Poll is worried that politicians—particularly in Europe—will act to curb air travel without seeing the whole picture. A part of that picture, he believes, is that regional air travel in the Third World would bring significant social gains that are otherwise not achievable. Building roads and railways from scratch is hugely costly to the environment, both by ravaging ecosystems and by producing pollution, and that operating them only adds to the damage. Aircraft, he points out, need only airports—not vast, land-gutting infrastructure projects. Even in rapidly developing world economies like India and China, cheap regional intercity air travel can remove the need for new road and rail networks. And in a country like Indonesia, with sprawling and difficult terrain, the attraction of budget carriers is obvious. Poll's contention does, however, assume that airplanes will be a lot more benign in their impact than they are now.

AN OIL WELL THE SIZE OF A DIME

Certainly, it has been good for Boeing to have a freethinker like Ian Poll lobbing provocative ideas into its talent pool from outside. One Boeing executive told me that until relatively recently, "the innovative thought at the leading edge of our business wasn't there as much as we would have liked." Another told me that she wasn't aware of how serious the challenge was going to be from green campaigners until she turned on the TV news in a London hotel and saw how organized the opposition to expanding Heathrow Airport was. If they were slow to catch on, they get it now. Of late, the company has shown a far greater sense of urgency in seeking out anyone with an idea, no matter how bizarre, that could bring an environmental payoff. Spectacularly, they seem to have found one close at hand in the person of Dave Daggett.

From the moment I first meet him in Seattle, it's evident that Daggett is not a regular Boeing suit. He appears near the end of a presentation by another executive, shedding his coat and juggling a bag of sandwiches, coffee, and a laptop and making something of a clatter. His title is Technology Leader, Energy and Emissions. Unlike Poll, who has a polished repertoire of public lectures, Daggett gives the impression of someone who has just emerged into the spotlight after years of anonymity, burrowing away in research establishments, to find himself much in demand as the master of a cause du jour: Energy and Emissions is, these days, where the desperate go seeking miracles, particularly through alternative fuels.

There are three distinct goals being sought under the generality of alternative fuels: to find an abundant energy source outside the grip of OPEC; to be able to produce the fuel cheaply; and to combine those two virtues with a fuel that, when it burns up in an airplane engine, leaves behind a lot less CO2 (or none). Managing this trick would be the equivalent of alchemy. As he talked and gave me a PowerPoint slide show, Daggett began to sound like a proto-alchemist. He has become a great enthusiast for an energy source that can be widely found and that flourishes, in fact, in any city's sewage treatment plant: algae.