, that is all to the good.
The UN/governments of the world claim that AGW is a threat….the $300 million is perhaps the price of doing business in such a ;’climate’…npi…
“npi”
What is “npi”?
..no pun intended..
Got it. T.y.
As of mid-August, Tom Steyer had only raised $7mil of the $50mil he had pledged to match, for a potential $100mil to “green” candidates in this election cycle.
Looks like Steyer’s performance will come up laughingly short.
All that stuff is based on the premise that the technology actually works. Then they go in bigtime. But not only has the investment seriously underperformed, but there is no easy fix on the horizon to turn the equation around. The investori must be more than a little miffed at those who presented the prospecti. But if their ain’t no gold in them thar hills, they catch on pretty quick.
If they could somehow come up with a tremendous leap in battery tech, then they would have a shot.
But that turns out to be very damn difficult. And this isn’t the first time it has been tried, either. Reliable Legend tells us that Ford hired Edison (not cheap) to come up with a battery that would work for a car. Edison reported great success: “I came up with 50 ingenious ways not to make a battery.”
I am led to believe that the first motor vehicle death ever recorded in the USA involved an electric car. What is your problem? Get with the program!
Sometimes they got stuck on “on”.
Anthony, small correction, you stated English Pounds (£) for the 2.7 unfunded amount, when it’s good ole American $$$. A small currency conversion.
The article states he pledged $3 Billion, which works out to be £1.8b. I’m not being nit picky, but I’ve seen people go ballistic (mostly elsewhere) over simple grammatical errors, etc.. I don’t want your “competitors” to have any ammunition to try and discredit you. Some people will latch onto anything and make accusations on the accuracy or your postings.. Just some feedback.
[author was Eric Worrall, fixed -mod]
MikeH, good spot – thanks for the correction.
I’ll have to work on my reading comprehension skills.
Welcome to the club! Steven Goddard wrote a post on mine! https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/reading-comprehension/
I just knew that green was only about the money!
I don’t object to doing well by doing good.
(But you need to go better than 0 for 2.)
The naivety of someone expecting Branson to fulfil his pledges is touching. His method of working is to let someone else run a service and bear the risk while he allows them to use the “Virgin” brand and concentrates on being the loveable businessman with a beard who doesn’t care about money (but somehow seems to have lots of it in his personal account. He got good publicity from making the promises but he was never going to go any further than that. I would have thought that green activists knew all about hollow promises, they use them all the time themselves.
Of course our Dick has a track record. Search on Branson sues and you find items like
“Richard Branson is one of the world’s most intriguing, successful and enduring billionaires. Worth $4.2 billion as of FORBES’ last count in March, Branson is, of course, the founder of the Virgin Group, which consists of more than 400 companies worldwide, almost all of which bearing the word ‘virgin’ in its names.
With sales of more than $21 billion last year, the Virgin Group is a global powerhouse, and one of those brands that seem to have been around forever, even achieving a cool status in the way Apple has. That’s why it came as a surprise that Branson decided to send a cease-and-desist letter to I Am Not A Virgin, a small New York eco-friendly denim label, claiming that the company’s name infringes on his copyright, as the Telegraph’s Laura Hubbert reported on the case.”
try to register the Virgin Olive Oil Shop and you will hear from his lawyers. The man is ruthless.
BTW, he also manages to hide the finances of his empire which is why you have such widely differing estimates.
Back in my paintball days, I used to carry a bottle of extra virgin olive oil in my kit. Useful stuff. (Besides, you never know when you may require one.)
Currently it sounds like Expression Engine is the preferred blogging platform out there right now.
(from what I’ve read) Is that what you’re using on your blog?
Of course it was all a lie. But a few million to the right people will bury that fact faster than modern science.
Branson was stupid to promise that he would invest so much. He should have figured out that the economics of green investments don’t justify much investment, BEFORE he made the promise. It seems as if he’s figured it out now.
I think he owes no apologies. He made his promise (and lost his money) based on information received that was hopelessly incorrect. If anything, he is the one who is owed an apology.
Richard Branson is a money driven & totally ruthless businessman who tried & failed to suppress the Tom Bower biography of him. He’s a wolf in green sheepskin.
Greens are supremely well funded :
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/mainstream-media-dont-know-big-green-has-deeper-pockets-than-big-oil/article/2548405
The public images of both Branson & the Greenies, sold to us by the corporate lamestream media, is so far from reality that those media are now beyond a joke.
Have to laugh that this article appears in The Guardian – a paper so focused on being successful and profitable that even its own CEO thought last year that it will not survive!
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/09/guardian-ceo-the-newspaper-cant-survive-in-the-uk/
Perhaps it took heart from Greenpeace
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/16/greenpeace-loses-3m-pounds-currency-speculation
Reality is perhaps dawning on CEO’s of businesses and they realise that as governments wind back their support for the Alarmists (the UK Government calling them the “Green Taliban” is pretty indicative of a shift in opinion) – then why should they throw good money at people who refuse to see reality?
It has long been said that if the Financial Services Industry used data to predict fund performance the deeply flawed way that climate models abuse the underlying actual performance/temp data then those individuals would end up in jail – and quite rightly so.
Perhaps the likes of Branson et al are getting hard info from advisers as to the accuracy of the Alarmists position.
good money
Productive effort that the world never gets back.
Perhaps Mr Branson could consider investing in nuclear power. I am sure Kirk Sorenson could do with some of that promised funding to move along the development of the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, the only sensible long term solution to providing significant amounts of electricity without using fossil fuel or wasting large areas of land with next to useless windmills or part time solar farms.
You often hear of Greens whining that sceptics are in the pay of Big Oil, is Branson now the equivalent of the so called Koch brothers.
OTOH, I never objected to the “bros.” in the first place.
Richard didn’t get to where he is today wasting cash, he’s seen through the scam so the money tap is off. Good on him.
Anyway his answer is simple: “you’ll get your money when I get my global warming”
This pretty well covers it.
Branson is not going to chuck good cash into a money pit when he can see no return. When he pledged the cash he clearly saw a PR win and the possibility that he was buying into a money making venture. The whole biofuel/corn ethanol thing has since gone a bit toxic. There is still plenty of PR mileage in looking green though so don’t expect a U-turn any time soon.
Naomi is probably doing the green coffers no favours by alienating him but her red pulp has burst out of her green skin.
Branson’s buddy Burt Rutan got to him, I imagine. Had a talk. And by the way, Burt Rutan has a massive grassroots enthusiast audience each year at the annual Experimental Aircraft Show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he is quite outspoken, that 100K American garage builders of private planes gather after they fly in carried by their own garage built aircraft, many designed by someone named Burt Rutan.
“Branson’s buddy Burt Rutan got to him, I imagine. Had a talk. ”
You nailed it.
I never understood how Branson can be that naive warmist posterboy while he’s working with Rutan, who completely destroyed Global Warming theory in his slides and lectures. Probably Rutan just laughed at him long enough until he understood he’s on the wrong side of a trade.
Thanks to the above comments ……. I fully agree, how can he be involved alongside Burt Rutan and not be influenced. Mr Rutan has many talks out there which make his thinking very plane ( pun !!! ) …… they must have sat down and talked about this stuff at some point ……. If Branson did not absorb something during his time with Burt, then I have no hope for the man ???
Naomi Klein is an anti-capitalist except when it serves her.
“The Economist, in 2002, accused her of writing “page after page of engaging blather, totally devoid of substance”, with “all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of an alienated adolescent”, whilst giving capitalism “no credit for the extraordinary progress seen in recent decades in reducing poverty and other measures of deprivation – notably child mortality – in the world’s poorest countries”.
“Her new book, This Changes Everything she lists specific points that need addressing – the reversal of privatization, more taxation, stricter regulation of business, higher government spending – and prioritizes wealth distribution to win “the war our economic model is waging against life on earth”.
Branson’s reply is easy: “You give me my global warming and I’ll give you your money”
In fact if he comes back from this hurtful sleight with a fighting reply like that maybe others will cut back the waste too, including government
Branson’s reply is easy: “You give me my global warming and I’ll give you your money”
In fact if he comes back from this hurtful sleight with a fighting reply like that maybe others will cut back the waste too, including government then we all win
Reneging on a promise ?
That’s no way for an ‘Ocean Elder’ to behave