Billionaire’s private jet angst won’t save the world

Mike Cannon-Brookes — co-founder and chief executive officer of enterprise software business Atlassian and Australia’s fifth-richest person with a $13.2 billion fortune — is suffering a "deep internal conflict” about taking on the trappings of the billionaire lifestyle.

In a posting on LinkedIn recently, he poured out his heart about reconciling his convictions as a climate activist with his actions as a tech boss — in particular, Atlassian’s decision to sponsor a Formula One team and his purchase of a Bombardier 7500 private jet.

"There’s a couple of reasons I’ve purchased a plane,” he sighed. "Personal security is the primary reason (an unfortunate reality of my world), but also so I can run a global business from Australia and still be a constantly present dad.”

As a fellow fortysomething Australian dad, I can sympathize a bit. I’d like to reduce my carbon footprint by getting my own electric car, instead of the battered 2008 Toyota Prius I share with my ex-wife. But money doesn’t grow on trees and we all have to make climate compromises somewhere.

The range of choices available to us, however, is governed by the institutional setup we live in. Cannon-Brookes could reduce his carbon footprint by moving away from the isolated southern hemisphere country where Atlassian earns only 11% of its revenue. I could cut back on Uber Eats to afford the payments on an electric car lease. In each case, though, technology and regulations make the polluting option a no-brainer.

That’s not meant to be just snark. One of the most profound problems in the energy transition is that carbon pollution is more or less free. Even places like Europe which have been trading emission permits for two decades mostly levy them only on major facilities like power stations. That means it’s easy for the rest of us to choose the carbon-intensive option.

The most substantive of these choices is not what Cannon-Brookes is doing with his plane, but with his business. Right now, the most important aspect of this is artificial intelligence.

Atlassian sells software products such as Jira and Trello, which help businesses run their operations more effectively. Revenues largely depend on the number of white-collar professionals signed up and they’re threatened by the possibility that many of those clients are going to be automated out of their jobs in the years ahead. As a result, Atlassian is trying to persuade customers that its own cloud-based technologies and AI can make it more useful to them than ever.

The carbon cost of this is significant. Data center emissions in the U.S. already rival those of the domestic airline industry and are growing far quicker. Atlassian’s pollution from "purchased goods and services” — mostly data centers — has increased 77% in the past two fiscal years as it has embraced the inevitability of AI, along with the rest of the tech sector. This now amounts to about two-thirds of its rapidly expanding footprint — well ahead of the 22% from every business trip taken by its 12,000-odd employees, not to mention the sliver one private jet would represent.

Put a reasonable price on all that carbon and any money being made disappears. Gross profits over the six years Atlassian has reported comprehensive emissions have amounted to 19 cents per metric ton of its total footprint, compared to an average $52 per ton for European carbon permits over the period. The company’s main strategy for fixing this is encouraging its suppliers to set credible net-zero targets, but just 12.3% had done so last June.

The comforting response to this is to accuse do-gooder private-jet fliers such as Cannon-Brookes and Taylor Swift of hypocrisy. The tougher realization is that not doing enough is always the easy option. We’re all victims of temptation when it comes to climate pollution, though the consequences of that are vastly larger when you have immense personal wealth to deploy.

Cannon-Brookes is a rare billionaire who has actually put money where his mouth is on climate, whether it’s buying a 10% stake in generator AGL Energy to push a faster closure of coal plants or funding a quixotic plan to export renewable electricity from Australia to Singapore. That’s a far better record than the U.S. moguls who cut funding for climate initiatives and ingratiated themselves with President Donald Trump as soon as net zero fell from fashion.

The problem isn’t that the rich are hypocrites — it’s that they’re powerful. Zeroing out emissions may force us all to make choices we’d rather not make. That’s likely to hurt even the most conscience-plagued billionaires, and in most societies, they’ll have an outsized ability to block needed political change.

It’s up to ordinary voters to ensure the complaints of a handful of moguls don’t limit the scope of what we’ll do to halt climate change. The modern liberal-democratic society we’ve built, bolstered by a stable environment, is a precious one. If we don’t want it to perish from the earth, we need an alternative to a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.