Business Stripped Bare (41 page)

I started in a sombre tone. At the last minute I dispensed with the poetic Cousteau intro and went straight for the jugular. 'There are some eminent scientists who already believe that we have gone through the tipping point, that there is nothing mankind can now do to stop the Earth heating up by five degrees, with all the dire consequences that will come with that.'

I then cited Jim Lovelock, saying that he went further than the UN report and he predicted we would lose all the floating ice in the summer months in the Arctic Ocean within ten years and that the five-degree rise is likely within forty years, rather than the eighty years that had been predicted by the United Nations. However, unlike the UN report, he believes that the world will then stabilise at this five-degree rise and that there will be survivors. But much of the lush, comfortable world that we now enjoy will be gone. It will erode into a largely featureless desert. The loss of life is likely to be gigantic, and we will be in a world where not nearly enough food is grown, or enough fresh water is available, to support a large population.

'Whether you believe we have gone through the tipping point or not, most scientists are in agreement that we are extremely close to it and it doesn't look particularly good. History has taught us that in times of peril, when all seems lost, bringing together the minds of the greatest to work together with one common goal – survival – is the most effective way to prevail. I'm convinced a winning strategy can be devised. The great minds are out there – but they are fighting in isolation.

'We all need to play a role to bring all the scientists, engineers and inventors worldwide together to come up with innovative, radical approaches to the issue, including finding a way to extract carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. If such a breakthrough could be made, mankind would be able to regulate the Earth's temperature. By extracting carbon when it's getting too hot – and by adding carbon when it's too cold. We have certainly sorted how to add carbon – we just need to sort out how to extract it. But it cannot be beyond the wit of man to crack this problem.'

Then I made a strong offer of partnership to anyone out there really concerned about this. 'Virgin has put up a $25 million prize to encourage scientists and inventors to put their mind to it. Today we'd like to urge the twenty wealthiest governments to match us in this endeavour so we can make this the largest scientific prize in history – a half-a-billion-dollar prize.' Surely, this would get some traction! I'm still waiting for a call.

I feel that with enough determination the world can pull together to fight this common enemy. I believe that man's ingenuity – driven in many cases by business acumen – can get on top of these catastrophic issues. And so I have begun to think of the way dark times focus great minds to a common goal. This is exactly what we need now: everyone has to work together and find the best solution. When Britain was faced with the prospect of war in Europe in the late 1930s, the Royal Air Force's Operational Requirements Branch determined the specification for a monoplane design to take on the Nazis. They had two projects competing against each other. Reginald Mitchell's Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane, designed by Camm, had to be able to hit an all-metal bomber 266 times to lethally damage it. The designers had to meet this challenge by firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Both succeeded. There are countless examples of new technologies emerging to overcome the odds in wartime – from the invention of cannons powerful enough to bombard castle walls, to the birth of modern computing among the Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park in England, a team led by Alan Turing. So why not create a peacetime war room to fight the new common enemy – runaway climate change?

The Environmental War Room will be a unique combination of entrepreneurial muscle, the best possible data and the power to mobilise resources and inspire innovation. Representatives from big business and finance will work alongside representatives from 'green' organisations with whom they may previously have been at odds. It will be a collection of 'best of class' thinking, brought together for the good of all – and it will be truly global. The plan is to have a small, indepedent team that works closely with partners to ensure we don't duplicate, but instead connect the dots on what is already happening, provide reliable information and help speed up the solutions.

The war room will identify all the best (and in some cases radical) ideas, map who is doing what, track and prioritise the impact of existing solutions on carbon reduction and the conservation of ecological systems. It will provide analyses of all the data collected, and identify and prioritise the best options.

Leadership is paramount here. During the questions and answers at the UN conference, the journalists were intrigued to find out who would lead our troops into battle – and I was asked several times about Al Gore. I deflected the questions because we were still considering who we should appoint – I acknowledged he would be a great person to lead us in such a battle, but I wasn't sure how he might take it. We need a Winston Churchill or a Franklin D. Roosevelt figure – someone with the respect, stature and voice to assert their authority.

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.

HIV/Aids and climate change are issues that I have a personal passion for and that make sense for the Virgin Group to get behind. We are working on other social and environmental investments, but the one thing all of our efforts in this area have in common is that they leverage Virgin's biggest asset – the entrepreneurial spirit of our people. This spirit, coupled with the right partners and great ideas, can truly help us make a difference, help communities thrive and help our planet.

If we want a world that we can be proud to leave to the next seven generations, every business needs to look at how they can drive change in every aspect of their operations. One last point:
don't forget to listen
– as some of the best ideas will come from your staff, customers and people on the front lines!