ABC/Randy Holmes(LAS VEGAS) — After a decade of playing Tony Stark on screen, it’s become difficult to find where Robert Downey Jr. begins and his flashy Marvel movies alter-ego ends. Apart from the fact they look exactly alike, the actor apparently shares Tony’s love of life-saving high-tech wizardry.
While Tony Stark funded technological developments with his fictional September Foundation, Downey just announced his own real-life high-tech environmental organization called The Footprint Coalition, while giving the opening keynote for Amazon’s Re: Mars conference in Las Vegas.
Officially launching in April of 2020, The Footprint Coalition is dedicated to finding high-tech solutions to environmental problems.
“Between robotics and nanotechnology, we could clean up the planet significantly, if not totally, in 10 years,” Downey said at the conference, quoting experts he’d spoken to, according to Variety. Nanotech, incidentally, was the driving force of the final two Iron Man suits Stark wears in the MCU.
Sharing Tony’s flair for showmanship, Downey took the stage in front of a massive video screen — which, in a deliberate gaffe, initially displayed his name as Matt Damon. Damon himself actually appeared later via video, spoofing his stranded astronaut character from The Martian.
Like many actors, Downey lamented the state of the environment — though, unlike many stars, he took more than a little responsibility for it.
“I’m a one-man carbon footprint nightmare colossus,” Variety quoted him as saying.
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