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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, the climate change deal reached in Paris yesterday is being described as historic.  After two weeks of intense negotiations, close to 200 countries agreed to the pact which has a legally binding core and I’m joined now by the Virgin Group founder and philanthropist, Sir Richard Branson, he’s on Necker Island.  Hello there Sir Richard and I’ve often wondered, I’m sure you have, if this deal doesn’t work is your own beloved Necker Island at risk from rising sea levels?  

SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, I think all islands would be at tremendous risk from rising sea levels and I think many cities in the world as well but what happened in Paris, as you say, was historic.  Nearly 200 countries got together and decided to do the right thing by the public throughout the world and say we do not want the temperature to rise about one and a half degrees, absolute maximum two degrees and I think with that clear signal it is up to business leaders world-wide to rally around and help make sure that becomes a reality and I think it can be a reality.  

DM: Interesting what you say there, Sir Richard, about business leaders, is that more so than the politicians?  Is that because the business leaders have their hands on the levers of industry and they are likely to be around a lot longer than some of the politicians?  

SIR RICHARD BRANSON:  Well I think governments need to set the rules, they need to make sure for instance that clean energy, the taxes on clean energy are a lot less than the taxes on dirty energy so they need to set the ground rules to make sure there is a clean energy revolution and then business leaders need to come up with the breakthrough technologies to make this happen but working with governments.  So for instance Bill Gates and myself and a few other people have got together to set up something called the Breakthrough Coalition and we have got like-minded people who want to invest in breakthrough technologies but we are also working with governments who have also agreed to put money into breakthrough technologies as well so I think it can be a combined attack.   

DM: But do you think they’ve got, I mean this is the key question arising or one of them certainly, from the summit, do you think they’ve got the balance right between the developed world, those that in many cases can afford to make these changes, and the developing world, those who say you can’t pull the drawbridge up on us.  If you want us to go clean and green we need some cash.

SIR RICHARD BRANSON: Yes, I think by and large they did get the balance right and it was an incredibly difficult negotiation where you had to get every single company to sign off on it and every single country did sign off on it, including countries where it patently wasn’t in their interests to sign off on it like Saudi Arabia because what’s going to happen is that oil and coal will have to stay in the ground if we’re going to be carbon neutral by 2050 and those countries that are solely led by exporting oil and coal are going to have to move their countries forward into new areas quite quickly and so it was remarkable.  I think what we’ve got to do is every year between now and 2050, we’ve got to move our countries forward by about 3% per year replacing dirty energy with clean energy and I think that is possible and it will also have the benefit for the public in the shorter term of keeping the price of dirty fuels lower which will actually help with the economy generally, if you have got more clean energy being produced than demand for energy then I think we’ll benefit from lower energy prices maybe forever from now.

DM: Sir Richard, I just wanted to relate this to another very live debate which I know you have a key interest in, it is of course the debate in the United Kingdom about how we expand airport capacity and in particular about whether there will be a third runway at Heathrow Airport, as you know a decision delayed on that one but I know you support it.  People will say, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before Sir Richard, how do you square your passionate environmental credentials with the call for another runway at Heathrow?

SIR RICHARD BRANSON: There is always a balancing act in life and we’ve got four organisations that are working on the environmental side, so we have the Carbon War Room that is trying to work with industry to try to reduce their carbon output, we’ve got the B Team which is lobbying governments and we were all in Paris trying to make sure these climate talks got done.  We’ve got the Breakthrough Energy Coalition that is trying to come up with new breakthrough technologies and one of the breakthrough technologies we are trying to come up with is clean jet aviation fuels which I think will happen in the not too distant future with a big enough push in it.  So the ideal for Great Britain is it definitely needs a new runway, it needed a new runway – actually I think it needed two new runways about 25 years ago and it’s holding Great Britain back – but the government needs to set very clear rules that say that the planes that operate there must be as environmentally friendly as possible, as quiet as possible.  It’s going to take 20 years to build a new runway so I think by then planes will be palpably quieter and palpably more environmentally friendly than they are today.

DM: Okay Sir Richard, great talking to you, thank you very much indeed for your thoughts on Heathrow there and the climate change deal, Sir Richard Branson there.