Times of London profiles Richard Branson on how he is “greening” his empire. An excerpt:

He is starting in the air. “Because I’m in one of the dirty businesses, I have all the more responsibility to do something,” he said. The Virgin boss, who is valued at £1.2 billion in The Sunday Times Rich List, has spent £100m buying stakes in clean-fuel companies in an effort to uncover an alchemy for today: turning the base metal of crops into the solid gold of clean fuel.
He started with coconut oil — flying a Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam last year with one engine running on the stuff — but gave up when he realised there weren’t enough coconuts to fuel an airline. It didn’t help that a recent holiday in India was ruined by people trying to sell him coconuts everywhere he went. He moved on to ethanol but dumped that when it became clear that it freezes at 15,000ft.
Now, he thinks he has found the answer. “Isobutanol is wonderful,” he said. “It doesn’t absorb water, so you can pump it in the same way as petrol. And you can make it from anything. Sugar is good. What if all the sugar now turned into soft drinks were, instead, turned into clean fuel?”

You’d think someone would have done the coconut math before spending millions on that idea, right?