Richard Branson
Can the travel and tourism industry help solve the world’s problems? Or is it, itself, a big problem?
Yes and yes.
Obviously, tourism when done right can be a force for economic growth and global understanding. But hotels can be blights on the landscape (ever been to Cancun?) and air travel is a significant contributor to global warming, with no short-term clean fuels in sight.
Today, the Conde Nast Traveler magazine brought together executives in the hotel, airline and travel industries to explore those questions, at an event known, immodestly, as the World Savers Congress. (I half expected to see people in Superman and Batman costumes appear at the august Council on Foreign Relations in New York.) The half-day of conversation revolved around issues big (tourism as a force for peace in the Middle East!) and small (why do hotels put shampoo in millions of little plastic bottles?).
Conde Nast showcased some big names. Richard Branson–surely the leading environmentalist in the travel industry, as the founder of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin America–talked about his efforts to “green” jet fuel and took a few shots at the U.S. airline industry, while Tony Blair made a pitch for the travel industry to invest more in Israel and Palestine, to help provide an economic platform upon which peace can be built. [click to continue…]
Look around you–the furniture in your office or house, the electronics, the clothes you are wearing, mostly likely some of your dinner–chances are these things moved by boat. About 85% of worldwide cargo travels by ship, and so it’s no surprise that shipping is a major contributor to climate change.
According to Richard Branson’s new NGO, which is called the Carbon War Room, the global shipping fleet is the equivalent on the sixth most polluting country in the world:
Annual CO2e emissions currently exceed one billion tons and are projected to grow to 18% of all manmade CO2e emissions by 2050. Yet existing technology presents an opportunity for up to 75% gains in efficiency, with required investments repaid in just a few years.
Fixing shipping will take bold ideas — see the ship at left, which is equipped with a kite from a company called SkySails — and it will take simple ones, like slowing ships down a little, adopting the equivalent of a 55 mph limit on the open seas. (See this New York Times story, which is literally about a slow boat to China.) And it will require bringing shipping companies, customers, regulators and others to work together to attack the problem.
Opportunities like these interest the Carbon War Room, which says its focus is to harness the power of business to bring about market-driven solutions to climate change.
“We believe that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humankind,” says Jigar Shah, the CEO of the Carbon War Room. “And we need a war room-like effort to combat it.”
I spoke recently with Jigar at the NGO’s new offices in downtown Washington. [click to continue…]
