‘James Lovelock believes we may have already gone past the tipping point and that the amount of CO in the air means mankind is doomed,’ I said to her.
‘Man created the problem. Man should solve the problem. There must be somebody out there who can sort it out. There are a lot of good brains out there,’ Joan said, as if it were blindingly obvious. I turned around and stared at her. She was right. If you look at the history of scientific and industrial development going right back to the seventeenth century, most of the big innovations of the past 400 years have come about as a result of offering big prizes. I had enjoyed reading Dava Sobel’s book Longitude, which is about the first-ever industrial prize of the modern era. The British government offered £20,000 at the start of the eighteenth century to whomever could develop a portable clock so accurate that sailors at sea could tell where they were on a line of longitude anywhere in the world. Navigators had always relied on the position of the sun and stars for plotting their course on charts, but, when it was overcast and cloudy, they often went miles off course, got lost or were shipwrecked. Maps were inaccurate, and arriving at one’s destination was more miss than hit. A foolproof method of accurate navigation would be of great value to the English whose colonies stretched over half the world. The man who eventually won was a clockmaker, John Harrison – but without such a huge prize he probably would not have bothered to spend half his life solving the puzzle. Prizes became the main way in which almost all modern industrial development has taken place. The first cars – and, ironically, also aeroplanes – were spurred in their development by prizes.
Sometimes prizes were offered by governments – as was the case with the longitude prize – or by individuals, as in the Blue Riband that I had helped win some years previously. But prizes were the spur to science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And, of course, it was even a prize that inspired the design of the Spitfire in the early 1930s. After World War II governments took over and they paid scientists to come up with solutions; big prizes offered by individuals slowed to a trickle.
Virgin itself has been a beneficiary of the X prize, that was set up to stimulate affordable private space travel. Burt Rutan and Paul Allen had successfully won the $10 million prize by developing a prototype spaceship called SpaceShipOne. It was that very prize that led directly to us investing in developing SpaceShipTwo with Burt – and, ultimately, to Virgin Galactic.
If we had gone beyond the tipping point because of the amount of carbon and methane already in the Earth’s atmosphere, perhaps we could challenge scientists and brilliant minds to come up with a way to extract it.
I picked up the phone and called a group of people to sound them out and to make sure I wasn’t mad. I spoke to Will, who has a good grasp of science and is running Virgin Galactic for us; to Josh Bayliss, our in-house lawyer; and, finally, I spoke to Shai Weiss, CEO of Virgin Fuels, to ask their opinions. All of them sounded cautious notes of optimism. They agreed that it certainly sounded possible, but that I should probably ask a scientist. So I asked James Lovelock, Steve Howard of the Climate Group and Tim Flannery. They told me that some work was already being done with capturing CO gas in various parts of the world and the stimulus of a major prize would be very good. So Joan’s almost casual comment quickly took the shape of a $25 million prize to find a way to actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is not to be confused with stopping CO getting into the atmosphere in the first place. Our prize is for taking CO that is already there out of the atmosphere, and this will include methane and greenhouse gases generally.
We are not looking for an agricultural solution to the problem because those methods are already known among scientists and have their constraints. By agricultural solution, I also mean using the sea, such as algae seeding in the ocean, although it’s a very interesting area. There have been some experiments in the South Pacific–South Atlantic areas, off New Zealand and Brazil: algae captures CO and, when depleted, the algae sinks to the bottom, theoretically out of harm’s way. The problem is that there is always the law of unintended consequences and it’s not known what possible effect large areas of algae could have on the fish population.
People are already planting more trees, and we’re going to continue that process. We have also suggested using ‘set-aside land’ in Europe to grow trees. We are talking about maintaining the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest, the African rainforests and the Asian ones – although, even as I write, in the next twenty-four hours, deforestation will cause as much CO as eight million people flying from London to New York. One of the old ideas on climate change was to seed silver iodide to make clouds rain, and that’s not what we are looking for either because it’s not new. What we are looking at is a way to find a process using the forces of nature or something else to literally take CO out of the atmosphere – something absolutely innovative that has not been thought of. And let me assure you now that no reader will win this prize by sending me an acorn in the post tomorrow morning!
Our proposed Climate Prize seemed to tie up extraordinarily well with a range of projects we were working on linking back to Gaia Capitalism, the Clinton Initiative and Virgin Fuels, then linking forwards from the Climate Prize towards Virgin Galactic. Once I had all the information and was assured that it made sense and had arranged a trust fund to be put in place for the prize itself, I telephoned Al Gore and asked him if he would launch the prize with me.
‘I’d be glad to, Richard,’ he said without hesitation.
A mere six weeks after my conversation with Joan, on 9 February 2007, A1 Gore and I held a press conference in my London garden to announce the $25 million prize, the ‘Virgin Earth Challenge’, to inspire innovations in the field of combating climate change. A1 said to the media gathered there, ‘What we are facing is a planetary emergency. So some things you would never consider otherwise, it makes sense to consider.’
As we were filmed tossing into the air a beach ball that was painted to look like the Earth, as seen from space, I said, ‘The prize will go to whoever comes up with the most innovative way of sucking harmful greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere within three years. The Earth cannot wait sixty years. We need everybody capable of discovering an answer to put their minds to it today.’ It also occurred to me that, while finding a solution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be as hard as finding a cure for cancer, if something does come of it, we could all enjoy life and not feel guilty about leaving the light on or putting coal on our fires.
I was gratified that many scientists agreed with us. As Tim Hansen, a climatologist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, said, ‘It makes much more economic sense to find ways to address the climate problem directly by reducing the pollution that causes it.’
The judges of the Virgin Earth Challenge include a NASA scientist and several top environmental researchers from around the world, including James Lovelock, Sir Crispin Tickell and Tim Flannery, who told me he was very excited by the potential. Almost as soon as the prize was announced, the entries started coming in – 5,000 in the first month alone! We had so many entries that we asked a team at the University of Cambridge in England to appoint some of their people to work full-time at going through them to assimilate and analyse and see if there were any real breakthroughs. It was agreed that it would be remarkable if any of the first applicants struck lucky. We are sure that we will get some crackpot ideas – but, promising or potty, it will only take one to win.
In the meantime, the US government, by doing nothing to tackle the problem, is helping to kill our beautiful world. ‘They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent,’ said Winston Churchill about the Chamberlain government, who didn’t believe another threat in the 1930s was real. ‘The era of procrastination is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences,’ he concluded.
Three weeks
later, I was enjoying a peaceful holiday with my family in Switzerland. We had spent the day – Friday 23 February 2007 – skiing and, late that night at 11 p.m., we were relaxing in the lovely little cinema in Zermatt, watching a French film with subtitles. The cinema had sofas and you could eat your supper from low tables. It was a very comfortable place to be after a hard day on the piste and I felt a little sleepy. My phone was off, but I felt it bleeping and vibrating in my pocket. It stopped after eight or nine bleeps and I carried on watching the film.
During my very first year of being in the travel business and owning an airline, if I ever had a call late at night I’d always be particularly worried. But now, I realise how wonderfully safe planes and trains are – and that night I felt I had no real reason to be worried when I got a late call. But there was something about this call that niggled in my mind so I finally decided to leave the cinema and stand outside to check my voicemail.
I was alarmed when I was told that there had been an accident involving a Virgin train in the wilds of Cumbria – a remote, mountainous region in the northwest of England. I went back into the cinema to tell Joan and the kids and we hurried back to the hotel, where I was able to phone around to arrange things.
One of the first people I tried to reach was Will Whitehorn, who is also a director of Virgin Trains, but his phone just kept going to voicemail. Eventually, I found my list of emergency numbers and reached Will’s wife, Lou, in East Sussex. I could hear chatter and laughter in the background.
‘It’s Will’s birthday, we’re having dinner at a friend’s house,’ Lou said, handing the phone over to Will.
For the first time in twenty years Will had left his phone behind. He remembered it as they drove out of the gate, but his wife, in hindsight memorably, said, ‘Don’t worry – nothing’s going to happen tonight.’ But he knew that something must be up if I had gone to the trouble of tracking down Lou’s number and he was instantly alert.
Briefly, I explained that there had been an accident to the 5.15 p.m. London Euston to Glasgow service. At that stage nobody knew how bad any injuries were or how many people had been hurt. I was told the train had gone down a ravine and the rescuers were having difficulty in reaching it. I said I was getting back to the UK as quickly as possible, but all the airports were closed. The first plane left Zurich for Heathrow at about 5 a.m. UK time.
‘I’ll see if I can find out more this end,’ Will said. He advised me that if it were a major accident – as it appeared to be – we wouldn’t be able to get a train north from Heathrow to near the crash site. In the end, it proved easier to fly to Manchester and for him to meet me there.
From Zermatt, I got a taxi for the five-hour drive down the mountain to Zurich and managed to get a direct flight to Manchester. I had plenty of time to think during that long night. I knew how disastrous train accidents could be. Even on a flat stretch of track, people were often killed and scores could be horribly maimed and injured.
By 2005 Virgin Trains had come out of the crisis period of the collapse of Railtrack and the formation of Network Rail. It had been tough, but things were running smoothly and our trains had fulfilled their promise. One of the things I was very proud of was the fact that the design of our Pendolino trains was unique. We had discussed our expectations with Alstom, the manufacturer, and outlined what we wanted. One thing we insisted was that we were designing a train that should be the most environmentally friendly train ever built – and, in service, it had proved that. Despite the fact that their electricity comes from the British national grid, Pendolino trains boast the same carbon efficiency as the nuclear-powered French TGVs (the supremely fast ‘train à grande vitesse’). In Britain we instead use a much bigger mix of oil, gas, wind and some nuclear power, but, because our Pendolino train is more efficient than the TGV and has regenerative braking – the same as a Toyota Prius car – as well as an aircraft-type aluminium body shell, it emits 78 per cent less CO than the equivalent airline seat to Manchester or Glasgow.
The other feature we designed into the train was safety. When we asked Alstom to build it and gave them the specifications, we said we wanted them to look into every successful innovation in safety around the entire world and incorporate it into the new train. They were to do nothing that hadn’t been tried and tested and shown to work somewhere in the world. I said to Tony Collins – at the time he was Alstom’s managing director – ‘I want you to bring together the best of all innovation in the rail industry in the design of the train. We want a train that should be able to survive an accident at full speed, regardless of the cause, and the passengers should be able to walk away from it.’
It was a very tall order, but I didn’t see why it couldn’t be achievable. Passengers are entitled to know that all that could be done has been done to ensure their safety. Consequently, there was innovation at every level. The design of the linkages between each carriage; the design of the carriages themselves; the design of all the interior fittings; the design of the windows – if there was an accident, the windows wouldn’t smash open and kill the passengers, or the passengers wouldn’t be hurled out of the train, as had happened in the Clapham disaster in 1988. The list of specifications was long.
The other thing that happens in a lot of train disasters involving old rolling stock is that, because of the design of the bogies – the links that hold the wheels on underneath – and the linkages (the connectivity) between each carriage, one carriage rides over the other one in accidents, crushing the carriage in front. Also, because of the old design of chassis with a body shell on top, one train can ride over another and push the body shell across the top of the chassis and kill the people trapped inside – again, as happened in the Clapham disaster. So we decided to build exceptionally strong carriages, even though it made for a heavier and more expensive train. In turn, to keep down the weight, we ordered what is termed monococh construction. That is, each carriage was a total aluminium cell, integral with the people in it. In effect, the passengers were in their own life-support system, even down to things like the lighting, which was designed to stay on after an accident, and run off automatic batteries for three hours. I knew we had tried to do all we could to make the train as safe as possible; nevertheless, having received little information from the front line of the accident at Cumbria, I was worried.
While I was making my way to Manchester, Will drove to Heathrow. The place was deserted, so he had a quick sleep under the British Midland check-in desk until he was woken up by the check-in staff, who put him on the first plane to Manchester. Will and Tony Collins – the man who had made the Pendolino at Alstom and who now ran Virgin Trains – met me when I arrived. We didn’t say very much. We got in a hire car and the first thing we did was switch on the radio to listen to the early morning news. The BBC had a running commentary and we would learn anything new as it happened. They didn’t know how many people had been killed but, to our great relief, there were already police reports from the scene that stated that the train was remarkably intact, which had contributed to the large number of survivors.
I turned to Tony and said, ‘Well, Tony, you built a bloody good train.’
We sat and listened to the radio for about another five minutes, but there was still little information. I said to Will, ‘Are we going to the train or to the hospital first?’
‘The first thing we’re doing is going to go to the hospital,’ Will replied. ‘I don’t know what we’ll find there. We’ve phoned ahead and they’re expecting you. They’ve taken the people to two separate hospitals.’
It was a long drive that cold and dank February dawn. England looked grey and grim compared to the dazzling Swiss Alps I had left. My mood was very introspective. As the chairman of the company I felt it was important to take a lead, to get out there, talk to the emergency services, talk to people and treat them as you might members of your own family who had been caught up in a disaster. I knew I had to go to the hospitals, and was dreading finding how badly injured people might
be. The fact that they had used two hospitals sounded ominous.
The thing that had shocked the staff in each hospital – and both the registrars mentioned it – was that when they heard about the accident and the conditions under which it had happened and as the pictures began filtering back that night from the scene from the helicopters flying to pick up the injured, they geared themselves up for over one hundred dead. The first reports from the scene were that there were over seventy to eighty casualties. As it turned out, of that number, only twenty-five went to hospital. By the time we arrived in the early morning, there were only eleven people still in hospital with serious, though not life-threatening injuries, many of which were caused by a whiplash effect when the carriages rolled down the embankment. The driver, Iain Black – a former Glasgow policeman – was the most seriously injured, with a broken neck. It had taken two hours to release him from the cab, although the cab itself remained intact. The other two seriously injured people were the children of a lady in her eighties, who had sadly died after she was brought to the hospital of heart failure.
I remember the registrar at the first hospital we visited, the Royal Preston in Lancashire, saying, ‘It’s incredible. Our experience of train crashes and the reality of what has occurred here is nothing short of a miracle.’
Miracle was a word we were to hear often as the morning unfolded. We visited the intensive care unit, but were unable to speak to the driver because he was unconscious and being prepared for an operation. But we met the surgeon and he said he thought the driver was going to be all right. We were leaving that hospital when we got accosted by a reporter from the News of the World. I said a few words to them and went on to the Royal Lancashire Infirmary, where we found that most people had been discharged. Again, I offered my help; and then we went quickly on to the scene of the accident. The surrounding lanes and fields were very waterlogged and the site was inaccessible by car. The police had cordoned off the approach and, displaying a little bit of bureaucracy, they asked who I was. I told them, but they still refused us access until they had radioed ahead to make sure that it was OK for me to go and look at my own train. Escorted by police, we walked about a mile towards the railway line, which lay across fields. As we got closer, we could see smoke rising and I instantly remembered the dreadful flash fire of the Clapham disaster.
Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way Page 48
