Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic makes first jet flight powered by biofuels

Man, there is so much stuff going on right now, it’s hard to know where to start. We’ve got Castro stepping down, bionic contact lenses, air powered cars that get 100 mpg, and a skinny African American dude with a weird name who’s up in the polls for president.

Something is up – it’s like we’re going to take quantum leap on a few levels.

Check this out: Virgin Atlantic just made its first cross-Atlantic flight using coconut oil-based biofuels. It is evidently the first flight made on "renewable" fuels. So, that’s cool, right?

Apparently the old-school environmentalists are deriding this as greenwashing and a publicity stunt, and they are right – to a point. Yes, biofuels tend to drive up the cost of food and have just as high a carbon footprint as regular jet fuel. This is still a major step – global businesses are taking sustainability more seriously than in the past, and are making moves to change their practices. Of course the first step isn’t perfect, but it’s better than just sitting back and burning coal dust or whatever.

Besides, what happens when researchers get the cost of large-scale algae biofuel production plants to the point of competing with fossil fuels? We’ll be glad there was a market established well in advance, making further advances possible and profitable.