The B Team is an international group of business leaders leveraging their influence for the common good. It is also a partner of Sparknews, who recently caught up with co-founder Sir Richard Branson in New York City
On the heels of a trip to Africa to check out solar energy initiatives, Sir Richard Branson made his way to Manhattan last September. There, the founder of the Virgin Group joined up with members of his global nonprofit, The B Team. The visit coincided with the 70th session of the UN General Assembly, and the city was teeming with politicians and heads of state—just the people Branson wanted to see.
Between back-to-back meetings, he sat down with Sparknews to talk about how The B Team functions and what commitments it’s hoping to get from the world’s decision-makers at the climate change conference COP21. “I’m an optimist and I’m reasonably hopeful that something will happen in Paris,” he said. The long-haired, self-made billionaire known for such stunts as jumping off buildings and crossing the seas in a hot air balloon was unexpectedly serious in person, choosing his words with deliberate care.
Branson co-founded The B Team in 2013 with Jochen Zeitz (Director of luxury goods holding Kering) to raise the ethical standards for how business is conducted and to leverage the private sector’s influence for the well-being of people and the planet. They invited other like-minded leaders on board, including Paul Polman, Chief Executive of Unilever, media mogul Arianna Huffington, Ratan Tata of the Tata Group and Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank.
Today, The B Team consists of 19 leaders, mostly from the corporate sphere and a few public officials. Representing industries from cars to condiments, the team plans to continue expanding its range of sectors and geographical regions. So far this year, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Bob Collymore of Safaricom and Sharan Burrow, the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, have joined, and more recruits are on the horizon.
But while it hopes to serve as a model for businesses everywhere, The B Team is keeping the core group small for now. “We could sign up 300 or 400 companies, but it wouldn’t be effective,” Branson said, noting that 25 to 30 would be ideal—and he’s confident they could find that many that meet the group’s standards. “With some people, we would say to them: Sign up, you may not be perfect today, as none of us are, but you need to move to it.”
The group puts pressure on governments to act on specific issues, doing so in person, by mail, phone or even via social media. Advantages of being Richard Branson include 25 million social media followers—and the fact that the politician you’re ringing is likely to pick up the line. “Quite a lot of our most effective time is actually spent using our public profiles to be able to cut through red tape and get straight to the people who make decisions,” he said.
The team meets formally about three times a year and will come together in Paris during COP21. Considering the mix of strong personalities and their various business obligations, it’s no surprise the members have had what Branson calls “healthy debates” on certain issues—such as whether it’s realistic to ask all companies to do a detailed (and expensive) Environmental Profit and Loss analysis.
Moreover, it’s much easier for privately-owned companies to sacrifice some profit in order to do good than for public companies beholden to shareholders, which is why government policy is key. “One of the things The B Team are trying to do is go straight to governments and say look, you need to set the ground rules,” Branson said. “Any company that’s reluctant to do the right thing, they have to.”
Last February, the team sent an open letter to Christiana Figueres of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, asking for a global commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Branson believes that the money raised by a carbon tax could replace taxes on clean energy, and further savings should come from ending the enormous government subsidies currently spent on fossil fuels (which the International Monetary Fund estimates at US$5.3 trillion for 2015, covering everything from tax credits to the health costs of pollution).
When asked the obvious question—how can a man who owns three airlines preach about a carbon-neutral world?—he explained that “People are going to fly, so what we’ve got to try to do is make flying environmentally efficient, and we’re working as best as we can to do that.”
He said he’s investing in efforts to come up with a clean fuel. He’s working with air traffic controllers, noting, “There’s something like 15 billion dollars worth of fuel that just goes up in smoke in inefficiencies from air traffic control, going around and around.” He said that the nonstop round-the-world flight that Steve Fossett made in 2005, in a specially-built Virgin GlobalFlyer, was meant to show Airbus and Boeing that carbon composite airplanes can fly.
Finally, The B Team is lobbying hard for a carbon tax, even if adoption would impact profits for companies like Virgin, at least in the beginning. “Maybe there’s some short-term pain,” Branson said. “But once you actually run the world on clean energy, it can remain very cheap forever.” That’s not just the activist talking—it’s the businessman, too.
By Amy Serafin for Sparknews
