All hail Richard Branson, the billionaire owner of Virgin Atlantic Airways, who has promised (as part of the Clinton Global Initiative) to dedicate the next 10 years of Virgin’s transportation profits to combat global warming. That’s an estimated $3 billion of new money into research on climate change solutions.

At the same time, let’s all acknowledge the continuing position of the Bush Whitehouse, which today re-announced the same roughly $3 billion in annual spending that the American government can, in one way or the other, claim is related to climate change.

President George W. Bush’s plan, with effective start dates that are four years away, couldn’t even garner unanimous support from Republican politicians – although the Exxon-funded think tank, the American Council for Capital Formation, announced that Bush’s new plan was “a substantial, credible effort” to address global warming.
Ouch.