Richard Branson: Business Stripped Bare

‘I’ve had the privilege in my increasingly long life to know a lot of amazing people and Richard Branson is one of the most interesting, creative, genuinely committed people I have ever known.’

I gulped with embarrassment when I heard about this. Thanks, Bill — but then you expected me to speak ?

Happily for me, I wasn’t in the hall. An aide shouted up to him: ‘He’s not here yet. He’s on his way.’ As ever, I had missed my cue. I was in the loo.

Bill coolly segued into the next item. Well, I made it — eventually. And I outlined my plans for the Virgin Group. ‘What we’ve decided to do is to put any proceeds received by the Virgin Group from our transportation businesses into tackling environmental issues, and hopefully it will be something like $3 billion over a number of years… Like Al Gore, I don’t believe it is too late. I think we do have a handful, two handfuls of years to get the ball rolling, to address the problem. And if we can develop alternative fuels, if people can take risks on developing enzymes, if we can try to get cellulose ethanol, then replace the dirty fuels that we’re using at the moment, then I think we’ve got a great future.’

Al stepped up. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I have one question. I didn’t hear it on the list, and I want to make sure. Are the expected profits from the rocket ships also going into this?’ I nodded and said: ‘By the way, they are environmentally friendly rocket ships!’

The conference was well received, and my announcement did what Al Gore wanted. That a business leader in the transport industry admitted there were problems with global warming and that something had to be done about it made the headlines. And this would make it more difficult for the oil and coal companies to continue to deny their responsibilities. But I decided I needed to help make a further step — and this time, a prize made the best sense. We set up a prize to encourage every inventive thinker to try to come up with a way of extracting carbon dioxide out of the Earth’s atmosphere. If that could be achieved, the temperature of our planet could be regulated by mankind, extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when it gets too hot.

On 9 February 2007, we announced the Virgin Earth Challenge. To win the $25 million prize, participants will have to demonstrate a provable, commercially viable design which will result in the removal or displacement of a significant amount of environmental greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The challenge will run for ten years.

Al Gore agreed to be a judge; so too did Tim Flannery and James Lovelock. I also asked two other distinguished people to join the panel — Sir Crispin Tickell, the director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation at Oxford University, and Dr James Hansen, professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute and head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. This was a heavyweight group of assessors.

The judges will decide whether a scheme has the potential to make a significant difference to global warming, and whether the prize should be awarded to one winner or shared between two or three. We found that setting more prescriptive targets was pointless, because there are so many ways to address the greenhouse gas problem. This point was very well put by James Lovelock, who was as sharp as ever when commenting on our early suggestions:

I was surprised to read in the outline of the Virgin Earth Challenge that the requirement for the prizewinner was the removal of at least one billion tonnes of CO 2per year. This seems small compared with the near 30 billion tonnes we add yearly. In fact, 6.3 billion humans breathe out yearly nearly two billion tonnes of CO 2 — trying to restore the Earth by removing one or even two billion tonnes a year is a bit like trying to bail out a leaky rowing boat with a teaspoon…

He said we should keep in mind that a billion tonnes of carbon could be taken out of the atmosphere if we synthesised our food, which would release huge areas of farmland to revert to natural vegetation.

Is it too late to make the conditions harder and at the same time more general? It would be a shame to have to turn down a good proposal for a method for making tasty and nutritious food by biochemical synthesis directly from air and water.

I knew I had to get Jim more involved, and Will Whitehorn offered to go and see him. Returning from a climate change meeting in France with former president Jacques Chirac, he agreed to complete the line-up of judges for the prize. ‘It’s a grand idea,’ he wrote, ‘and who knows, it might just promote the discovery of an answer. We have all spent far too long sleepwalking towards extinction and need an incentive.’

I think that all business people need to have sceptical scientific friends who can challenge, prod and stimulate. Jim was certainly doing this for me.

A successful application for the Virgin Earth Challenge could very well take into account the Earth’s self-regulating ability. In September 2007, Jim and his colleague Chris Rapley wrote to the science journal Nature : ‘The removal of 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the air by human endeavour is beyond our current technological capability. If we can’t "heal the planet" directly, we may be able to help the planet heal itself.’

One way to do this would be to lower vertical pipes into the ocean. Wave power could enable a simple pump to drive cold, nutrient-rich waters up from the depths to the relatively barren ocean surface. This would promote the growth of algae, which would consume CO2 and produce dimethyl sulphide, the chemical that turns humid air into clouds.

Jim mentioned this example to me because he was attending a meeting in Washington the following week and wanted to discuss the idea with scientists and engineers there. He recently wrote to me with a new idea:

More and more I think our best chance of reversing global heating lies in the burial of charcoal on land and in the ocean. If most farm waste were turned into charcoal yearly on the farms and then ploughed in, this alone would do much more than anything otherwise proposed. More than this, the preparation of charcoal yields a modest amount of biofuel and the total could be quite large. It would take longer to establish the same scheme with ocean farms but if we really intend to do something this is the way to go.

It’s an ingenious notion — and might even become a successful business proposition.

Within the first year, the Virgin Earth Challenge attracted more than 3,000 notes of interest — and this was very exciting. But one thing began to dawn on me: prizes do take time to produce results. Peter Diamandis came up with the X Prize concept for commercial space flight in 1994 and over the course of several years had presented it to numerous people for funding — including Virgin — but it wasn’t won by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen until ten years later. As fighters in the war against global warming, we were all too well aware that time was one thing in very short supply.

A prize of $25 million was an incentive for departments at a lot of universities — but I began to ask what if there was a bounty ten or even twenty times this size? Perhaps this would attract the major industries to divert significant research and development into the project. A prize of this magnitude would do a great deal to stimulate the large corporates with their massive R&D spending power.

With this in mind, early in 2008, I accepted an invitation to address the UN’s two-day workshop on climate change, where I was made UN Citizen of the Year by the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for my work on climate change. As the owner of several airlines, even I can see the irony in that!