Our global industrial and energy systems are built on carbon-based technologies and resource demands that are rapidly making our planet inhospitable to human life. Massive loss of wealth, expanding poverty and suffering, and potential loss of life due to disastrous climate change, water scarcity, deforestation, and natural resource destruction are the end results of these broken systems. Climate change and natural resource destruction is humanity’s greatest threat to security and prosperity – a threat that transcends race, ethnicity, national borders, and ideology.
The Carbon War Room harnesses the power of entrepreneurs to implement market-driven solutions to climate change. The world needs entrepreneurial leadership to create a post-carbon economy.
The War Room’s unique approach focuses on bringing together successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, policy experts, researchers, and thought leaders to focus on market-driven solutions.
The organisation's approach is to identify the barriers that are preventing market-based scale up of climate change solutions and thereby perpetuating the status quo. In addition to technology and policy gaps, these barriers include principal-agent problems, information gaps, and lack of common standards or metrics.
The War Room operates across 25 battles in 7 theaters and has three core functions:
1. The Research & Intelligence team compiles a reliable, independent source of global research on the current carbon-industrial complex and leading market-driven innovations.
2. The Communications team convenes successful entrepreneurs, experts, and leaders to ensure solutions are strategically sound, fast acting, and well presented.
3. The Operations team plans the path to victory in each area using appropriate tools and partners to achieve the overwhelming force necessary. After determining partners, budgets, and leaders to execute the battle; funding is raised and milestones created; then the operation is closely monitored as each operation proceeds.
According to Richard Branson, who co-founded the group along with six other entrepreneurs, "The cadre hopes to identify opportunities to cut both costs and carbon emissions. Between reliance on foreign oil and the negative impacts of global warming, we need to get on top of carbon."
"We are potentially facing World War Three, and we've got to treat it that way," Branson said. "Man should be able to come up with an answer."
