Aussie entrepreneur could solve climate change, Richard Branson and Mike Cannon-Brookes tell Impact X Summit

Richard Branson and Atlassian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes say Australia should stop romanticising the past and instead embrace a renewable future.

Sir Richard Branson speaking at the Impact X Summit in Sydney. Source: The Australian

Australia needs to look closely to the UK for lessons in transitioning its economy urgently away from coal and stop romanticising the past, according to global business leaders Richard Branson and Mike Cannon-Brookes, who have predicted that the solutions to climate change could come from young local tech entrepreneurs.

Speaking at the Impact X Summit on Wednesday following this week’s COP26 conference, Sir Richard called for ‘more bravery’ from Australia’s politicians on tackling climate change and said that the nation still has an opportunity to be a positive example for the rest of the world to follow.

“You just have to ask the politicians whether they’re going to be brave enough just to do it, and it obviously has to be done,” he said of whether Australia could transition fully from coal to renewable energy.

“Coal is the number one problem that the world has. The coal fired power stations that China still has are doing tremendous damage, so I think a good government in Australia would try to work out a way of creating jobs for all those people who are working in the coal industry as has happened in the UK and other countries and I think they would have a much better life than they currently have going down a coal mine.”

Atlassian boss Mr Cannon-Brookes, who last month pledged $1.5bn to climate projects along with wife Annie, praised how the UK managed its transition away from coal, and said that Australia could benefit greatly from a close inspection of that process.

Atlassian boss Mike Cannon-Brookes speaking at the Impact X Summit in Sydney. Source: The Australian

“I think one of the things they really did is stop romanticising the past,” he said. “We should celebrate the past, it built a lot of Australia’s prosperity today and we should celebrate ourselves for that. Now that we know its effects and that we have other alternatives, we have to take stronger action to move away from that. Otherwise our customers are going to do that.”

Appearing virtually in conversation via video link, Sir Richard said he solution to tackling climate change at a global level could come from a budding Australian entrepreneur.

“Potentially one of them could come up with a way of actually sorting out the problem completely,” said Sir Richard, who founded Virgin Atlantic in 1984.

“We need to think big. Could we use technology to take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it to the very bottom of the ocean? I’m lucky enough to live on an island, and I know that tech entrepreneurs make our island 25 per cent more efficient by just making it a bit more tech savvy than it currently is. And I think that there’s an enormous amount of savings that can be done in Australia by tech entrepreneurs in just reducing the amount of waste that is done every single day.

“This is the biggest challenge of our lifetime and tech entrepreneurs everywhere are putting their minds in to trying to solve it.”

Mr Cannon-Brookes said that the battle to fight climate change can be won with better customer experiences, rather than forcing people to pay higher prices through climate surcharges for example.

“If you show people that doing the right thing can be cheaper, and they can have a better experience of whatever it is that they‘re doing, then I think it will accelerate the rollout,” he said.

“We should focus very much on the speed and urgency with which we can get these technologies into people‘s lives. People buy Tesla cars, and they buy them because they’re just a better car, right? They don’t buy them because it’s green. They buy them because they’re quiet, because they’ve got a great sound system and all this other stuff that happens to have an effect that they can help save the planet while they’re doing that.”

Describing himself as a ‘born optimist’, Sir Branson said 2022 will likely be seen as a turning point in global opinion on climate change.

“People are now realising the world is facing a global catastrophe. And that‘s taken a while to really sink in,” he said. “I think it’s tech entrepreneur and other entrepreneurs who can help solve this problem. So I’m optimistic but there is a hell of a lot of work to do and we’re definitely behind the curve at the moment.”

Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest on Monday lashed the federal government over fossil fuel subsidies, telling the Impact X Summit the use of taxpayer funds to help bankroll companies that are “busily cooking the planet” is an anathema to halting global warming.