Monday, February 25, 2008

Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

It sounded wonderful, the first bio-fuel flight. Virgin Flight 811P took off from London Heathrow fueled, in part, by 150,000 coconuts and babassu nuts picked in the Amazon rainforest. The Boeing 747 touched down safely 40 minutes later in Amsterdam. But things are never as simple as they seem. If coconut oil really were to be a major fuel for the airline industry then massive deforestation of the Rainforests would be needed. In other words, a massive eco-disaster.

And the irony. This was a passenger-less flight. So a trip designed to show the way in saving the ecosystem actually had a massive carbon footprint without even getting one person from "a" to "b".

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