Richard Branson with Symposium host, Sonu Shivdasani
Selected talks from the 2011 SLOW LIFE Symposium are now available to view in full.
Over the course of three days at the SLOW LIFE Symposium, Sir Richard Branson, Chairman of the Virgin Group, participated in three Symposium talks.
The first, a keynote speech, told of the trajectory that took him from being the head of a global business empire to a concerned citizen determined to use his time and his resources in the fight against climate change. He explained what the process was:
“My own journey started in earnest when Al Gore turned up at my house in London and effectively practised his ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ presentation on me. I was an attentive guinea pig and it made me realise we had to do something to change the way we do business.”
The first response was to pledge any dividends from Virgin airlines and train businesses over the next ten years to be invested into renewable fuels, with a particular focus on jet fuel. In the week following the Symposium, Virgin announced a breakthrough in carbon aviation fuel, at just half the carbon footprint of Kerosene (for an explanation of how this works and a summary of other airline initiatives, see fellow Symposium speaker Mark Lynas’s blog).
Asking the question “If the treat to our planet is indeed worse than World War 1 and World War 2 put together, where was the Churchillian war room to coordinate the attack against the enemy – carbon?”, the response was to set up the Carbon War Room, to facilitate market based solutions to carbon reduction. The Carbon War Room identified 25 sectors ripe for carbon reductions, including shipping, aviation, IT, energy efficiency, and so on. Citing the Carbon War Room’s work with Cities as an example of working with one sector, Richard explained the approach:
“During the winter Olympics in Vancouver, the Carbon War Room convened 30 mayors from some of the largest cities around the world to find out what was stopping them from turning their cities green…The answer they gave us was simple – finance. The Carbon War Room looked at creating an innovative financing system that gave lenders security by having the loans for solar panels, double glazing, etc. repaid out of slightly increased property taxes. In Miami alone (the scheme) will create 30,000 jobs.
“As a result, local governments who follow this lead worldwide can now tap into private capital to finance energy inefficiency improvements for residential and commercial properties, and the owners of the properties will dramatically reduce their energy bills.”
Reiterating his faith in the entrepreneur to find solutions to tricky problems, Richard laid down the gauntlet: “We must look at the issues of protecting our natural resources as one of the greatest entrepreneurial challenges of our lifetime.”
In a later session, “Sustainability as the New Normal: the role of the CEO”, Richard expanded on the theme of responsibility. “If you are lucky enough to become a successful business leader, or a successful entrepreneur – and there is a large element of good fortune in that – because extreme wealth comes with it, extreme responsibility also comes with that. If leaders are not responsible citizens and if they do not redistribute that wealth by creating more jobs, or starting new businesses, or tackling some of the seemingly intractable issues of this world, then I think the current form of capitalism is questionable.”
Finally, in conversation with Jose Mariano, founder and CEO of zerotoinfinity, Richard literally invited us to reach for the stars. The conversation centred on the progress and plans of Virgin Galactic spaceships and zerotoinfinity’s manned hot air balloons into space, but also touched on the importance of dreams. “I don’t think anyone should ever be embarrassed about doing something as an adventure. By shooting for the stars, benefits will come from it…I know scientists will be hungry to spend time in Jose’s balloon.”
“Just by doing things you sometimes stumble across other things. We’ve realised we can put satellites into space at a fraction of the price they’ve been done in the past…and a fraction of the carbon output it currently takes. Schools, universities will be able to afford to have their own satellites and we will be able to monitor sea levels, coral reefs, forests at a very, very low price.”