A ‘green’ plane?

Bombardier claims it’s building one.

“The CSeries family offers the greenest single-aisle aircraft in its class,” said Gary Scott, president of Bombardier Commercial Aircraft.

“These game-changing aircraft emit up to 20 percent less CO2 (carbon dioxide)... fly four times quieter, and deliver dramatic energy savings,” he added in the statement.

Boeing claims this is a Bombardier claims time of opportunity to build such planes. Will it deliver?

Southwest could use its leverage to try to force Boeing to come out with a much greener version of the 737.

Not all American airlines may be around to benefit, though.

In the first story, Virgin Atlantic’s Richard Branson predicted that:

There will be “some spectacular casualties" in the airline industry. “One of the big American carriers will almost definitely go.”

Richard Branson ready to go where no civilian has gone before

No, it won’t quite be the five-year, or ongoing, voyages of the starship Enterprise (wait until Friday for that on this blog), but suborbital space travel for (relatively) cheap prices is one giant step for mankind closer.

WhiteKnightTwo, a specially designed jet carrier aircraft built to haul the passenger and crew-filled SpaceShipTwo to release altitude of roughly 50,000 feet, will be arriving in California in July.

How big of a step is this? This big:

Some 254 people have plopped down cash to earn priority seating onboard SpaceShipTwo in the first couple of years of suborbital flying, Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn explained. “They’ve paid up-front between $20,000 and $200,000 ... and we’ve got about $36 million, as of today, in the bank.”

As the story says, Richard Branson’s cash registers are indeed going to be ringing in space.

Richard Branson volunteers to launch ‘war room’ on global warming

Call this the “global warming surge,” a surge in which Shrub Bush will be permanently AWOL. British airline billionaire Branson, who has already started serious discussion on the greening of air travel, is ready to launch the global warming fight into its next phase:

The British billionaire, speaking at the start of a U.N. debate on climate change, said it would be run by a world figure in global warming and could serve as "a tool for the U.N." to ferret out good ideas and calculate each nation's costs.

“The ‘war room’ will be independent of politics,” Branson said. “But in the end it will need the United Nations, governments and other organizations to help make sure implementation happens.”

And, taking a break from his non-candidacy for president, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is sensibly calling for a carbon-dioxide tax rather than a cap-and-trade system.

This is a “surge” that any environmentalist can support. Hell, if Branson flew flights inside the U.S., I’d look to book with him for this reason alone.