thinkingstring.com

It is reported that Willie Walsh will, on behalf of the IATA will promise to cut the airline industry’s emissions by 50% over 2005 levels, by 2050. It is further reported that the airline industry is taking such a pledge in order to sidestep what they expect to happen to them otherwise. Which is raucous protest by the rallied (and ever swelling masses) of concerned citizens, and censure from the soon-to-be-assembled set of speakers due in to Copenhagen in 76 days time. In effect, Willie has realised that the price the airlines must eventually pay to be allowed to continue trading is on the same sliding scale as that used to calculate passenger tickets. Leave it until later before you commit on the decision, and for the same outcome you just get charged more and with less choice.

Have the airlines finally got on board with the programme?

The choice of 2005 as the baseline year is the first red flag that all might not be “final and best effort” down at the IATA HQ. 2005 was one of the peak year for airline emissions this decade - prior to the recession-led slump in airline travel that has resulted in a fairly dramatic drop in emissions from the sector during the 2008-2009 period, and interestingly also before the run up to $147 p/bl oil prices. During the recession airlines have parked unneeded aircraft left and right, mothballing planes that nobody could afford to fly on any more. They have therefore chosen for themselves a baseline year that allows them plenty of scope for growth in airline movements and passenger numbers compared to now.

The airlines have also calculated that their efforts to cut emissions will result in higher costs being passed onto travellers. So it should - if the idea is to dissuade passengers from flying and encourage them to consider alternative means of transport, for example a national high speed rail system. However early reports indicate that the IATA estimates that the incremental cost will be around the £40 to £50 mark for a long haul trip. Interestingly this is the same price range for a charge applied to a would-be traveller by one of the flight-offset companies. I’ve written before here that offsetting doesn’t really make a lot of difference, and also that a £40-£50 charge on top of the cost of a long haul flight isn’t likely to make that much difference at all to a potential traveller’s decision as to whether to fly or not. For short-haul flights, the ones that are actually more likely to be unnecessary (you can catch a train from London to Paris but you can’t from London to Sydney) the incremental cost is likely to under £10, possibly under £5. Certainly not enough incremental cost to have anyone caring about whether they fly to Majorca on holiday or Paris for a meeting. After all, Ryan Air and the like charge that much just to allow you to breath inside the aircraft.

It will also be significant what percentage of the industry’s planned cuts come from carbon offsets, from reduced capacity, from fleet efficiencies, or from biofuels. The latter is particularly worrying - powering all the world’s aircraft with biofuels will use so much of the world’s arable land we won’t even have enough left spare to grow the peanuts to give to all the passengers (Oh…I forgot you don’t get free peanuts anymore anyway).

What would be nice is if the industry recognised that it is not just in the flight business, it is in the communications business. During the recession business travellers stayed out of the skies in sufficient numbers that the IATA Chairman stated recently that “teleconferencing has become a competitor to business travel via flying”. The airline industry needs to embrace this trend, not continue to fight against it. Having fronted Willie Walsh up to speak on their behalf, they perhaps now might consider the merits of joining forces with the growing teleconferencing industry to examine how communications hubs can best be developed to serve the business executive. Heathrow runway and passenger terminal expansion plans can be torn up now and they can start immediately on something like this instead.

Embracing “game changers” like teleconferencing might also help the airlines deal with the ever rising cost of petroleum based feedstocks for airline fuel. Willie Walsh himself is not stranger to the impact of high oil prices on airline viability and profitability, with BA shedding pounds and staff as oil climbed to $147 p/bl during 2008. Oil prices are not coming down to sub-$70 in the longer term. That too will represent a serious challenge to long term airline viability.

The IATA’s announcement is a welcome one. It ought not however to be seen as the airline industry rolling over sweetly and wagging its tail in a happy-go-lucky manner as climate campaigners coo and rub its stomach. The devil is in the detail regarding how the industry will achieve its promised cuts.

Originally posted in computing.com

Though their lineage dates back to before World War II, ATMs in their modern form appeared widely on the high street in 1973. Since then they have bred like rabbits and spawned numerous cousins in the form of automated ticket dispensing machines and point-of-sale devices. They have also arguably created the payment services backbone that has enabled the “cardholder not present” transaction capability that is internet payment services.

Along the way ATMs have also fundamentally altered the relationship customers have with their banks. Gone are the days of queuing at inconvenient times in actual banks and dealing with real tellers, bank managers and advisors. All replaced with anytime, anywhere banking, in whatever currency of whichever country you’re standing in. Meanwhile branches have closed, and while almost everyone appreciates the convenience, there are many who rue the dehumanising of the bank/customer relationship.

All of this is worth keeping in mind as the NHS, and its international health care counterparts, dabbles increasingly in technology-enabled remote diagnosis and treatment of patients. The efforts of the NHS’ Aberdeen TeleHealth initiative, based in no small part on Cisco’s telepresence technology, have yielded some impressive results.

The NHS trials used high-definition telepresence communications, enhanced with customised cameras, scanners and a wide variety of other electronic diagnostic tools. The patient, normally assisted by a relatively unskilled helper (who may have no more than rudimentary first-aid skills), can be subject to an array of tests as well as being interviewed by the remotely located GP or specialist.

The healthcare service has field tested such diagnostic services in the remote wilds of Northern Scotland, out to the remote North Sea oil drilling platforms and with the communities on the Orkney and Shetland islands. Such communities are remote, sparsely populated, and suffer from a lack of dedicated and local health professionals. If enough trained personnel were to be supplied, they would be underworked - but horrendously expensive to maintain and manage.

The NHS trials have delivered impressive results, with the service reporting that diagnostic accuracy is on a par with in-person capability. While the telepresence approach requires availability of relatively high network bandwidth between the patient location and the remote healthcare professional, as well as a not-insignificant capital cost in technology, it is cost effective compared to providing comparable healthcare to remote communities via traditional means. Telepresence-based medicine makes it possible to more accurately and more rapidly diagnose a patient compared to the service that could be provided by way of the irregular in-person approach that such remote communities have historically suffered.

Such benefits are substantial, and it is clear that remote diagnostics provide important potential benefits in terms of service and cost. That said, it is also critical to remember that effective healthcare ought to be more than just treating patients as “units” to be pumped through an increasingly automated health service factory. Arguably, telepresence-based health services are another step down the path of dehumanising healthcare and turning it into an assembly line for the dispensing of treatments that address mainly the symptoms, and rarely proactively address the causes. The provision of telemedicine to a remote community that previously had no service is better than nothing, but is it the best we can do as a society?

The old bedside manner has to become the new telepresence-side manner. If some of the more mundane reviews and check-ups can be automated out of the health system - such as repeat prescriptions, blood pressure tests and anything else that can be made self service through web interface or remote monitoring - then more time should be freed up for the medical professional to spend in real consultation with the patient. This can then help with preventative treatment, so minimising reactive treatments, and again freeing up more time.

Therefore, technology used correctly can create a virtuous circle - whereas used wrongly can be counterproductive. Let’s ensure that the healthcare beancounters don’t ruin it - and that healthcare professionals can get back to caring more about their patients, and focusing less on the profitability of the service.

Many people would complain already that they are treated as walking wallets rather than individuals by GPs, as they are herded through community clinics in 10-minute appointment increments. We need to be careful as we take this path that we do not end with unintended consequences whereby there is some added convenience to some, at the expense of degraded and dehumanised services to everyone.

Originally posted at http://quocirca.computing.co.uk/

Henry David Thoreau said, “We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice”.

And so it is with technology and the energy supply model underlying it. What wonders the profligate use of petroleum based fuels and coal has brought to mankind over the last century. Borrowing profusely from the energy stores of the past has allowed us to break free from the limits otherwise placed on us, had we needed to continue relying solely on plant based energy sources for fuel, and animals (and human slaves) and the occasional use of wind, water and gravity for motion. Supporting as it has the major technology innovation driven macro economic cycles of the 20th century we must recognise that even our current plans (such as they are) to move to widespread use of renewables for electricity supply would not be possible without the construction and technology innovations fuelled by the petro industry.

Our current perilous state is the end result of two human failings.

Firstly, we have treated as an externality the economic and environmental cost of the pollution generated through burning coal and petro fuels. The treatment of pollution as an externality is not just a problem of human behaviour; it is clearly also a systemic failure of market fundamentals, and one that must be addressed even as we seek a way out of the current global economic unravelling.

Secondly, we have failed to plan sufficiently for the eventual and entirely logical decline in the availability of oil supplies. The extent to which we have collectively found it convenient to ignore the clarion calls regarding the peaking of oil supplies is breathtaking.

Yet here we are; facing the environmental unravelling that results from a century of spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the collapse of the market systems as a result of self deception as their true operational nature, together with the real likelihood that peak oil is a “now” not a “later”. You couldn’t plan that nexus better if you were the scriptwriter for a Hollywood disaster movie.

While the irony of our current problems should not escape us the technology that it has allowed us to develop might however provide the means for us to avoid some of the worst of the potential resulting scenarios. It may be argued that in the long term (meaning: really long term) human society needs to evolve to an entirely different model (and why not - we have seen already in human history the existence of several different models that have been effective in their day, given the needs and limits of the time). However in the short to medium term we must recognise that we cannot simply stop doing every activity that is currently performed and that in this new reality is recognised to have an unacceptably large ecological footprint. To attempt to do so would be far too disruptive of the current social order to be acceptable. Instead, we must use technology in different ways in order to provide low GHG emission alternatives to current heavy GHG emission ways of working and living.

Of all of the changes we must make, the two areas that will require technology-supported alternatives to most desperately are travel and electricity supply, and they are in fact linked.

Lets first look at travel. The four most common forms of polluting travel are (road based) vehicular, sea-borne bulk carriers, air, and rail. Which is worse is a moot point as far as progressing the discussions along in the short term, especially given the debate over the actual impact of jet propelled, high altitude flight. For simplicity’s sake it is worth assuming that they’re all bad, and they will all need to be drastically curtailed and/or re-engineered if they are to remain viable.

Sea-borne bulk carriers are the easiest to deal with, so lets get that topic out of the way first. The easiest way of avoiding pollution resulting from an activity is to not perform the activity in the first place. The vast majority of bulk carriers are either carrying crude or refined petrochemicals or derived products or coal; raw or semi refined minerals; components that are destined to used somewhere else as part of a highly distributed supply chain; or completed manufactured goods. The shipping of petro products and coal in bulk will clearly decline anyway as we remove these products as primary energy supply sources. Highly distributed and long tail supply chains look increasingly unviable when we recognise those costs that are currently treated as economic externalities, and in doing so account for those costs in the price of the resulting product and service. Already companies are beginning to re-examine their supply chains in light of GHG emissions, and work is underway to further refine the Scope 3 calculations of the GHG Protocol by the World Resource Institute in order to provide further clarity regarding the details of supply chain reporting. In a similar fashion, we can expect a reduction in long distance shipping of manufactured products, especially as the embodied footprint of such products is more commonly calculated, reported, and as a result priced in to the product. In such a scenario a locally produced product will become more desirable than an equivalent product manufactured remotely. The accounting for the pollution resulting from the fuelling of the remaining shipping movements will naturally encourage a re-examination of nuclear driven ships, and the use of wind power.

Rail meanwhile needs to be powered by either clean sources of electricity, or through acceptable bio-fuels. These same two energy sources are also required for road based vehicular transport. We must however get much smarter in our use of technology if we are to make rail transport again acceptable as a common form of mass human transport. Currently rail journeys are more often than not an exercise in frustration, uncoordinated as they are with bus services, and with the thicket of overlapping rail service providers that has resulted from privatisation of the rail network in many countries. Successfully getting from A to B via rail services is an unnecessarily complex wrestle with numerous timetables, ticketing systems, and interchanges - none of which have seen much effort to simplify. It needn’t be so. If we made the same effort toward taking the friction out of rail transport as we have to making car travel easier and more enjoyable we would go a long way toward making mass rail services far more attractive as a form of human transport. Coordinated web based services for timetables and ticketing is a start. Telecommunications based services to enable information to be readily available to travellers is also required - why can we buy a GPS mapper for a vehicle for $100 but can’t be similarly helped to navigate from one train to another or from train to bus to address. Location based services must be extended to encourage commuters out of their vehicles and onto public transport. Meanwhile, we must also look to move much of the bulk transport of goods off the roads and back onto the rails. The decline of the use of rail as a viable bulk material transport method is illogical, should be reversed, and will certainly become more attractive as road carriage costs are internalised into the economic model.

Road travel in its current form will only continue if fuelled by either acceptable bio-fuels or clean electricity. It is likely however, and perhaps desirable in the greater scheme of things if we also achieve a drastic reduction in the overall use of cars as a form of transport. It is important to recognise that we have managed to engineer into society an unnecessary reliance on vehicular travel. Urban design must be rebalanced such that the use of a car is not required for much of everyday living. It is illogical that we have decimated the economy of the local shops through the adoption of huge shopping centres for which we have no alternative but to drive to in order to use. There is much talk today by the USA’s Obama administration regarding the links between Wall Street and Main Street. The reality is that the death of Main Street (or the High Street if you’re in the UK) has more to do with this engineering out of local economic resilience as it has to do with the failures and corruption of the banking and finance markets.

Removing cars from the road will however also require us to provide technology-based alternatives to many activities. For a start, telecommuting must be made more common and far easier. This will require many changes and the provision of enabling services, not least of which will be the provision of secure broadband services to everyone. In fact, high speed communication links are perhaps the most important enabler of change if we are to at all engineer our way out of both the problems of climate change and those presented by peak oil.

And what of “clean electricity” supplies? Aside from altering the fuel stocks used for generation, away from coal and natural gas and toward renewables, the most important change we must make will be a fundamental change in the energy generation and distribution model. In order to engineer the required resilience into a smart grid system we must move from the highly centralised and concentrated generation model that we have today, and move to a highly fragmented and widely distributed micro-generation model. Such a network will have a dynamic and rich mix of renewable generation sources as well as tapping into the stored energy sources that are parked (electric) vehicles and the like. Successfully achieving a resilient and balanced power supply that supports both baseload as well as peak demands will require co-ordination of the supply and demand “nodes” as well as the grid that connects them. This co-ordination is what is meant by the term “smart grid”. Telecommunications infrastructure is again the enabler, providing the means to monitor and manage the various consumptive or contributory nodes.

That just leaves us with the little problem of air travel. Simply put, even if we develop an acceptable source of biofuels the days of mass air travel are rapidly drawing to a close. All the highly publicised experiments by various airlines in the use of biofuels are nothing more than a distraction and a con. Airline travel will be severely curtailed. Humanity may eventually get used to that - keeping in mind the fact that for all the protestations to the contrary by holiday makers and airline executives the reality is that international and domestic long distance travel is something that we have only recently managed to fall so deeply in love with. Those same airline executives as well as the forty-something holidaymaker would do well to be reminded that as recently as their own childhood humanity managed to do quite OK without racking up half a million air-miles each per annum. Again however we must face the reality of the short term, and again telecommunications must step up to meet the demands now built into our personal and business structures of behaviour. Telepresence enabled communications provides a useful alternative for the business executive, and with the right investment may even provide some acceptable alternatives to flying around the world in order to have Christmas dinner with that distant relative whom you didn’t really like all that much anyway.

Telecommunications therefore is perhaps a great saviour in many ways as we re-engineer our current personal, working and industrial models. However there is also one more role it needs to play - that of helping us to accurately account for the embodied ecological footprint of the goods and services we consume. As the embodied footprint of a product is linked to the distance that we transport it and the mode by which we transport it, location based services will increasingly be relied upon in order to accurately account for that travel. We must become far more aware than we are today of the complex shifting back and forth of products that takes place before they reach their final consumption point.

All that remains is for us to find the will to move forward. A reasonable question might also be to ask whether our various telecommunications providers have the vision and the strategy to play a role in delivering the infrastructure and services we will need from them. Lets continue to shout the demand down the phone line to them, and hope for more than confused static in return.

What a failure of vision the announcement of the UK government’s go ahead for Heathrow expansion is. Brown’s government has added another item to the list of lamentable directives, all notable by their inspirational paucity and shallowness of intelligent insight. Not that Cameron’s side is much better - starting with Boris’s vision of a Venice like Thames Estuary airport with waves lapping gently outside as passengers board the next generation of eco-jets. The best thing that can be said of Boris’s plan is that if Captain Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger ever needs to ditch a plane again at least there will be a nearby river to do it in. Don’t hit the Thames Barrier on the way in Ches’.

The decision to expand has been positioned as one that is necessary if the UK is to remain competitive within Europe, and globally. So sayeth the Chairman of the IoD, so sayeth the airline CEOs, not to mention the ever impartial BAA. Baroness Valentine of Putney, who took the unprecedented step of pausing as she reloaded her shotgun in between shooting foxes to comment “In the current economic turmoil, one mustn’t forget that if the UK is to face darn increasingly fierce global competition – if London’s access to world markets is to remain one of its unique selling points – the capital will need the best international connections. We simply mustn’t allow upstart economies such France and Germany to fly more aeroplanes than we do. The British Bulldog must be given its wings!”

And what an unnecessarily black and white view that is, simply because it ignores the possibility that we may, if we just try hard enough, manage to uncouple economic stability from the need to fly. What might such a vision look like?

There are basically two types of airline traveller - business and holidayer. OK, there are also people travelling for funerals, to participate in sporting events, or emigrating. There might even be the occasional asylum seeker who is either flying to the UK to spend some time getting to know the BNP (sorry Immigration Department) process for asylum seekers, or having already enjoyed the BNP’s hospitality perhaps flying back to the welcoming African regime from which they fled. It might even be the case that some of those failed asylum seekers might be flying back for repatriation to whatever tiny, remaining square of dry land we still call Bangladesh.

Of course the projected increase in passenger numbers that is used to justify the need for expansion includes the increased holidaying crowds, however Baroness Val appears a little dismissive of the economic benefits of 10 million more Aussie backpackers and Chinese holiday makers, which is odd really. It is worth remembering that outbound English holidayers are a net economic drain on the UK, taking as they do all their hard saved pounds and pissing them up the wall of some Ibiza nightclub. Every pound spent in Eurozone or in the US is a pound not flowing back into the UK economy. Indeed, if we are primarily worried about benefiting the UK economy then we’d be better off charging all those wannabe UK holiday flyers the fully loaded ticket cost, including a carbon and environmental tax reflective of the true environment footprint of their flight, with a view to encouraging them to holiday instead within the UK’s borders. Gap year students who have nothing better to do than backpack through India (no really….they truly have nothing better to do as there are no graduate jobs for them) might instead be encouraged to walk through Slough and Chalvey buying English samosas instead of Indian ones. Immediately, that will free up seats on both outbound and inbound flights for more foreign holiday makers to come here. More camera wielding Japanese gleefully pumping Yen back into the Putney High Street as they pose in front of a boarded up Woolworths snapping retro photos that celebrate England’s passed glory. A result for the IoD and Baroness Val - a net economic benefit to England and the beginnings of the traveller carrying the economic burden of the environmental footprint of jet travel.

Meanwhile let us remind ourselves that is the business traveller whom the airlines all find the most profitable to cater for. Not for them £10 seats and a bag of peanuts an optional extra. For the business traveller has the fantastically profitable habit of planning travel relatively late, and thus paying full price for the dubious joy of flying to New York, Hong Kong or Moscow to take part in a High Powered Executive Thinkfest. However as they too are charged the full environmental cost of flying, they’ll suddenly decide that those business meetings in New York sit a little more uncomfortable on the balance sheet. The already significant economic argument for avoiding optional staff travel will gain a whole new lustre.

Already, companies that have deployed high end video conferencing technology (”telepresence” as it is known) as a way of conducting effective executive meetings, with a range of international participants are reporting significant savings as a result of avoided staff airline travel. One company this author has spoken to has reported a saving in the region of $40 million, in return for a $4 million dollar investment in telepresence suite solutions. The use of such solutions is not without challenges of course. Telepresence suites are not cheap, and of course you need one for every location to which you wish to communicate. A reasonable alternative to each business having their own suites however is for a network to be established that can be shared by many businesses. And therein lies the failure of vision from the Brown government, and their wannabe Cameron alternatives.

Heathrow T6 could be so much more simply because it could represent the future of international and intranational business communications. By all means, build all the high speed rail you want. By all means, build all the bus and rail links in between London and Heathrow so as to encourage the use of public transport to and from rather than use of personal cars. T6 however, ought to a Telepresence Hub, not an additional runway. Business travellers, already used to the idea of heading out to Heathrow anyway, could find awaiting them not a baggage hall of lost luggage and the demeaning exercise that is full body scanning in your socks. Instead upon arriving and checking in a highly trained Telesteward could shepherd business people to waiting lounges where they may avail themselves of the facilities and prepare for their discussions, and then ensures that they can find their assigned suite and can start and conduct their meeting with success.

Bold thinking is required if we are navigate our way through the challenges we face from climate change. Heathrow expansion as announced has the boldness and vision of a wet tissue, locking us in to the status quo as it does. Ecoplanes are merely ecoplans on Boeing’s and Airbus’s drawing boards, and should only be a meaningful factor in our planning when they are a proven sight in our skies. Meanwhile, it is time for us to look differently at both the needs of the business traveller, and the meaning of “a transport hub suitable for the 21st century businessperson”. In the 21st century, effective ideas do not need an additional runway to have wings.

Telepresence - the generic name given to high definition video conferencing technology - has been much hyped over the years however with the close eye now been given to corporate travel it is perhaps now coming into its own. In the past the technology has suffered from the twin evils of over-inflated expectation together with the under-delivery of constrained network capability.

The fundamental difference between telepresence and videoconferencing is that the former attempts to be an immersion experience. At this end of the market, which is served to varying degrees of capability by Cisco, Teliris, Tandberg and HP, solutions are sold as “suites” with the necessary technology installed in matching and furnished meeting rooms at various locations. Meeting participants sit at Board Room type meeting tables across from a co-ordinated array of wide HDTV screens that display the participants in the “elsewhere” end of the meeting in life size. Much effort is made to visually trick the here and there participants that they are actually staring at each other face to face, rather than face to face (amongst the here participants) and face to camera to screen to face to camera to screen (amongst the there participants).

And that perhaps is the greatest paradox of it all. Telepresence must use a LOT of gee-wizzery in order to achieve its ultimate goal of you not noticing it. Telepresence must first convince you that using it is as at least as easy and intuitive as meeting someone face to face for real. And that is before you even begin to use some of the technology value add features that several of the vendors now claim as features. The extra challenge here is that you can’t help but express a quiet “Wow” as you first enter any telepresence suite - its something about ten or so metres of high-def flat screen installed in a mood lit and paneled room that almost ensures such an utterance. This mustbe amongst the few technologies that ranks highly on the Wow-meter however it begs to be unseen if it is to succeed in being more than a very expensive and rarely used corporate executive toy.

In order to achieve such feats of invisibility vendors have gone to a lot of trouble with the technology - from network performance to camera technology to acoustic engineering to visual trickery. Underlying all that is generally a fair degree of understanding of the “human nature” aspects of how we communicate effectively as people. Effective telepresence solutions must ensure that eye contact is assured, that meeting participants on screen have a 3D look to them, and that sound levels are the same whether you’re addressing a remark to a person who is 2 chairs to your left or 15989kms away (Sydney to New York if you’re curious).

If telepresence solutions are to ultimately play a significant role in providing a viable alternative to regular corporate business travel several current problems must be overcome. For a start right balance needs to be struck between “Wow!” and “What technology…was there technology?”. Organising a telepresence call must be no more difficult than organising a meeting with your colleagues down the hallway, never mind being easier than booking a flight (and transfers, and hotels, and making sure that your toothpaste and shampoo is in 100ml tubes…). Telepresence vendors also must do more to engage with users to educate them on what types of communications work well using the technology, and which should rather be done face to face. I cannot imagine for instance that firing a staff member would be appropriately performed over telepresence - though we’ve heard reported cases of that being via SMS so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear it happens.

2009 may well be the year that telepresence comes of age. Corporates with extensive deployments have certainly pointed to the ability to achieve financial ROI for the investment in the order of a 10:1 saving on the costs as a result of avoided air travel. Therefore the financial justification should alone be enough to convince more organisations to examine its use. ThinkingString recommends that companies with extensive travel budgets revisit the technology as today’s experience is a far cry from that of only a few years ago. Just don’t be wowed when you walk into the room!

Dear Mr. Branson,
I am writing to you in the hope that you will actually put some serious business effort toward being environmentally friendly. No, I am not talking about the use of biofuels in the Virgin Atlantic fleet. I am sure that you know what I, and numerous leading environmentalists know; biofuels are not an ecologically sound nor sustainable replacement for petro-based aeroplane fuels. Even with oil priced above $130 a barrel, amidst calls for the UK government to scrap the £10,000,000,000 a year subsidy they currently provide to the airline industry, you still can’t seriously think biofuels are the answer.

I am sure that you know as well as I do that there isn’t enough arable land in the world to feed the fueltanks of the world’s current aeroplane fleet, while leaving any land left for food production or forests to act as carbon sinks. What, I ask myself, would you feed all those Virgin Upper Class passengers once all the land has been turned over to fuel production? That biofuel flight was, permit me to suggest, a marketing stunt that permitted a little green washing of the red Virgin brand. No, the maths and the science don’t add up, and I don’t believe you can get to be the head of a brand like Virgin without enough intelligence to crunch the numbers and come up with the same conclusion; biofuels are not the answer.

But I also believe that you do recognise the reality of, and danger inherent in climate change. After all, you did pledge £1,600,000,000 to help fund action. There you were, standing smiling with Al G and Bill (you remember - the other Clinton) promising to put all the profits from Virgin’s air and train operations for the next ten years toward reducing reliance on petroleum. So we agree that there is a need, and we both share a will. It just seems that we don’t share an understanding of the way. Two out of three is surely enough for you to consider my suggestion.

Mr. Branson, let me lay it out. I’ll say it quietly so as to not scare the Virgin Airline shareholders: we need to drastically reduce the number of flights. Not fuel them with algae or babassu trees; don’t fly them at all. So here’s my suggestion; how about putting some of that £1.6 billion toward establishing a world wide network of business executive meeting suites, interconnected with state of the art high-definition video conferencing capability.

You know better than I that there are basically two classes of traveller; the holiday maker and the business person. In one move you could take all those business travellers out of the skies and enable them to conduct their meetings online. Lets face it, business travel isn’t really even any fun any more, what with all that hassle of stripping down to the silk socks; no Perrier passed security; lost baggage and hassle. Not to mention the lost productivity, what with not even being allowed to Blackberry in the air.

How much more preferable it would be to book meeting time in an executive suite, in my own city, and to avoid all the hassle of flying. How much more productive to be able to avoid all the time wasted checking in, traveling whilst having to be “off the grid”, and then having to deal with hotels and all that at my destination. And how much more profitable for the Virgin group of companies? Think of all the cross sell opportunities that present themselves. The basic service comprising two suites in two cities (for say, half a day) could be priced just under the price of a business ticket. Meanwhile, business people could travel to and from the city centre in a Virgin train, while staying online using Virgin broadband. Of course people will expect the same excellent class of service they currently enjoy on Virgin Atlantic. Those massages in Upper Class really are a nice touch; but just think how much cheaper it must be to employ a professional masseuse if you don’t have to train and pay them as a flight attendant too.

Of course this isn’t a new idea; lots of companies are talking about the power of video conferencing. But I do believe that the Virgin brand of companies is in a uniquely powerful position. Unlike your competitors in the air travel business (say, like BA) “Virgin” isn’t really an airline; its a brand umbrella. It is already diversified into a whole range of areas that complement each other. Meanwhile, unlike teleconferencing technology companies like Cisco, Virgin is already synonymous with business (and holiday maker) travel. Doing business is really all about communicating, while the travelling is just an enabler for that communication. “Virgin Business Telesuite” does have a certain ring to it; don’t you think?

So how about it Mr. Branson? How about a little innovative thinking toward climate change? Biofuels? You wouldn’t last five minutes with Alan Sugar with that one. Thanks for your time and all the best.

Regards,
Simon Perry
Sustainalyst
ThinkingString

PS. If you need some help with the business plan I have some time next week.