Business Stripped Bare (40 page)

Jim's emerging theory was that the world and its atmosphere were one living and breathing system. It was a radical view for its time and rejected by the scientific consensus. However, Carl Sagan, the editor of the astronomy journal
Icarus
, was intrigued enough to publish Jim's views.

When, in 1965, the US government abandoned the Martian exploration project that Jim had been working on, he went to work for Shell Research, to consider the effects of air pollution and its global consequences. This was in 1966, and three years before the foundation of Friends of the Earth. Jim warned about the build-up of particles which were then depleting the ozone layer – a thin skin of gas which protects us from the sun's radiation. One of his many inventions was the electron capture device which was essential for detecting and measuring the atmospheric concentration of chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) – the chemicals responsible for breaking down the ozone layer.

It was his friend, the writer William Golding, author of the
Lord of the Flies
, who gave him the name. Golding suggested 'Gaia' after the Greek goddess of the Earth. (It's from her that we get the root of words like geography and geology.) Jim put forward his 'Gaia hypothesis' at a scientific meeting about the origins of life on Earth at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1968. Gaia is Jim's shorthand for the complex interactions between the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soils. Earth, in his view, is effectively a self-regulating mechanism – a machine for life.

When I first spoke to Jim he told me that in the 1970s, he had no clear idea how that machine worked, but as a scientist he knew that the Earth was different from our nearest neighbours in our solar system, and he was fascinated by how the Earth, unlike Mars and Venus, constantly managed to make itself a fit and healthy place to live.

Jim Lovelock has become a great friend, and he has shared with me his work on his long-overdue follow-up book – a soliloquy for his beloved Gaia. Even in his advancing years, his freedom of thought and mind is astounding. I'm not an academic and I struggle with some of the detailed scientific technical stuff, but Jim's descriptions are poignant, beautiful and understandable.

Jim knows he isn't going to live for ever, and that his ideas will disappear unless we capture them now. So he has been sending me a host of ideas in the hope that I can turn at least some of them into businesses. He talks about dropping pipes into the ocean, about burying algae at sea, about putting extra sulphur into the atmosphere. He is not a crank, or a lone voice in the wilderness. He is an internationally celebrated and revered figure and his ideas have a lot of currency. What is lacking, however, is the sort of serious, heavily funded research necessary to show which of his ideas are most worth pursuing.

In April 2006, almost in the same post as the letter from the charity Starfish, I found a letter from former US president Bill Clinton, inviting me to the Clinton Global Initiative, to be held in New York that September. I fully respect the work that Bill is doing to tackle social and environmental issues, so a few days later I agreed to participate. Bill also phoned me and asked if there was any gesture that I would be willing to make.

I was sitting in the bath when it occurred to me: why not just divert all the profits made by the Virgin Group from our carbon-creating businesses – such as the airlines and trains – and invest it in developing the cleaner technologies of the future? I'd also look at business research on wind power and solar power and anything that could replace the fossil fuels. When I briefed him beforehand, Bill was excited. He wanted to make it the centrepiece of the meeting in September. I said I would like Al Gore, Bill's former vice president, to be there as well. I said that without Al visiting me I wouldn't have come up with the idea in the first place. Bill Clinton's introduction went like this:

'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
₂
per 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!

I already had a lot of sympathy for the views of Jeffrey Sachs, outlined in his book,
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
, when he stated: 'When it comes to problem-solving on a global scale, we remain weighed down by cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions. A world of untrammelled market forces and competing nation states offers no automatic solutions to these challenges. The key will lie in developing new sustainable technologies and ensuring that they rapidly reach all those who need them.'

So I arrived in New York with Jackie McQuillan and Jean Oelwang, determined to make a public plea for the creation of an Environmental War Room. I intended opening with a Cousteau quotation: 'There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Russia, no China, no Taiwan. Rivers flow unimpeded across the swathes of continents. The persistent tides, the pulse of the sea do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth.'

The president of the UN General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs for Macedonia, chaired the session. As I remember it, this went under the banner 'Addressing Climate Change: The United Nations and the World at Work'. Srgjan was a gracious host. Among the other participants were the Secretary-General and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York. Also with me at the conference was the actress Daryl Hannah, a perceptive campaigner on climate change issues.

On 11 February, Srgjan introduced the session: 'I am very much encouraged in that the climate is changing – in terms of the political climate at least – and that people have replaced ignorance with awareness. Awareness is now our ally but that's not enough. We are not talking about long-term planning and the world of tomorrow. We're talking about the emergencies of today.'

He explained that the United Nations was talking about partnerships and that a negotiation process was going on among member nations on setting up targets on greenhouse gases. But he said that only partnerships that included the business world, the media, the non-governmental organisations, and academics (such as those who made a contribution with the IPCC, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and helped politicians understand the magnitude of the problem) would work. He stressed that the UN could not do it all by itself. The chairman said that when he was preparing for his role as president of the General Assembly he had read about climate change – and he acknowledged the creation of the Virgin Earth Challenge. 'It is not by chance that they are here; they inspired me,' he said. 'I invited them . . . this is why we are here together.'