Richard Branson: Business Stripped Bare

So just as Virgin Unite is now in the process of setting up a war room to tackle disease in sub-Saharan Africa, they are also in the process of creating a war room to tackle carbon.

Should we fail to find a technological solution then we must start to prepare the world for the consequences of a five-degree rise in temperature and look at ways of mitigating the worst effects. The war room must find radical ideas and win the global community’s backing, as happened when CFC gases were banned worldwide to deal with the hole in the ozone layer.

At the session in New York, I introduced one idea as an example. ‘It is now widely accepted that rising sea levels, as a result of global warming, will destroy hundreds of thousands of homes in coastal towns all over the world and displace millions of the world’s population. But what if today we start planning to create massive inland lakes in Africa, Asia, Australia, North Canada and South America, using fresh water from rivers that would otherwise have gone into the sea? These inland seas can be created as sea levels start to rise with the aim of keeping sea levels as they are at present. They will also — as water — have an added benefit in helping to cool the Earth down. They will help create more rain in desert regions, which in turn will create more trees — which in turn will absorb more carbon.’

The Environmental War Room would be able to place a cost on such large ideas, negotiating compensation ‘costs’ with individual countries. But I stressed that the United Nations would need to work in partnership with the war room to ensure implementation happens. I had prepared a quote from Sir Winston Churchill, who created his famous War Room in London, during the Second World War. ‘One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!’

In March 2008, at the suggestion of Richard Stromback, a former professional hockey player who struck gold as a clean-technology entrepreneur, we decided to have a small gathering of people who were addressing the issue to see how we might be able to join forces. Richard, the chief executive of Ecology Coatings, the Climate Group and Virgin Unite invited a group of like-minded business people and former political figures to the event to consider further opportunities. Larry Page, from Google, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal, Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, and Tony Blair — the former British prime minister, now working as a Middle East peace envoy — were among those attending.

In America, the ‘clean tech’ business boom has already begun, not only in Silicon Valley and the rest of California, but also in and around Boston, around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and near Austin, Texas. Already energy investments are the third largest component of all US venture capital funds, and by far the fastest growing segment. The number of companies and individuals to watch in this sector is now large, with companies like Odersun, Solyndra, Clipper Windpower and Enphase Energy moving very fast.

Shai Agassi, the former president of SAP’s product and technology group, is out on his own now as the founder of Better Place of Palo Alto; he has been trying to create the infrastructure to operate a countrywide fleet of electric vehicles in Israel.

Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal and now a space entrepreneur, talked about his Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes electric sports cars retailing for $100,000. (Larry has ordered one, but I’m holding off for the moment as I rarely even use a car now.) Hunt Ramsbottom, chief executive of the synthetic fuel technology company Rentech, talked about his plans to make biofuels for aeroplanes, while William McDonough showed us designs for a building in Abu Dhabi with solar panels built into the windows, and a Wal-Mart distribution centre with an energy-friendly grass roof.

Then Tony Blair said something that chimed with me — and made me more determined than ever to pursue the war room. He said governments are too busy firefighting to truly make a difference. ‘It is frightening with the day-to-day hustle and bustle of government how little time is spent on the major issues such as carbon,’ he told us. For example, the UK’s environment minister would come in for a meeting with him for perhaps two hours a month if he was lucky. The Cabinet would work out some short-term project and say: ‘OK, let’s do this or that.’

If this is typical, then there is a truly desperate need for the Environmental War Room — and I see the green entrepreneurial community playing a central role in its operations.

To run a business ethically, you have to consider the effect of your operations on others . You would never tolerate bribery; by the same token, you must not tolerate casual damage to the environment.

It took me a while to realise this. I was half afraid to look the problem of climate change in the eye. It daunted me. I thought it was too big for me — too big for anyone. And so I tried to persuade myself that it didn’t exist.

Like one that, on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

But unlike the outlook of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, business is about facing up to realities. Real problems — even ones as gigantic as climate change — are never as frightening as the spectres in our minds. We can do something about global warming. We just have to lose our fear of it. We have been frozen in horror and denial for too long. We have to act.

No one is asking you to save the planet. Just dream up and work on a couple of good ideas . No one expects you to find a global solution to everything. Just make a difference where you can . Local solutions have a value in themselves, and some can be scaled up, so it doesn’t matter how modest your budget, you can and will make a difference.

That’s the good news.

Now comes the frightening bit.

If you don’t do this, then you will almost certainly go out of business, if not next year, then in five years’ time, or ten or twenty. The climate is changing and the population is rocketing. As a consequence the price of everything is fluctuating. The insurance market is in chaos. Unpredictable, unexpected shortages are disturbing production. Changing weather patterns are imperilling whole populations and disrupting the economies of entire nations. And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

You’ll recall that when I was describing our development of biofuels and spacecraft, I said that there was no such thing as an overnight success in a new market: that Virgin’s early emergence in these sectors was the consequence of years of reading and research.

The sector we might as well call ‘responses to climate change’ is not a sector we can choose whether or not to do business in. It’s a sector that now embraces all of us, whether we like it or not. Big or small, we have to do business in this area because our failure to do so will ruin us.

If you’re not ahead of the game, if you’re not researching the solutions to problems that may affect your business a decade from now, then you run the serious risk that you will haemorrhage and fail.

But why look at this through the gloomy end of the telescope? The reverse is equally true: make a success of yourself in this sector, and you will find yourself turning something that advantages everyone into a handsome profit for your company.

With that profit, you can then dream up and experiment with bigger and bigger scale solutions. Addressing climate change is good business; and I guarantee that once you bite the bullet and start work in this sector, you won’t want to stop.